The need for organisations to meet their customers’ need to interact across multiple, different channels of communications has been increasing for several years as users adopt video, chat, email, SMS and social channels in addition to mobile and fixed-line voice. What’s needed is a flexible, user-controlled, context-aware and easy to operate environment to handle all the different formats. Ideally, this should be able to support interactions that traverse more than one channel.
The good news is that Converged Contact Solutions are already here to make this a reality and bring together all the methods of contact that customers use with fixed-mobile convergence, productivity tools, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, contact centre functions, marketing automation and many other systems. The technology is the enabler here, maximising the benefit of Converged Contact Solutions is actually more about the people and business, as Iain Sinnott, Head of International Carriers at Enreach for Service Providers, explains.
“For the business customer, benefits include making better use of employees' time and simplifying hybrid working to enhance the employee experience,” he says. “Converged Contact also maximises your ROI through enabling more integration of technology which enables improved customer service. We see this powering increased sales revenue, decreased customer churn, increased staff productivity and decreased staff churn.”
Sinnott adds that the benefits don’t end there. Converged Contact Solutions can also enable businesses to reduce their operating cost and their carbon footprint while increasing net promoter score (NPS) and decreasing social media negativity.
For Converged Contact Solutions and service providers there are also substantial benefits. “Service providers can improve customer loyalty by selling more than just comms or IT systems,” confirms Sinnott.
