Digital Engagement Blog

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.

Is mobile customer care something you should pay attention to or can you ignore it for now?  Here are 5 red flags that help you decide if you can wait any longer. 

1) You got a high percentage of mobile calls coming into the contact center

A high percentage of calls coming into your contact center from customer on mobile phone suggest your customers have made a shift.  That shift is one to greater expectations for speed, ease and experience that mobile brings to the table.  Of the 1.5 billion calls we process through our IVR every year, a typical client sees 70% of the calls coming from mobile devices.  The expectation of these callers has rapidly changed and your enterprise needs to be ready service them on their terms.  You get one red flag for thinking mobile calls can be treated like a regular call.  And a bonus additional red flag for not knowing percent of inbound customer service calls come from mobile devices.

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:

One of the biggest challenges businesses face today is how to win, serve and retain the digital consumer. 

Mobile, digital and IoT are forcing major changes in digital strategy, business models and value chains.

Rules and frameworks that worked five years ago are under direct attack. So how does a business develop a digital strategy playbook?

I just returned from a few days at the Shoptalk conference where 3,000 people came to explore nextgen commerce.  I thought I’d share ten takeaways from ShopTalk that look at how digital is disrupting commerce.  I found trends here that will likely impact all industries.

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.

Digital engagement is continually evolving and changing. (Well that's an understatement, isn't it?)

And so, if you’re not staying up-to-speed on consumer research, behaviors, and trends, you could be falling further and further behind. But have no worry! Consider these three components in your Digital Engagement strategy, and you'll be able to keep yourself in the fast lane:

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. 

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.