Discussing Digital Engagement and Customer Services with ALE

"We're seeing a lot of companies struggle to deal with all four forces mentioned above at once. Instead, they often need to focus on things one at a time, harnessing the cloud, then mobile, then social, then big data."

Another trend that Xavier noted was the move towards the entire business becoming more involved with the customer experience conversation. "We've moved beyond the restriction of the customer service agent being the only person responsible for serving customers. Now, virtually everyone in a company can act as a digital engagement representative and improve the dialogue that the brand has with its customers."

How Does Rainbow Support Digital Transformation?

To support the discussion of digital engagement, ALE has recently introduced their own team workflow app in "Rainbow" a platform in the cloud that's designed to enhance digital transformation. I asked Xavier how Rainbow connects to digital engagement, and he told me that Rainbow serves two functions - the first being Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), and the second being a Communication Platform as a Service.

"It's the CPaaS approach that's really critical to digital engagement because it means that you can integrate platforms and link customer engagement platforms. For instance, with Rainbow and APIs, you can develop a chat application for a browser or mobile device and bring real-time communications to your customers."

"Then you can use the system to rapidly escalate chat discussions to live telephone conversations and more."

Rainbow can also integrate with the business application, which means that companies can make sure that they have the context support their customer conversations too. Team collaboration is just one of the applications that Rainbow offers, "We're using the platform to deliver real-time communication capabilities as part of an open experience that can fold neatly on top of everything else you do within your communication network."

"This means that users get the best end-to-end solution for the customer journey."

What Does the Future Look like for ALE?

For ALE and Xavier, most of the discussion around customer engagement is based on existing information - historical data that's been compiled for a number of years based on interactions with customers. "The more data we collect and use, the more we can ensure that companies have the right information at the right moment in the conversation. We anticipate that digital engagement will push people to bring more technology into the customer service experience to add context to the answers service agents provide."

One of the new technology functions that ALE will be delivering in the future is artificial intelligence, meaning that companies can not only retrieve information but use the data they collect to provide recommendations based on patterns that their algorithms recognise.

"The first step in the future for us is leveraging that shift to the abilities offered by AI. We'll also be using voice biometrics and recognition to identify customers for tentative transactions, shorten the enrollment process, and automate certain activities too."