CCaaS is one of the most exciting developments in the customer experience environment for any business. More than just a more cost-effective and efficient way of running your contact centre, CCaaS offers enhanced opportunities for customer experience. Thanks to a flexible environment in the cloud, CCaaS allows businesses to adapt and adjust their strategy to suit their customers.
With the right CCaaS provider, you can increase your company’s reach with the press of a button, implement new communication channels, or even unlock the benefits of artificial intelligence.
So, which features are most likely to have the biggest impact on your CX?
Here are just some of the top features perfect for impressing your audience.
1. Omni-channel Interactions
CCaaS solutions give you the power to deliver customer service through more than just voice. In today’s digital age, Gartner predicts that 72% of customer interactions will involve emerging technologies like mobile applications and messaging. There’s even an increase in the number of companies using video to connect with their clients.
Companies that can provide immersive service experiences on multiple channels will instantly earn the attention of their target audience. After all, customers love being able to communicate on the platforms that feel most comfortable to them.
However, it’s important to ensure that each channel you embrace for omni-channel interactions is connected on the back end. Though customers want multiple channels to connect through, they also don’t want to say the same thing over and over as they move from one channel to the next. Making sure that the conversation is aligned will be crucial for CX.
2. Self-Service and Automation
Artificial Intelligence is a fantastic functionality in many CCaaS platforms today. Intelligent tools can complete a range of tasks on the behalf of companies, including automating repetitive jobs. When you use automation to eliminate the more monotonous tasks from your employees’ day, you ensure that each staff member has more time to focus on more pressing projects.
Automation also opens the door to various forms of self-service for customers. Around 70% of customers now expect a company’s website to include a self-service chat application. Adding a chatbot to your website or customer service strategy will allow customers to ask questions and get automated responses, without interacting with busy agents.
This self-service experience can even extend to intelligent IVR systems. Agents that can respond to human voices can automatically determine what a customer needs and help them through simple tasks like making a payment.
3. Analytics and Journey Mapping
To truly deliver an amazing customer experience, you need to understand what kind of journeys your customer moves through with your brand. Fortunately, many CCaaS solutions come with access to data and analytics systems that can help give you a better view of the customer journey. Real-time analytics solutions in the contact centre can help to rectify problems in the moment.
For instance, a real-time analytics system could use artificial intelligence to detect the sentiment of a customer as an agent moves through a conversation. If the sentiment begins to decline, the bot could notify a supervisor or manager that the agent needs help. These tools can also make it easier for supervisors to track the performance of their employees when they’re working remotely.
Historical analytics and long-term data, on the other hand, helps with the discovery of trends and important information. Companies can determine whether customers are using certain points of contact more than others, making it easier to know where they should be investing their budget. You can even use historical tools combined with AI to predict future trends, or busy periods in the contact centre.
4. Tools for Empowering Agents
To drive better customer experiences, you need to start with employee experiences. According to a study in 2016, one US airport realized that the customers in queues weren’t as concerned about the time they spent in line, as they were about the conversations they had with staff.
CCaaS instantly improves the agent experience from a flexibility perspective, by giving agents the power to work from anywhere. Teams can easily leverage additional talent when they need it most, by provisioning a cloud-based worker with the tools they need in seconds.
When agents are empowered to be as efficient and productive as possible, they can deliver better outcomes to customers. With that in mind, many companies are beginning to combine their CCaaS solutions with tools that support agent performance. Workforce management and performance analytics tools can help teams to track their performance and remain motivated wherever they are. These tools also show supervisors where teams may need extra training.
AI is also an important component of empowering customer service agents. CX professionals believe that AI is crucial to enhancing agents, by automatically routing messages to the right person, collecting customer information, or even just giving teams access to data. Virtual assistants can take some of the stress off your team.
5. UCaaS and Other Integrations
One of the things that makes CCaaS so compelling is that like any cloud solution, it’s inherently flexible. Companies don’t need to settle for a one-size-fits-all environment. Instead, you can build a contact centre that scales up and down to suit customer needs.
CCaaS also allows for the integration of tools that can make the customer experience strategy more manageable for agents. For instance, connecting UCaaS (Unified Communication as a Service) tools and collaboration software to the contact centre improve back-end collaboration. When teams throughout the business can communicate more effectively, knowledge flows freely, and problems get fixed much faster.
This is one of the reasons why many companies are beginning to implement their contact centre solutions into collaborative tools like Microsoft Teams. Remember, around 70% of employees say they often have to leave the customer conversation to consult with their colleagues.
It’s not just UCaaS integrations that can offer benefits either. Linking things like CRM tools and support ticket software into the CCaaS environment means that agents can spend less time jumping between apps, and more time serving customers.
Improving CX with CCaaS
Above are just five of the best CCaaS features for boosting customer experience, but there are plenty of others to discover. CCaaS can offer access to improved security and privacy tools so that companies can give their clients more peace of mind. CCaaS also makes it easier to implement remote workers into the contact centre when demand is high, reducing the length of call queues and keeping teams efficient. As the world of customer experience continues to evolve, CCaaS is becoming the key to long-term success.
