In what ways do contact centers need to change to more effectively serve the needs of the connected customer?
Conner Burt, Head of Relationships, Lesson.ly Effective communication externally starts with effective communication internally. We believe contact center managers should make it a priority to both teach and listen to their teams. Teaching is typically the focus. However, an effective manager will complete an internal feedback loop, helping them in understanding where their team is struggling.
Ross Haskell, Senior Director, BoldChat Product, LogMeIn According to new research by Ovum, recently conducted for LogMeIn, there is a significant disconnect between what today’s mobile, always-connected customers have come to expect from customer service and what contact centers are delivering.
Among the key findings were that mobile, web self-service and chat are growing rapidly for customer support. The number of customers using a mobile phone for calls doubled to 42 % and the number of customers using live chat also doubled to 28%. But, customers are not getting the help they want, how they want it. The research shows that 48% of customers surveyed believe that the ability to reach the right representative has worsened over the last two years and as a result, 76% claimed to have stopped doing business with a brand following a bad customer service experience.
Best Ihegborow, VP of Contact Center Operations, Voiance According to data from ICMI, 86% of contact center leaders report having customers that prefer a language other than English, but only 65% report offering non-English support options. One in five people in the US prefer a language other than English, and as of 2012, more immigrants come from Asia than Latin America annually. The demographics and customers are changing. Contact centers would benefit from adopting comprehensive multilingual support strategies that include bilingual agents, phone interpreters, written translation, or all-of-the-above.
How can organizations align technology, operations and people to deliver a consistently excellent customer experience?
Conner Burt The key here is to view technology as grease and not as a roadblock. There are many widely accepted technologies that haven’t changed in decades. They were built to complete a certain task that comparatively was faster than having no technology at all. Today though, we are faced with the next generation of technology that takes the prior processes from good to great.
Ross Haskell We suggest that one way is to use the best tools. That means tools that are easy to implement, flexible to integrate into existing workflow solutions and scalable to grow with the business. The ability to collaborate internally is critical in delivering the best service to customers while maximizing efficiency internally.
Also, organizations must ensure that there is alignment across departments on their customer engagement/experience strategy. Everyone must be working towards the same goals. You can’t deliver on consistently excellent customer experiences when sales is doing one thing and support is doing another. Agent training is also a big component.
Best Ihegborow When a leader has results that need to be reached, we see technology, people, and operations come together in incredible ways to accomplish those results. We see this continuously in contact centers. The industry spends a lot of time figuring out how to lower AHT. ACDs, IVRs, managers, supervisors, and agents can all rally around that goal. If there’s a desired result, leaders should work towards it. In the area of multilingual support, we see top-performing organizations have someone picked out to be responsible for customers that prefer a language other than English. That person can bring operations, people, and technology together. They can optimize IVRs, set up dedicated numbers, work with vendors and internal stakeholders to ensure no gaps exist.
What do see you as the difference between multi-channel and omni-channel service? How do your solutions help enable companies to more effectively engage customers across multiple touch points?
Conner Burt We help our customers build, deliver, and measure learning regardless of the topic. With the same effort required to write and send an email, you can create an engaging learning environment for your team.
Ross Haskell Companies with either strategy are using multiple channels (e.g. chat, social media, email, etc.) to engage with their customers. The key difference is that omni-channel strategies are focused on delivering a consistent experience/message across multiple touch-points, on every device.
We look at the customer support experience quite simply: be where the customers are. We start with our Bold Chat platform to deliver a sophisticated mobile chat experience for both technicians and end-users. If support is needed, our Rescue product provides IT support for just about every computing platform a customer could use, including mobile. The two represent an integrated solution that enables our customers to deliver exactly the type of engagement and support that their customers are seeking, on the devices they are using.
Remote support is being extended beyond connected devices, to virtually any device imaginable with the introduction of Recue Lens. This is a new feature of Rescue that enables a mobile device to serve as a real-time streaming camera that the end-user can point at a physical device, and allow the support tech to see, direct and even annotate the customer’s device to help diagnose and fix the issue.
Best Ihegborow Multi-channel may be a little more reactive – given enough requests, a channel is added. Omni-channel is proactive. Omni-channel sniffs out all the ways a customer wants to interact and plans ahead. The most effective customer service organizations have documented language access plans. These plans outline how to provide non-English support regardless of the type of contact the customer initiates, so when it comes to non-English language support, the best have an omni-channel, proactive mindset.
What specific benefits does your solution deliver that differentiates it from other offerings in the marketplace?
Conner Burt The top three are ease of use, mobile-friendliness, and one-stop-shop. Ask any of our customers why they enjoy using Lesson.ly and you’ll hear a single word in unison, “easy.” In addition to the easy interface, our lessons look amazing on literally any device. Many competitors claim mobile-friendliness, but our platform actually works! Finally, being able to build, share, and track your employee learning all in one place allows you to save time and minimize effort.
Ross Haskell Because they are cloud-based and SaaS-delivered, our solutions are quick to implement, infinitely scalable and extremely flexible, so companies can make changes in real-time as their engagement strategy changes.
– We offer point solutions (BoldChat, Rescue) that work seamlessly together and that are also easily integrated into incumbent workflow solutions (e.g. ServiceNow, Salesforce, Zendesk).
– Our solutions support multiple platforms: PC, Mac, iOS, Android and others.
– BoldChat offers one of the best out-of-the box, all inclusive mobile feature sets on the market, including layered chat windows, in-app SDK, and both reactive and proactive mobile invitations.
– Rescue Lens: Makes any device remote supportable through the power of video-enabled mobile devices.
Best Ihegborow Most other language interpretation providers primarily use at-home or offshore interpreters. More full-time interpreters work in our US contact centers than in the United Nations. The centers are audited under the ISO 9001:2008 standard and are PCI certified. Our interpreters receive 120 hours of training, which is 3 times longer than is typical in the interpreting industry – most competitors provide little or no training. We believe our clients see the difference in the quality, speed, and security of our service over a virtual at-home network where interpreters can make their own schedule.
Our interpreter centers would be considered very good contact centers by many – fully redundant systems, backup generators, managers and supervisors, noise reduction technology, quality monitoring, and more. Our metrics and priorities align with the contact centers that we service. We work with our clients on metrics like ASA, AHT, call completion rate, and more. We’re very efficient and are able to pass on those efficiencies to our clients as a benefit.
How does Lesson.ly make it easy for companies to create, administer and track customizable customer support, employee onboarding and sales enablement training programs?
Conner Burt Our customers love using Lesson.ly because it saves them time, money, and effort. Specifically, ModCloth, an online fashion retailer, has saved four hours per new employee; real estate search engine Movoto has reduced their onboarding time by a full month; and auto sales specialist Peddle has improved onboarding efficiency by 60% after switching to Lesson.ly.
The proof is in the numbers. We improve customer support teams, the new employee onboarding experience, and sales enablement teams after implementation, in less than a day!
How does LogMeIn’s Experiment Engine enable companies to improve their customer engagement capabilities by testing multiple variations of onscreen features, rules and invitations?
Ross Haskell From our vantage point, this is an industry first, offered in LogMeIn’s BoldChat Enterprise product. Rather than offering only A/B testing, the Experiment Engine provides the ability to do A/B/C/D/etc. testing. Companies that wish to test multiple variations of buttons, windows, invitations, and invite rules or rulesets simultaneously, can do so. It also provides for multi-dimensional segmentation variables such as first time vs. repeat, geo-location, device, page or referrer URL, etc. – and defined control group sizes and durations. It allows an organization to make granular enhancements that can deliver huge improvements in delivering the best possible customer engagement and experience.
How does Voiance phone interpretation and Video Remote Interpretation (VRI) facilitate improved business outcomes across a broad spectrum of industries?
Best Ihegborow Twenty percent of the people living in the US prefer a language other than English. Companies that target and support customers in this category see successes their competitors do not – we have seen this anecdotally, and from studies conducted by the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies. Phone or video Interpreting services provide scalable support in hundreds of languages. In ICMI’s research data, they saw that – of those measuring both – 82% of contact center leaders said CSAT scores with interpreters were greater or equal to those with bilingual agents. You can attract and retain profitable customers with this kind of service.
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