Improve customer satisfaction and optimize costs: against a backdrop of tightening economic conditions, it’s a hard trick to pull off.
Global inflation, risk of recession, and the geopolitical situation are certainly set to make 2023 a challenging year for enterprise.
However, as is so often the case, technology has the potential to help.
- Solving IT Management Challenges with Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise
- ALE: Smart Cities Deliver Good Governance
When it comes to customer relations in particular, an omnichannel approach has the power to deliver an all-round better experience for businesses and their customers – whilst simultaneously driving significant efficiency gains.
Indeed, a new mix of human interaction + clever automation is transforming the way many of the world’s smarter enterprises are connecting with those with whom they interact.
For example, live agents teamed with Interactive Voice Response (IVR)-based self-service capabilities can bring a new, smoothness and rapidity to the process.
Similarly, a web-based conversational assistant - or chatbot – can be many times more convenient for customers than calling, and can also enable enterprises to devote its human resource to handling complex requests, winning new business, and retaining customers thinking of leaving.
The key to success is to pick a provider partner that understands the challenges and can offer the right solution and support.
“Studies show that in difficult periods such as the one we all now face, most enterprises rightly put customer experience at the top of their priority list as it’s seen as capable of creating a competitive advantage likely to increase wallet share,” says Ludovic Leclerc, Product Marketing Manager at global enterprise communications solutions provider Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, whose ALE Connect omnichannel contact centre offering ticks all of the right boxes.
“Unfortunately, it is very often the case that the automation of the processing of requests tends to degrade the customer relationship as people still prefer a conversation with a trusted person rather than with a bot.
“How do you find the right balance? How do you deal with cost containment or even reduction while improving the customer experience?
“The answer is to deploy an omnichannel approach that combines automation with live voice. That’s when quality and productivity go hand in hand.”
In essence, an omnichannel strategy develops the use of new conversational channels through which customers’ can achieve first-call resolution to their issue with the same quality and efficiency as a live telephone conversation.
So-called ‘hot’ channels, such as voice – synchronous and in real time – combine with so-called ‘cold’ channels; traditionally email but now extended to instant messaging such as Twitter, FB Messenger or WhatsApp; and also live chat via brand websites or mobile applications.
