We all know that AI changes everything – but one thing that doesn’t change is the importance of customer experience and having a customer-first mindset. Reducing costs while investing in customer experience can be challenging. With rising customer expectations, businesses need CX solutions that are cost effective, easy to deploy, and provide quick time to value. RingCX can help organizations find the right balance between price and performance in order to provide the experiences that customers expect.
For the past several years, the buzzword “customer experience” has become the driving force of many organizations as they recognize that in order to differentiate, gain, and retain customers, they must provide exceptional customer service. Companies that invest in customer experiences will win out over their competitors, helping them to grow and thrive.
There are various factors driving the increased need and desire for improving and optimizing the customer experience in today’s environment, including macroeconomic uncertainty and rising customer expectations.
Macroeconomic uncertainty
It’s no secret that businesses are facing tough times with rising interest rates, geopolitical tensions, stubborn inflation, prolonged slow growth, pandemic recovery, and more. Ongoing international conflicts impact both supply and demand for goods and services, leading to increased prices. IT buyers across the globe are impacted by these macroeconomic trends and concerns as they evaluate where to make their investments.
When businesses face challenging situations, they often feel they need to do more with less. As companies struggle to maintain profitability during inflationary periods, they look to reduce costs, leading to staffing cuts. One of the first places some organizations look to when reducing costs and staff is the contact center, as many organizations mistakenly view contact centers as cost centers.
However, a reduced focus on customer service often leads to unhappy customers, making problems worse. Instead, in these situations, businesses should prioritize CX in order to remain competitive and retain customers. Companies that invest in CX can set themselves apart during challenging times and come out even stronger. Contact centers are now viewed as the front door to customer engagement, as businesses recognize that satisfied customers are more likely to remain loyal, repeat customers, leading to increased revenues. However, this requires the appropriate level of investment in the right tools and technologies to better engage with customers.
Rising customer expectations
Continued investment in customer experience is absolutely necessary in order to retain both customers and agents. Businesses know that building personal relationships with their customers leads to better customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. Customers recognize the value of positive experiences, with 48% of consumers willing to pay more for quality customer service. And study after study shows that customers have switched brands after a single negative customer service experience, or are likely to switch brands because of poor customer service.
Achieving the right level of customer experience and engagement requires investments in the right technology solutions and tools, which can be costly. It’s important to carefully thread the needle between the pressure to decrease spending while investing in customer experience, and between reducing staffing costs while increasing efficiency and enhancing the employee experience. Organizations can’t simply invest in technology without being able to identify the return on investment in a relatively short time frame. AI is perhaps the perfect example. While it can provide benefits for specific use cases, it is not a catch-all solution for every business challenge.
While essential, investing in CX technologies that enhance customer and agent experiences and provide an adequate return on investment is not always easy to achieve. Contact center technologies can be costly, requiring investment in the technology, as well as professional services to customize the solutions and make sure everything works as advertised.
Different needs require different solutions
There is no “one size fits all” when it comes to customer experience and contact centers. While some large, mission-critical contact centers require full-blown solutions with all the bells and whistles and specific customizations, there are just as many with simpler needs. These businesses have different requirements and priorities, where more basic solutions will meet their needs. A large segment of the market requires key capabilities in a cost-effective, easy-to-deploy solution, providing the functionality to enhance their customer service operations.
For example, these businesses may need:
- Full omnichannel capabilities supporting a large number of channels, without requiring customization to support channels that are used in only one or two geographies or segments.
- A solution that can be quickly deployed, with agents set up and ready to serve customers within hours or days rather than weeks or months.
- Simplified packaging and pricing, with predictable and affordable pricing that isn’t possible with larger systems requiring more customization.
- AI that is easy to implement and use. While AI is the hot topic, many businesses may not want an arsenal of AI tools, but want to take advantage of the recent AI innovations in conversational intelligence, agent assistance, and simple self-serve options.
- Tools for forecasting and scheduling rather than a comprehensive workforce engagement management (WEM) solution.
- Basic CRM integrations without requiring hundreds of integrations to niche CRM applications.
Regardless of the number of agent seats they have, these organizations are looking for simplicity, with a complete, connected platform to streamline communications both across the business and outside it. They also prefer the ease of dealing with just one vendor rather than multiple point-solution providers. And, they are not willing to compromise on the reliability and security of the network.
RingCX: Filling the gap
Fortunately, RingCentral introduced RingCX, adding to its portfolio of contact center solutions to offer CX solutions for every use case. In addition to its UCaaS, digital CX, and advanced CCaaS offerings, RingCentral now offers RingCX, filling the gap between comprehensive functionality and cost-effectiveness.
RingCX is RingCentral’s native, omnichannel, intelligent solution for simple use cases, that is attractively priced yet feature-rich. It is aimed at organizations that may have limited or restrained resources yet require the tools and technologies to provide optimal customer service experiences. Regardless of the size of the organization, RingCX removes the anxiety of deploying a modern contact center solution while offering a feature set that meets the needs of a large portion of businesses.
Simplicity doesn’t mean boring or lacking in features. In fact, AI is infused throughout the platform. RingCX is powered by RingSense, RingCentral’s AI platform, providing a range of AI capabilities, including auto summaries for agents to reduce post-call work by up to 20%, as well as auto scoring, streamlined coaching, actionable insights, and more. Virtual Agent functionality is provided out of the box via integration with market-leading technology partners. Intent-based Real-time Agent Assist capabilities are available as well.
In addition to traditional inbound and outbound voice, including predictive, progressive and preview modes, RingCX provides complete omnichannel capabilities, supporting more than 20 digital channels, video, and bots, all in a single agent interface. This eliminates the need for agents to switch screens when servicing a customer on different channels. RingCX comes with real-time dashboards and historical reporting, and allows customers to build their own reports using built-in report builder. Omnichannel reporting and analytics gives supervisors a single pane of glass view into contact center operations across channels.
While traditional CX solutions are resource intensive, complex, and time consuming to set up, requiring dedicated IT resources, RingCX runs natively on RingCentral’s global telephony platform offering reliability, availability, and scalability, ensuring rapid deployment and ROI. With the power of tight integration with unified communications, agents can bring non agents into the contact center to reduce handle time, increase first-contact resolution, and improve customer satisfaction.
Conclusion
Even in the new era of artificial intelligence, customers and the customer experience need to be top priorities for businesses. When it comes to CX technologies, it can be hard to find the right balance between price and performance. Fortunately, RingCX fills a gap, providing the right set of solutions for the right price. Learn more about RingCX.
Originally published Nov 15, 2023, updated Aug 06, 2024
