Set contact center agents up for CX success with contextual support

Your customers want better experiences with your contact center. At the same time, your agents want to deliver a better customer experience (CX) to them. Yet, if they don’t have the right tools in place, they can’t make that happen.

Chatbots and omnichannel automation tools improve the customer experience by providing agents with contextual information. Read on to learn more about how these tools can help your contact center agents deliver on the promise of better CX.

The impact of the customer experience on your business

Here are some statistics that show the impact of customer experience on businesses:

Each year, American businesses lose $1.6 trillion to poor customer experience
Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than those that aren’t
96% of customers say customer service is important in their choice to be loyal to a brand
77% of customers say that an inefficient customer experience detracts from their quality of life
Customers only tell an average of nine people about a positive brand experience; in contrast, they’ll tell an average of 16 people about a negative customer experience

How the right technology changes the customer experience

To show how omnichannel automation and chatbots can be implemented to improve the customer experience, we’ll illustrate with an example. Dan buys a smart home thermostat so he can save some money on his utility bill. After he installs it, he’s having trouble programming it. He contacts the manufacturer via online chat.

Dan enters his problem into the chat, and the bot directs the call to a live agent for support. Sarah, a contact center agent, receives Dan’s call and the transcript of his chat so she knows what the problem is without Dan having to repeat the issue.

After taking a few preliminary troubleshooting steps, Sarah realizes that it would be helpful if she could see the exact error message Dan gets when he tries to program the thermostat. Sarah asks Dan to photograph the thermostat with his phone and send her the picture via email. He does, and he sends her the picture. With that information, Sarah determines the cause of the error message and advises Dan exactly how to fix it.

How omnichannel automation improves the customer experience

As we see from the example above, Dan has a positive customer experience because:

He is able to connect with a contact center agent when it is convenient for him
He is able to connect to the contact center agent through the channels of his choice
He provides contextual information to the contact center agent that helps her solve his problem

What facilitates that level of customer experience is to have the right technology in place. Thanks to omnichannel automation, Sarah and Dan are easily able to shift communication between channels. Moreover, the right contact center technology allows Sarah to receive supplemental data from Dan (such as photos) that provide her with the necessary contextual information to solve the problem.

RingCentral: empowering agents to deliver a better customer experience

RingCentral’s contact center technology empowers agents to deliver a better customer experience in the following ways:

It offers omnichannel flexibility, so customers can connect through their channel of choice.
It allows contact agents to receive multimedia messages such as images and video so they have the contextual information to help customers.
It gives contact centers the ability to set up chatbots, so customers can still receive help even if a live agent isn’t available.
Chatbots can hand off a customer interaction to a live agent if the interaction becomes too complex for chatbots to handle.

Agent empowerment: a cornerstone of a positive customer experience

When agents have the tools they need to do their jobs, customers have a better customer experience. In Microsoft’s 2018 State of Global Customer Service Report, one-third of customers responded that the most important aspect of good customer service is the agent’s ability to solve a problem in a single interaction, while 31% said the thing that matters most is connecting with a knowledgeable customer service agent.

RingCentral’s contact center technology empowers agents to deliver a better customer experience because omnichannel flexibility allows them to continue the conversation with customers, so they can solve problems faster. Moreover, these tools help agents gain critical contextual information which they otherwise wouldn’t have, so they have a better chance of first call resolution.

Chatbots: a huge role in a better customer experience

Chatbots also play an important role in improving the customer experience. Here’s how customers feel about them:

35% of customers use chatbots to resolve a complaint or problem, or to get detailed answers.
69% of customers prefer using chatbots because they make it faster for customers to connect with a brand.
Eight out of ten customers who have used chatbots say they had an overall positive customer experience.

RingCentral’s chatbot integrations help improve the customer experience because they can handle simple questions that save customers time and effort (and allow agents to focus on higher-value tasks). In addition, they can also gather details about the situation from customers and then pass off the interaction to an agent so the agent has all of the necessary contextual information to handle the issue.

Chatbots can be programmed to be always-on, so if customers have questions after business hours, they can still receive answers. Most importantly, RingCentral’s chatbots are designed with the human touch. Interactions with them aren’t stilted or unnatural. Customers feel like they’re getting the assistance they need so they can resolve their problems, which leads to a better customer experience.

RingCentral contact center software: giving agents the tools they need for customer experience success

RingCentral’s contact center software gives agents the tools they need to deliver amazing customer experiences, which makes customers happier and more loyal to your company. Omnichannel automation and chatbots help agents gather contextual information about a customer issue so they can solve it quickly and effectively.