Jump-Starting an Omni-Digital Customer Care Strategy – with Dimelo, a RingCentral Company

Any business that cares about its customers, partners and suppliers will be finding itself having to cope with a bewildering variety of communication channels. Preferences for communication channels vary according to region and demographics; some customers prefer to phone others may use messaging, or email – in all, it’s not uncommon for companies to have to employ multiple staff just to try and correlate all the different comms channels.

Companies use on average eight or nine different software applications or systems to communicate with and hold data on customers, and prospects. Among these might be various CRMs across departments, a Digital Customer Interactions Platform in the Contact Center, various reporting tools (each with their own data sources), call management software and perhaps an automated chatbot or two.

To cover all the bases, different systems are all firing in multiple directions, with little or no central direction or management. That’s not to say that your company or organization is a poor provider of customer care or a third-rate communicator, it’s just that maintaining the highest standards of business-to-customer relations is expensive, time-consuming, and mostly reactive.

Into this arena steps the concept of an omni-digital unifying platform, one that’s explicitly designed to connect the various communication platforms in everyday use and back-end systems. The RingCentral Engage Open Platform means organizations can now interconnect their disparate communications or data management systems (of just about any flavor) in one solution.

Source: Dimelo, a RingCentral Company

In short, everything plugs in: in-house cloud-hosted systems, call management solutions, messaging platforms (like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp) and social media channels. The better data integration, the better and more rounded the total view of each customer. The RingCentral Engage solution can give the 360° view, essential for the supply of personalized customer care and contact.

One significant advantage of the open framework of RingCentral Engage is future-proofing. Because communication preferences change over time and, as mentioned, vary significantly with taste, demographic and locale, a business needs to have an open, non-prescriptive way of communicating with its customers and customers-to-be. Platforms that are long in the tooth (like Facebook Messenger) are in use every day alongside others that were just rolled out and have massive potential, such as Apple Business Chat. With the Dimelo platform’s APIs, any tool can be connected to increase the value of customer interactions.

In a disconnected system, a customer may contact your organization by phone, but the information needed by the human operator isn’t to hand because that particular customer has a long history of interacting with you via Twitter (or some other digital channel). So your customer will have to recount their history with you (and perhaps verify their identity for security purposes), which is troublesome for the customer and a pointless, costly time drain for you.

Source: Dimelo, a RingCentral Company

With RingCentral Engage, that same interaction is entirely different. The human operator will have a screen of relevant data ready as the call goes live; not only historical data garnered from multiple channels, but also records from (for instance) the marketing department’s CRM, showing what offers have been sent to that customer in the last few weeks. The interaction is, therefore, personalized, but moreover, it’s an opportunity to better the relationship, up-sell or provide more relevant services or products.

Another example of the open platform’s capabilities is when a customer decides to change comms channels mid-flow. For instance, an online chatbot could offer the option of speaking to an operator to address a complex issue. It’s so much better for the customer and the organization that the individual picking up the voice call is informed as to the bot’s progress – plus all relevant background information from right across the company’s data sources.

RingCentral Engage offers other significant gains, too. Here are just a few:

• The Management of all digital channels’ contents in a single interface, reducing response times
• A 360° view of the customer to have a global view of conversations of all past digital interactions as well as transactional information from the CRM
• A complete analytics interface to manage the activity across all channels from a single place, helping to handle peaks and downtimes better
• More focused use of skilled human agents. Intelligent routing systems can best deploy skillsets and abilities (determined by training or experience), according to need the query raised or the service requested. For example, an agent who speaks Spanish fluently can be automatically assigned to particular customer conversation, without the customer having to re-dial.

More than 100 companies such as AXA, ENGIE, BNP Paribas and Orange  use RingCentral Engage to optimize their omni-digital strategy. To learn more about open communication management platforms and Dimelo’s powerful digital customer care interactions platform, schedule a demo of RingCentral Engage.