In a digital age where customer expectations are rising, the days when businesses could rely on a top-class product offering and competitive price point alone to stay ahead of the curve are gone.
Today, customer experience (CX) is absolutely crucial for success and with a recent study having claimed that customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator by 2020, it’s clear to see why so many businesses are desperately searching for a solution that can help them engage with their customer more effectively.
Though basic CTI may once have been a sufficient way to accomplish this, it is no longer enough to provide a modern customer experience, and a more detailed, personalised service that can pinpoint the customer’s journey across various channels within a contact centre is essential.
In order to explore this in more detail, InGenius recently commissioned McGee-Smith Analytics to carry out research on why customer experience is so important to the modern businesses, what customers now expect and what role CTI has to play in helping businesses meet these demands.
To run us through what they found, we met up with VP of Product Management and Marketing at InGenius, Kari Simpson, and discussed some of the key points.
Evolution of the Customer
Unlike the past where customers contacted a business exclusively through either telephone or email, the modern customer has many channels to choose from and preferences differ greatly depending on age group.
“From the McGee-Smith Analytics research, we can see how callers aged between 25 and 34 years show a much greater preference for channels such as social media and web chat, while customers aged between 35 and 70 still prefer to contact a business through traditional channels such as telephone or email.”
So, for example, if any customer aged between 25 and 34 is contacting a business via telephone, chances are they’ve already started their journey into the contact centre through another channel and will expect whichever agent answers them to know why they are calling.
A failure to meet this demand is disastrous for the business and, as well as slowing down agent productivity while simultaneously prolonging the duration of the call, it can have a huge negative impact on the customer’s perception of the business – thus making them more likely to take their custom elsewhere in the future.
Fast Personalised Service
In response to this, then, investing in a CRM solution like InGenius that enables businesses to provide seamless, personalised customer service across all channels within their contact centre and ensures that every agent has a clear 360-degree view of every customer they interact with, is key.
“With InGenius, phone systems are fully integrated with the company’s CRM so whenever an agent takes a call, all information from prior interactions (irrespective of what channel it was logged on) will be presented to them through the screen pop function on their CRM, thus preventing them from having to ask questions that have already been answered.”
As a result of this, agents are able to deliver a much more personalised service to their customer, reinforcing the idea that the company values their time, is concerned about resolving the issue as quickly as possible and makes them feel like a person rather than just another number in the queue.
