Much is made of the survival of the fittest in business, but when it comes to customer experience, friendliness is the key differentiator. Paul Holden, CallTower’s VP of EMEA sales explains why customers demand friendliness, and how businesses can use data and AI to ensure they experience it.
Nobody likes a frosty reception. Whether we’re shopping in the high street, checking into a hotel, or filling up at a remote garage, our interactions with the world always feel better with a smile. Exactly the same applies when we’re chatting to support agents, or getting things done through digital channels, but here businesses face the challenge of separation. How do you extend the hand of friendship across the cold fibreoptics of the internet?
It’s not an idle question. Friendliness has a huge bearing on customer satisfaction, which in turn is a key driver in fundamentals such as repeat business, advocacy and brand reputation. Research by PwC suggests that 60% of global customers would stop doing business with a brand due to unfriendly service. In fact, most customers have had their relationship with a brand soured by a single conversation – getting it wrong once might be all it takes.
Great customer experience (CX) is a differentiator for brands seeking to stand out among their peers. But friendliness is hard to scale, particularly for businesses that might be handling call and text requests from many thousands of customers. How can large and mid-sized businesses deliver a consistently friendly experience, across agents, territories and even different contact centre (CC) platforms?
Personalising the customer journey
As customers, we interact with organisations across channels, and through multiple touchpoints. By themselves these snapshots can only tell businesses so much, but by piecing them together organisations can build a greater understanding of each customer’s journey, and a clearer picture of their needs – and frustrations. Insight derived from this data lets companies personalise the experiences they offer, which might be as simple as making sure CC agents know callers’ preferred name and pronouns, or have ready access to their account history.
Increasingly, however, AI-driven personalisation helps CC workers display a deeper familiarity with their customers. AI-derived insights might flag up repeated customer service calls, for example, or abandoned online transactions that could indicate frustration. CC staff with an overview of customers’ web visits can see their areas of interest, and use these to shape friendlier conversations or make targeted offers.
For CX, that’s a transformative shift, giving employees – and even chatbots – the background to engage in highly personalised conversations, sensitive to customers’ immediate needs and frustrations. But it takes more to turn this into friendly and effective customer service.
The final pieces come from the convergence between unified communication (UC) and CC technologies. Organisations that integrate their internal collaboration tools with customer-facing channels can offer frictionless transitions from self-service to live assistance, and with it higher resolution and satisfaction rates. Empowered CX agents, able to flex the rules and find solutions, can draw on expertise from across the organisation to deliver individual customer successes, offering a personal touch that creates genuine satisfaction and advocacy.
The opportunity: meeting customer demand through new partnerships
At CallTower, we know that comms buyers are increasingly looking to service providers to give them integrated tools for friendly customer experiences. That’s a challenge for UC providers without a strong CC offering, requiring investments in technology, expertise, and sales and marketing resources. However, it’s also an opportunity, potentially unlocking new business and creating a route to higher margins.
Service providers can expand their offering, and accelerate their entry into the CC market, by partnering with established UC, CC and collaboration solution providers. These offer the benefits of established relationships with technology vendors, and can streamline deployment through pre-built integrations with major providers. These partnerships give vendors access to training and support programmes, allowing them to maintain quality while rapidly positioning themselves to meet customer demand.
Working in partnership also allows service providers to target new segments. With cloud-based solutions now making sophisticated CC capabilities more accessible, providers can make the most of opportunities with mid-sized organisations, who may previously have thought these capabilities were out of their reach.
There’s a further incentive and opportunity for service providers to profit from partnerships. Research by Cavell and sponsored by CallTower, shows that enterprises are increasingly looking to deal with one provider – even in multi-vendor environments. Service providers that can offer a wider range of products and integrations will be more able to compete, and to win a larger share of their customers’ IT spend. This advantage extends beyond borders, too: partnerships can help providers tap into new markets, and offer multinational businesses the reassurance of expertise across multiple territories.
Softening complexity through warmth
Communication is complex, and enterprises of all size depend on multiple platforms and products to manage it. Increasingly, however, they demand integrated solutions, able to share data and work collectively to improve the customer journey. This is key to offering customers a friendly, informed and positive experience, with all the potential benefits that entails.
Discover more about the challenges and opportunities for service providers as they deliver communications solutions for the future. Download the Global Calling white paper from CallTower in partnership with Cavell.
Through partnerships, IT and communications service providers can widen their reach, and create new opportunities to profit from trends in unified communications. Working with experts in unified comms, contact centre and collaboration solutions such as CallTower empowers businesses to tap into new markets, and satisfy their customers’ demand for platforms that support increased personalisation and friendliness.