Changes in the customer experience journey are happening fast. There is no slowing down or stopping the convergence of technology and the increasing demands for quick, relevant and personalized customer interactions. The stakes are high when it comes to the customer experience and it is not just the Contact Center that needs to take notice – the customer experience is a whole company issue.
What if we could tell you the contact center can be better, faster, smarter and more successful in creating loyalty with your customers that is long lasting? Creating a better customer and agent experience has been a goal that businesses have been chasing for decades. It is finding the delicate balance between agent efficiency, self-service performance and customer expectations that continues to be the challenge for most businesses. How do you create a smarter experience for customers and agents without sacrificing something?
All this talk about modernizing the customer experience can quickly get overwhelming. You have many options to enhance the customer experience today with natural language speech, incorporating other channels like SMS, chat and even visual IVR or go all the way to leveraging the power of artificial intelligence.
Release 7.7 of Blueworx Voice Response for Linux
Contact centers today are actively looking for opportunities to leverage enhanced self-service as well as proactive outbound interactions that drive customer loyalty and reduce the cost to serve. In today’s competitive market, where maximizing customer loyalty while reducing costs are key business metrics, offering a proactive approach to common reasons customers call in is imperative. The dissemination of time-sensitive or personal information delivered quickly and consistently is a requirement to meet today’s customer demands. The essence of outbound calling or text messaging is being proactive, preemptively contacting a customer before they have to contact you for information. That is why Blueworx continues to make features like outbound calling more efficient and effective for businesses.
Touchpoints are vital to the overall customer experience. It is during these moments, when a customer reaches out to you to conduct business, that your company has the opportunity to really put its best foot forward and leave a lasting impression. When too much emphasis is placed on these moments, though, it can actually have a negative impact. It will leave the customer feeling like the only time you truly care about them is when there is something to be gained by you.
Chat automation and other forms of artificial intelligence are effective in boosting customer engagement. The micro-experiences these tools create, however, do not account for even a fraction of a customer’s entire experience with your brand. If your company defines the customer experience by only a series of touchpoints, you’re missing out on a valuable source of information.
Leveraging real-time data analytics enables a faster, more precise and effective ability to make decisions over those evaluations made with conventional data reporting. Today, Contact Centers must ensure that they are gathering and analyzing data at a fast pace in order to deliver on the ever-changing customer demands. The amount of data that is being collected from the contact center can be overwhelming and how to take advantage of that data for improving each and every customer interaction is even more challenging. That is why Blueworx continues to focus on developing key integration points for new services from artificial intelligence like IBM Watson to delivering a foundation that can enhance the delivery, collection and ability to report on key metrics and activities.
Blueworx Voice Response version 7.6 introduces a new communications infrastructure that forms the foundation for continued development around event management and reporting.
The event manager offers a new approach to the distribution, storage and sharing of events from various Blueworx components. These broadcasted events are received from an entire cluster and delivered to various applications using a high-performance Producer-Consumer Event Pipe powered by Apache Kafka.
Our team recently attended the IBM THINK show and demonstrated the power of artificial intelligence in the contacts center leveraging Blueworx Voice Response with IBM Voice Gateway and IBM Watson. In a recent blog post by Jay Zelter, Worldwide Hybrid Cloud Executive at IBM, titled “At The Tipping Point: Transformation in the Contact Center”, Jay states that we must take a different approach to meeting changing customer expectations. Combining the power of IBM Voice Gateway and Blueworx Voice Response, IBM Watson enables us to deliver a fresh and powerful cognitive contact center experience. Today, Blueworx releases BVR 7.5 for Linux which adds support for this integration.
Blueworx Voice Response for Linux 7.5 introduces a complete Cognitive Contact Center solution supported by the integration of IBM Voice Gateway and IBM Watson Conversation with Blueworx Voice Response.
Successful enterprises understand the importance of customer loyalty. 52% of people stop using a company’s products or services based on bad customer service interactions. And their opinion matters. Users take reviews into account 88% of the time when deciding if they should start doing business with a company.
The Blueworx team is wrapping up our presence at the IBM THINK event in Las Vegas today. The massive show provided excellent intel on why artificial intelligence will significantly change the way we work today, across every industry on a global scale. AI is a technology that will most definitely change how we view self-service and every kind of customer engagement with businesses. During her on stage opening at Think, Ginni Rometty, President and CEO of IBM, talked about the significance of this time in history and how we are on the verge a major shift. The time where process and technology surge at the same moment has only occurred at two other periods in history – and the impacts are still with us today.
So, the question becomes “What are you doing about it?” How will you embrace this new era of intelligent interactions, cognitive self-service and the balance of man with technology?
We live in a world where pizza delivery gets to your home faster than the police. No offense intended members of law enforcement. Rather, kudos to all those technologists out there that have enabled the consumer to consume their company’s product via a myriad of channels. Just the other day, I had to scramble to get a gift for a high school senior for his birthday. In a matter of moments I found a restaurant near the campus of the university he’ll attend in the fall, and was chatting on-line with someone at that restaurant about getting a gift card out to me ASAP because his party was in 3 days. This wasn’t some mega-chain restaurant, but rather a single location, local business. So, if you work for a company that doesn’t have an omni-channel contact center presence – get moving…quickly, because if Fatback’s Smokin’ Racks in Quincy, IL has web chat, and you don’t…well, you can draw your own conclusions.
