Digital Transformation – The Future of Contact Centres: Digital channels have become an integral part of the way that organizations connect with their customers. Consumers expect reliable and secure solutions for their platform of choice whether that’s email, social media, webchat, SMS, or good old-fashioned telephone calls.
Digital channels continue to shape the way we all live, work, shop, and communicate. Having the ability to take quick, secure and convenient payments from your customers via whatever channel they choose will give you an edge over your competitors, as well as providing a frictionless journey for your customers. It can also help increase payment conversion rates, as there is no risk of losing sales by asking customers to switch channels (e.g. from Webchat to a telephone call) to complete payment transactions.
Digital transformation is taking place in contact centers worldwide and customers expect to be able to make payments via any channel of their choosing. The Covid-19 pandemic has helped bring digital transformation in contact centres forward, due to many contact centre agents needing to stay safe and work from home coupled with the growth in online shopping and other types of digital interaction from consumers.
To ensure you are offering the best possible customer service and making it as easy for your customers to purchase your products or services, it is vital that you are operating a digitally enabled contact centre, this is often referred to as multichannel or omnichannel.
What is Digital Transformation?
Digital Transformation is a buzzword that has been floating around for the last few years, but what does it really mean? Putting it simply, digital transformation is the process of integrating technology into your organization in order to create new business processes (or modify existing ones) with the aim of meeting changing business requirements and enhancing customer experience.
It sounds simple enough, but digital transformation is more than just purchasing technology and adapting your business’s processes. It is a complete change in how your business engages with your customers – as well as an overhaul of the attitude and culture of your business. Getting buy-in for any change can be difficult and a common phrase that’s thrown around is “We have always done it like this”.
Digital Transformation doesn’t need to be complicated – It needs to be efficient, effective and solve pain points that you have in your business. For contact centers, that means not only ensuring that the telephony works as it should but also introducing digital contact channels (such as webchat, video chat, email, social media, SMS, etc.) and enabling customers to contact your business via the channel of their choice, even switching between channels during a single transaction if they wish. Digital transformation is also about using data analytics to improve your efficiency and productivity, making decisions that optimize your business based on the data and evidence that your digital systems enable you to collect.
What are the benefits of an omnichannel contact centre?
Increased customer engagement
The omnichannel contact centre has become a competitive advantage. By providing your customers with the ability to contact you via the channel they demand, you are improving their customer experience and the level of service that they receive. Increasing customer satisfaction increases customer retention as well as referrals and recommendations.
Efficiency and Productivity
By using multiple customer contact channels, you are able to streamline customer engagement, for example by filtering simple, regular transactions towards automated, lower-cost channels such as your IVR or a chatbot whilst freeing up your agents to focus on more complex customer queries. This maximizes your agents’ productivity and reduces operating costs whilst also enhancing customer satisfaction as your customers are also given more personalized service and benefit from seamless interactions through the channels of their choice.
Greater visibility and insights
Using data analytics in digital contact centers gives you visibility of key metrics in your operations. This can include data on service levels, customer engagement volumes by channel, as well as payment transactions, giving you the ability to communicate, collaborate and share relevant information with the rest of the business. Knowing which channels are most effective for different kinds of transactions gives you the information you need to maximize the efficiency of your contact centre operations.
How can Syntec help?
Our secure payment solution Cardeasy Digital supports digital transformation in contact centres, with a full suite of omnichannel payment solutions that keep your customers’ payment card data safe whilst ensuring you are compliant with PCI DSS.
All of our secure payment solutions work together seamlessly, and CardEasy Digital is no different. Our digital offering provides the highest level of payment security for all digital channels – including but not limited to webchat, SMS, WhatsApp, social media, and emails.
CardEasy Analytics provides your organization with a range of flexible reporting and useful data analysis tools, at no extra cost. Analytics is available for all of our CardEasy secure payment solutions.
The solution provides you with the ability to track the effectiveness of using secure payment links, with analytics on successful and abandoned payments, as well as those which are part-completed and may benefit from direct follow-up from a member of your team.
With its real-time dashboards and customizable reports, CardEasy Analytics gives you visibility of key metrics for your contact center operations and provides a rich source of data on service levels, customer engagement volumes, and payment transactions. All CardEasy reports can be exported for further interrogation and insight.
CardEasy Analytics also provides you with status pages to allow your IT department to view the live status of each CardEasy regional service. You can also subscribe to receive real-time alerts for any events that could affect service.
Syntec’s CardEasy solution enables you to take card payments in your contact centres and by remote workers without the customer’s card details ever entering your own environment or systems.
Whether you take payments by phone or via digital channels such as e-mail, SMS webchat or social media, you can’t be at risk of a breach of the card payment data because you’ll no longer be privy to that data – and you will also be seen to have adopted ‘appropriate technical measures’ to be compliant, as required by the PCI DSS standards. And most importantly, you won’t be faced with the never-ending task of trying to keep that very sensitive customer data secure.
