Over the last few years, the word ‘omnichannel’ has been used (and overused) to describe a utopia of marketing and customer care. We all have heard and read about how an omnichannel approach solves all customer care issues and allows brands to prove their customer obsession. Then why do brands still pursue a better approach?

The answer is simple: because every brand has defined ‘omnichannel’ using the best of their abilities and technologies at hand. We saw many multichannel or cross-channel solutions being called omnichannel only to be found incapable of delivering what they promised. What we needed was a solution capable of delivering a true omnichannel experience. And what differentiates a true omnichannel solution from its counterparts is the technology that empowers it.

Let’s start with the definition. We believe that a true omnichannel solution does not make the customer bend their ways to engage with the brand, it allows customers to switch through various channels of their choice to complete a transaction without being limited by rules and predefined menus. It offers a personalized experience for the customer using the data and customers past behavior. And it maintains context and persistence throughout the customer journey so they don’t have to repeat themselves as they change channels.

Here’s a quick checklist of items you should be looking for while selecting an omnichannel solution:

CHANNEL CHOICE

A true omnichannel IVA solution spans all channels of customer communication and maintains conversations and brand persona across those channels — from traditional telephony to digital channels like text, web chat, mobile apps and from new messaging platforms such as Facebook messenger and apple business chat to smart speakers like Google home and Amazon Echo.

PERSONALIZATION

Customers like when brands show that they care by offering personal and relevant service. A true omnichannel solution recognizes a customer when they start the engagement, greet them with their name and carry out a conversation using what they know about the customer – past behavior, purchases, and preferences.  A true omnichannel IVA achieves this by tightly integrating with a brand’s CRM or data stores and retrieving customer profiles and relevant information in real time to offer a personalized experience.

Ex. Good morning Tim, how may I help you?

CONTEXT AND PERSISTENCE

When it comes to customer service interactions, context is everything. Repeating themselves again and again when switching channels or personnel is one of the biggest cause of frustration among consumers. A true omnichannel IVA avoids all of this by maintaining a context either by transferring session IDs or history of the transaction across channels.

Ex. Good morning Tim, are you calling about your recent purchase of a vacuum cleaner or how may I help you?

INTEGRATIONS

Modern customer experience expectations have taken customer service beyond the contact centers. Now, it is widely distributed among various departments — for example, the social channels are managed by a marketing team and web or mobile chat channels are managed by digital teams. These teams need to access central CRM systems, knowledge management systems, agent desktop softwares and other repositories to deliver a coherent experience. A true omnichannel IVA integrates with all the pieces of the customer service jigsaw puzzle in real time.

THE BEST OF AI AND HUMAN INTELLIGENCE

A true omnichannel solution uses the best of AI technologies to understand and predict customer behavior. Technologies such as automated speech recognition and natural language processing help the IVA understand the customer in spite of complicated prompts, stacked intents or background noises. The dialog management technologies ensure a conversational interaction over voice and digital channels. A true omnichannel IVA also offers a second source of recognition — human intelligence — when the AI produces lower confidence score in what the customer is asking. The machine learning algorithms complete the feedback loop so the system learns from its experiences and gets smarter with each interaction.

With the current misuse of terms describing a variety of automated customer care solutions, it’s important to understand what technologies are required to empower a truly omnichannel solution — so you can be sure you’re selecting the right technology for your organization. To learn more about how Interactions omnichannel solution is truly unique, watch our on-demand webinar today.

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Messaging Customer Care: Real-World Deployments, Real Results

The goal of this blog post is to clearly identify the business value of implementing messaging customer care alongside traditional care channels such as phone, email, and live-chat. In my role as Head of Product, I have the privilege of meeting customer service and customer experience leaders on a weekly basis. Over the last several years of my career, I have racked up several hundred such conversations.

These conversations are a part of my role that I love and value immensely because they help me understand our customers’ priorities. While every organization has its own way of articulating their customer service priorities, they generally fall into three main buckets: improving customer experience, controlling customer service costs, and improving agent satisfaction. Agent productivity impacts all three of these commonly held priorities.

Improving agent productivity means conversations are being resolved faster which is a key component of customer satisfaction. It also impacts agent satisfaction because higher productivity is achieved by eliminating repetitive, mundane or wasteful actions that agents are required to do for issue resolution. Finally, and most significantly, agent productivity is directly tied to cost control since its presence enables organizations to handle higher volumes of customer service requests.

In previous posts, we’ve talked about how messaging customer care provides superior CX for consumers. What’s often overlooked is that customer care over messaging channels is also significantly cheaper compared to other, more traditional channels including voice and textual channels such as email and live chat. This is largely because messaging enables agents to dramatically increase productivity.

Voice vs. Messaging

To understand how much more productive, we analyzed a representative sample of our customer base. We found that agents on our platform are able to resolve between 5.7 to 14.5 conversations per hour. This resolution rate is about 25-65% higher than that of voice teams. The median messaging customer care team resolves 7.2 conversations per hour. This is about 42% higher than the benchmark of 4.2-5.2 resolutions per hour for a voice agent. This does not include conversations that did not require a response (e.g., conversations resolved by bots and automation, or a “Thank you” from a customer after a conversation was already marked resolved by an agent). Also excluded are additional conversations conducted by agents that were never resolved.

This disparity in productivity is driven by a messaging agent’s ability to handle many more simultaneous conversations than a voice agent is able to. Agents on our platform often have more than 10 conversations being actively handled at once without jeopardizing the quality of service.

Email vs. Messaging

Messaging provides an even higher productivity gain over email. Email, like messaging, is an asynchronous channel. This means that conversations don’t have to happen in real time and can span minutes, hours, or even days. However, from a consumer’s point of view, email is a highly dissatisfying channel, associated with high response times (often a day, sometimes several days) and high friction.

Emails tend to need more words compared to messaging which wastes agents’ time without adding much value to the actual problem resolution for the consumer. This communication style often requires a lot of back and forth, which feels natural in a messaging-style conversation, but can get frustrating in a more “offline” format. Email issue resolution costs for enterprises that we’ve talked to tend to be in the range of $6-7 per resolution. Compare this to the $2-2.5 cost per resolution for an average messaging team on our platform and it translates into a 60-65% productivity gain over email agent teams.

Chat vs. Messaging

Live chat has been around for a long time and is a well-established service channel in many organizations. On the surface messaging and chat look similar enough that enterprises tend to assume that they also have similar costs. However, this is not the case due to a key difference between messaging and chat: asynchronous versus synchronous interactions. Chats often suffer from a high abandonment rate whereas a messaging conversation can never be abandoned. This is the source of messaging’s productivity advantage over chat. Messaging conversations never get abandoned as there are no session timeouts.

Timed out chats often lead to either channel hopping or new chat sessions (e.g., if a user gets timed out because they were browsing a different webpage and didn’t see an agent’s reply). For each abandoned chat that drives a new session or a phone call, the time spent by the first chat agent is wasted productivity.

Messaging also allows more simultaneous conversations than live chat’s typical 3-5 range. We estimate that eliminating involuntary abandons and enabling higher simultaneous conversations can add up to 15-30% higher productivity over live chat. Abandonment rate being the key variable for the extent of these savings.

Whether comparing messaging customer care to voice, email or live-chat, it is safe to say the messaging provides a superior customer experience. Perhaps most importantly, it drives 20-60% agent productivity compared to traditional channels, creating a win-win situation for the consumer and the enterprise.

Messaging provides a superior customer experience and drives 20-60% agent productivity compared to traditional channels, creating a win-win situation for the consumer and the enterprise.

What is your experience? Have you looked at what a messaging operation could save your organization?

Interested in finding out more about this topic or Sparkcentral? Sparkcentral is one of the subject matter experts that will be sharing their insights and expertise at Customer Response Summit Marina del Rey, September 10-12, 2018. CR Summit Marina del Rey will feature keynotes from Chick-fil-A, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Upwork. Sparkcentral will be delivering a Customer Shop Talk session titled “Digital Messaging Customer Care at Scale”. 

For more information about our leading event for CX professionals, visit our event website. 

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PHOENIX, July 12, 2018 — Execs In The Know, a community of Customer Experience Professionals, has announced the details of their national event – Customer Response Summit (CRS) Marina del Rey. CRS Marina del Rey will be held September 10^th-12^th, 2018, at The Ritz-Carlton Marina del Rey, in Marina del Rey, CA. Culture, customer engagement, AI, the millennial workforce, mindfulness, digital transformation, and more will be featured topics of discussion. The customer experience conference will include keynotes from Chick-fil-A, LinkedIn, Upwork, and Microsoft.

CRS is a gathering of customer service leaders, across many verticals, focused on creating innovative experiences for their brands. Highlights of the CX leadership event include an exclusive tour of the Porsche Experience Center Los Angeles, evening networking opportunities, and numerous case studies. The newest version of the CXMB Series – 2018 Consumer Edition, will also be released (a joint effort between Execs In The Know and COPC Inc.).

“Our EITK community is a dynamic, collaborative group of customer experience executives who are constantly inspiring us and leading the charge in their own organizations,” said Chad McDaniel, President and CEO of Execs In The Know. “There’s nothing quite like the sharing, networking, and learning at our live events and I would urge anyone who hasn’t been part of one to join us in Marina del Rey to experience it for themselves.”

Other leading corporate brands that will speak at the customer care event include Humana, Uber, GoDaddy, Southwest Airlines, Slack, Electrolux, and more.

To learn more or to register, visit the event website https://execsintheknow.com/events/marina-del-rey/.

About Execs In The Know

Execs In The Know is a global community of customer experience professionals focused on excellence in customer experience. Execs In The Know gives brands a platform to share and gain insights, benchmark their brand, stay on top of the latest trends in CX, and create lasting relationships with their peers – “Leaders Learning From Leaders.”

Execs In The Know holds numerous live events each year including Customer Response Summit, Subject Matter Briefings, Lunch & Learns, and Dinners. They also offer industry content and thought leadership, webinars, reports, and various social communities.

Learn more at www.execsintheknow.com.

Media Contact:
Alyssa Pitura
info@execsintheknow.com

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