Digital Engagement Blog

Traditional chat solutions create a CX that’s essentially a phone call with typing instead of talking.  It’s a strictly linear experience tied to a single session that begins and ends on a single device.  That may be a good fit for a customer journey that follows a nice straight line, but that’s not how consumers buy anymore.

Consumers jump between a mesh of digital devices

Today’s digital consumers live their lives differently, and they expect to engage differently. 

Your Customers Are Digital

By 2020, mobile commerce will make up 45 percent of total e-commerce (BI Intelligence) and require a different strategy than today’s online web strategy.  On the service side, Gartner says 35% of all support will take place on a mobile device by the end of next year.

How do you make customer service effortless, fast and efficient?  It's not by talking to a live person!

As a company whose mission is to provide the best possible self-service, we understand the good, the bad and where the industry is going. And we’ve also seen that most customers will self-serve over talk to an agent.  Even Dave Pell avoids agents.

Today there is a lot of hype and buzz around Chatbots, artificial intelligence, and cognitive computing making it difficult to understand what is actually feasible and what can actually have an impact on your business.

TechCrunch recently said, “What’s really surprising is that, despite all this hoopla, it’s hard to find a single chatbot that’s actually a really good product.

Of course, we can wrangle over the definition of what makes a good product, but in its simplest terms, a great product would have three traits:

You’ve heard about the Age of the Customer. That’s a customer environment that goes beyond traditional customer care; it is about establishing a context for an enterprise’s consumer-base. As consumers equip themselves with more devices, and those devices connect to each other, consumers create a personal ecosystem, called Digital Context.¹ Gone are the days when consumers are comfortable adapting to preconceived engagement protocols. Today’s the day about engaging with consumers when they want, how they want – their choice trumps the enterprise – and it results in a win-win scenario if done right. That’s Digital Context in a nutshell.

Enterprise contact centers play a key role in digital consumer engagement strategies. Enterprises need first to empower customers, and secondly to ensure that their customer care representatives are able to take up the conversations that have begun via digital channels. They’ll need to understand that these conversations are no longer one-off quick fixes; they’re part of an ongoing effort to build a better and more sustainable relationship with the customer over time, like tiles that make up a larger mosaic.

Are you hot for chatbots?  They're certainly heating up the conversation among customer engagement executives these days.  Chatbots have been around since 1994 and have matured to the point that they (maybe) can be used effectively for real business applications.  And now thanks to Facebook announcements and a demo of chatbots the topic is top of mind.  So how do chatbots impact your digital engagement strategy?

Digital engagement is all the rave these days. In CX circles leading all the way to the boardroom, buzzwords like engagement, omni-channel, and transformation are creating bingo winners every nineteen seconds.

Today is a good day to come full circle and consider how customers will drive your digital engagement strategy. Yes, it’s pi day. And if you’re eyeing a bigger slice of it in the coming year, it’s time to consider just how much things have changed.

As always, we’re here to help. We put together this plum of a list of things you’ll want to achieve before the next pi day if you want to get your organization ready for digital context. We hope you’ll find this to be some delicious food for thought that drives many fruitful discussions:

Once upon a time, consumers were respectful of your time. As an enterprise, you could grant them access to your people on your terms.  Consumers would wait their turn and be glad to accept help from a sales associate or customer service representative when you were ready to provide it. 

Those were the days, huh?  It seems almost like a fairy tale now, because digital consumers have turned that world completely upside down.  They expect more, pay attention to you less, and behave so differently it’s hard to know when or where to engage them.

Customer engagement success happens in the moments you share with your customers. So if you’re serious about providing customer experiences that drive true engagement, it’s essential to make every moment count. But every year, enterprises waste a huge engagement opportunity.