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If you're in need of customer service, you have quite a few more options when it comes to getting help that far surpass calling into a call center. The digital age has made it possible for agents and consumers to speak on a variety of levels, from live chat to social media interaction. While voice communications are on a decline, experts agree, it's about offering service on many levels, including the old ones.
Most companies today are aware of the strong benefits improving the customer experience can bring. They include increased sales, more loyal customers, better first-call resolution and reduced costs. But what many of these same companies fail to recognize is that it's the agent experience that determines the customer experience. If your businesses processes, databases, knowledge bases and agent desktop software are a mess, your customer experience is going to be a mess. You can't build a good house on a bad foundation.
Customer relationship management is a $23 billion-plus business, and has enabled Salesforce.com to become a software giant, generating sales of around $4.3 billion and growing at 20 percent. But despite all that, there's still much debate about what CRM actually is, and what it will become.
Several years ago, customer support organizations began an effort to become multichannel. The idea was to offer customers a variety of communications media they could use to contact a company. Organizations counted their job done if they simply provided the channels: phone, e-mail, Web forms and maybe chat. The problem is that nobody figured what would happen if customers used more than one channel. Siloed information led to duplicated efforts, errors and customer frustration from having to explain their problems all over again from one channel to the next.
Global unified communication software as a service (UCaaS) provider BroadSoft is obviously a big believer in hosted UC, but now the company has a strong vested interest in the cloud-based contact center as well. That's because BroadSoft has acquired Transera, a provider of cloud-based contact center software for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and large enterprises.
An investment in customer support software is a great first step, but if you haven't defined your true customer service initiatives and strategy, how will you know what to select? If you're working in the business to business (B2B) space, failure to make customer support a priority will quickly limit your ability to succeed. Companies look at other companies as partners and that partnership is dependent upon the experience key players have with each other.
There's a new generation of beauty brands that are shunning department stores and traditional advertising. Instead, they're taking advantage of the direct-to-consumer model, by eliminating the middleman and selling exclusively through their own online and brick-and-mortar stores.
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