Today’s comms-savvy generation expect communication to be easy, instant, efficient, rich and partly asynchronous, so improving customer experience continues to be a major priority for businesses. New digital transformation (DX) strategies aim to drive competitive differentiation and process efficiency to introduce new ways for customers to engage. Yet many businesses remain widely off the mark because they continue offer limited useful and integrated ways for customers to communicate.
In contact centres, there’s still a lot of emphasis on phone calls – a regular cause of frustration with long hold times (and annoying music), too many options and no guarantee of resolution in the end. The process is messy and inefficient. We accept this because customer communication over the years has largely been normalised as a separate and special activity, siloed by function - an interrupt rather than integral to the business process.
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IPCortex CEO, Rob Pickering[/caption]
But connecting communications and CRM systems across the business – sales, marketing, contact centre – provides a really effective way to improve the workflows and processes that underpin customer engagements and experience. It gives businesses an opportunity to introduce context to their communications; that is, data about a customer, a transaction, or big data trends that allow better decisions to be made at the point of communication. It also enables rich interactions that allow people to communicate seamlessly - both with each other and with an application via any combination of chat, video, call – effectively and inherently omni-channel.