We talk a lot about "future-proofing" your business. It’s an important concept for any company considering digital customer service integration. You don’t simply want to plan for your current customer service needs. You’ll need a solution that can easily scale as business grows.
Digital customer service is evolving quickly, and this change hopefully comes in tandem with important developments in your business — namely growth. So, when you do integrate digital customer service technology, you’ll want to be thinking about the future of the technology, its agility and flexibility, and the development of your business.
By priority, here are 5 key technologies for the future of digital customer service — both in line with technological developments and in terms of growing your business.
1) Live Chat
A few years ago, live chat was a nice novelty to have on your website. Now, live chat is a necessity. Most customers expect a self-service option on websites, and they want speed combined with personalization. Live chat makes all that possible — and more.
With live chat, you can increase efficiencies by closing cases faster and reducing the average cost per case. The fact that live chat is a real-time engagement channel makes this possible. At the same time, agents using live chat can generate revenue by identifying proactive service-to-sales opportunities. Cart abandons are minimalized as agents guide customers through the purchase process. Live chat saves money and helps build revenue. What’s not to love?
Key takeaway: Live chat delivers a service that customers want and helps agents work more efficiently at a lower cost than other channels.
2) Omnichannel Coverage
Like live chat, omnichannel customer service coverage is a necessity for today's digital customers. When you’re doing omnichannel right, you can unify all your digital channels into one platform to capture customers wherever they choose to interact.
Companies using omnichannel customer service can unify customer requests and conversations from social media, live chat, email, forums, blogs, mobile apps, and contact forms in one platform. This makes it easier for agents to respond to high volumes of customer interactions.
Key takeaway: It’s vital to be available on channels your customers use. Conduct research to identify which channels your customers demand and maintain an active presence there.
3) Advanced Reporting
Any reputable digital customer service software includes advanced reporting features that make it easy to track and measure business goals. This allows companies to optimize workflows, deep-dive on specific incidents, prioritize queues in real-time, and identify new business opportunities for cross- and up-selling. The bottom line: Knowing more about how you work helps you work smarter.
For contact center managers, having detailed data to track digital customer service needs helps optimize efficiencies. This is important for companies of all sizes — especially companies with high growth.
Key takeaway: The more you know about your customers and your agents, the better your service will be. Monitoring your customer service activities enables you to adapt with agility, flexibility, and scalability.
4) Powerful CRM
CRM is one of the most important tools that customer service agents can have at their fingertips. With the right CRM technology, all customer data and interactions are stored, enabling at-a-glance personalization of responses. Without CRM, knowledge about customers and solutions to key issues are not retained.
Connecting customer activities across social networks into one record is key for more personalized service. It’s also important to take a customer's online reach into account because this could impact the tone and content of an agent’s interactions. Identifying these influencers is just one more way that call center agents offer better service. And the best thing about CRM is that it gets more intelligent with each customer interaction.
Key takeaway: Knowing more about your customers allows you to offer a more personalized style of service — exactly what today's customers demand. Using CRM constantly builds the intelligence of your customer service team.
5) Intelligent Routing
When incoming customer service queries aren’t intelligently routed to the best agent for a specific customer or issue, your customer service team isn’t operating at peak efficiency.
Intelligent routing and automatic ticket prioritization allow you to increase first contact resolution and utilize the full potential of your agents. Incoming customer queries are routed to your team of agents based on skillset, relationships, and availability. This way, each customer is directed automatically to the best possible agent.
Key takeaway: For every customer and every service query, there is an ideal customer service agent. Use intelligent routing to encourage human service and long-term relationships between customers and agents.
We believe in future-proofing your business with the right call center software because we believe in growing business and increasing ROI through extraordinary digital customer service.
Interested in learning more on future-proofing your business in the digital age? Watch our webinar, Digital – First Customer Service: The Future is Here Today.
