Call Recording Featured Article

Customer service has undergone a revolution in recent years, largely fueled by technology and driven by customer demands. Technology has made information and purchasing power available immediately, at customers’ fingertips, and as a result, they are demanding more from their customer experiences.

A recent Customers 2020 report shows that customer experience is expected to overtake price and product as brand differentiators by 2020. That represents a major shift in customer expectations and organizations need to ramp up their technology and service levels to meet those demands. One of the key things customers look for in their interactions is chat, and this form of communication is becoming increasingly popular by all accounts.

In fact, Forrester Research (News - Alert) claims 63 percent of online consumers were more likely to return to a website offering live chat. Whether it be text or voice chat, which is rising in popularity thanks to widespread adoption of WebRTC solutions, customers want communication with a live person and they want it now. Chat not only benefits customers, but it benefits contact centers and businesses by helping agents optimize their productivity and multi-tasking abilities.

Efficiency, speed and customer satisfaction are the end goals in the customer service game, and workforce optimization solutions go a long way toward achieving them. Chat is rapidly becoming a key component in workforce optimization, since it is easy to monitor and measure results. And with the proliferation of cloud and hosted contact center and workforce optimization offerings, chat is a very simple service that may be included in a larger solution package.

Very simply, original chat solutions required premise-based software installation that was cumbersome and lacking in security and privacy. Chat has come a long way and is now part of multi-channel offerings deployed in a variety of ways to meet customers’ needs. This new way of deploying chat lends itself to easy quality monitoring as well as the ability to simply generate reports and analytics on quality and satisfaction.

Chat won’t be going away any time soon, as evidenced by customer demand and increasing business adoption based on all its benefits. The fact that it is easily integrated into larger workforce optimization offerings makes it valuable as a measurable way of providing a superior customer experience. And the bonus is that chat can be evaluated for efficiency and productivity gains on the contact center side as well.