Digital Engagement Blog

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?

These days, the answer to pretty much anything we want is just a tap or click away.  As the Harvard Business Review describes it, we live in a world of micro-moments, frequent moments in which we intensely want or need something such as a particular fact, destination, product, service, or activity; right here, right now.

Throughout the day, we frequently use mobile devices to check the Google Maps app for traffic updates, make a last minute reservation on Open Table for dinner that night, or calling your pharmacy to make sure your prescription is ready. 

You’re a consumer.  I am, too. 

So, let’s say we feel the need to engage with our favorite company.

Raise your hand if you want to be forced to use the phone.

How about forced into email?

What about web chat?

Of course you don’t.

Why?

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.

Mobile engagement, digital engagement, and customer engagement are some of the hottest buzzwords that executives like to toss around these days.  While most of us have a general understanding of what all these terms mean, the specifics can get as fuzzy as the cloud most of these engagement solutions operate in.

Would you like to sound really smart the next time a "customer engagement" topic comes up in a meeting?  Let's start with mobile engagement and break it down for you.

Enterprises have been using our solutions to engage customers for over 12 years. Today our IVR platform supports over 1.5 billion calls a year. This vantage point has allowed us to observe how customer expectations and behaviors are changing across a wide set of industries.

Others are talking about this as well:

Remember. The Force will be with you. Always.

It’s been more than ten years since most of us paid much attention to The Force.

When was it last relevant? 2005? 2006? Back then, it was fairly simple to understand.Over the years, though, it has seemingly gone dormant, as if frozen in carbonite. What we knew back then has pretty much stayed with us until today. Not much has changed: why would it, right?

Organizations build systems to deliver desired outcomes in a repeatable, predicable and scalable manner. Most of the time these systems are good things that are downright essential to the success of the enterprise. But what happens when customers change faster than you do? They become harder to engage, and that can wreak havoc on your customer engagement strategy if the changes necessary to meet new customer expectations clash with your internal systems.

Now that we’ve covered the “what” in part one of this series about WebRTC in the contact center, it’s time to look at the “why” when it comes to WebRTC.  While most companies haven’t yet embraced WebRTC for customer interactions (We’re still in the early adoption cycle as the specification continues to work its way through the standards process and gains more industry awareness)  it’s critical for companies to begin crafting a strategy  to empower their digital customer service with WebRTC.

In the fall of last year, e-commerce behemoth Amazon introduced its newest Kindle Fire tablet together with a feature that some industry analysts have called “the shot heard round the world,” in comparison to the first shot fired in the American Revolution at the battle of Lexington. While the Revolutionary War started a trend of freedom throughout many nations of the world, the Kindle Fire “Mayday” button has launched a compelling new trend in customer support: easy browser-to-browser real-time voice and video communication. The Mayday button is an instant live video customer support widget that allows Kindle Fire users to summon an Amazon agent into a free video session within 15 seconds. It’s safe to say that the Mayday button has caused a few sleepless nights for marketing and sales executives of competitive device makers.