Customer Interaction Optimization

Optimizing how you interact with your customers is about using technology innovation and processes to enhance the customer’s communications experience.  Customers expect first-contact resolution within the minimum time and appreciate proactive customer service.  After a successful interaction, the customer has greater satisfaction with your products and services, meaning greater customer retention.  Research has shown that this score directly correlates with financial performance.

Deliver intelligent, personalized self-service, enabling customers to efficiently and enjoyably retrieve the information they need from the contact center.  On the phone, customers can key in digits or use their own voice to request self-service information.  In addition, voice portals now support video interactions, i.e., video self-service from mobile devices and kiosks.  Web-based self service solutions provide a range of ways to get to information in the common knowledge base to customers via your website, such as FAQ, search, browse, guided help and virtual agents.  Whether self-service is over the phone, video, web or chat, if customers request live agent assistance, the portal offers easy escalation from self-service into assisted channels, also transferring the record of the self-service session when escalating to an agent.  Customers are likelier to use self-service if they know that they will be taken care of when they cannot help themselves.

Assisted service, when the customer needs to speak to a live agent, continues to be the primary method of contact.  Routing of the call to the most appropriate agent with the shortest wait time, taking into account customer preferences and requirements, is fundamental to managing the interaction.  Equally important are the tools and processes for the agent to service customers’ needs.  Intelligent communications gives contact center agents the ability to reach the right resources across the enterprise during the customer service process.  The contact center of the future is an integral part of the enterprise, not distinct from the enterprise.  Outbound contact, when the contact center calls the customer, has applications in proactive customer service, sales and collections.  Outbound contact automation and intelligence to estimate the best time to call improves cost efficiencies and business results. 

Email, fax and inbound / outbound text messaging are more effective when integrated into existing communication channels.  For example, a customer requests a service by sending a text message, email or fax, and gets confirmation from the contact center over the same or another channel.  In some regions, text messages are the preferred means of providing notification, advertising and location-based services.

Within the contact center, workforce management is one of the integral practices to efficiently manage and improve contact center performance.  It provides tools for resource managers to make sure there are enough agents but not so many that the business fails – making sure you have the right number of people, in the right place, at the right time, with the right skills, to handle the workload.  Quality management applications are used for measuring the quality of the service provided by agents and for improving the overall performance of a contact center.  Interaction analytics allows businesses to glean insight from customer interactions which can help them be proactive and capitalize on market opportunities first, as well as to intervene in situations before they evolve into potential problems.

Consilium Software can provide your organization with all the technologies and services to manage and optimize the customer contact experience.