Omni-Channel Customer Engagement Article

Kobie Marketing has tapped Aspect (News - Alert) Software to provide its cloud-based contact center and workforce management solutions.

The loyalty marketing company expects to benefit from Zipwire’s omnichannel self-service capabilities. The solution addresses chat, email, SMS, social media and voice. Meanwhile, Kobie Marketing is leveraging the Aspect EQ Workforce Management Cloud to connect the most appropriate contact center agents with customers at the ideal times.

The move by Kobie Marketing to bring its contact center in house and implement customer service solutions that enable it to address customers as individuals and cater to their specific channel preferences (and allow for seamless communications among channels) makes perfect sense. That’s because the company itself is a major proponent and provider of solutions that allow for personalization.

“Consumers today prefer to interact with brands via multiple interaction channels and switch between them at their convenience,” noted Joe Gagnon, senior vice president and chief customer strategy officer at Aspect Software. “At the same time, there is an increasing demand for convenient, empowering self-service experiences. We’re delighted to be working with Kobie Marketing, an organization that fully understands how to increase consumer engagement and drive brand loyalty.”

Indeed. In the October 2013 issue of CUSTOMER magazine, Kobie Marketing wrote: “Personalization used to be achieved on a small scale: imagine the local grocer remembering a customer’s name and his or her daily shopping preferences or a business owner contacting a customer when new stock arrived. Today, however, personalized omnichannel engagement scales those very human efforts to a much larger arena and ensures that customers feel personally rewarded while remaining committed both to the brand and the brand experience.”

Businesses of all stripes are now paying more attention to customer service and personalization in light of the fact that customers can now comparison shop with just a few taps and swipes on our mobile devices from anywhere we are. The ease of doing that and making online purchases has made the buying decision process much faster than it was in the past. That means customer service professionals and marketers need to work harder to get our attention, and businesses need to be more innovative in winning our wallet share. Personalization is one way they’re working to do that. Personalization involves leveraging the customer information within existing databases (like CRM) and other sources (like conversations from the call center and customers’ online social media profiles) to ensure businesses are addressing the interests and key life events of individual consumers.