Messaging is more than text chat: C2B comms with RingCentral Engage

Customers today are looking for a personalized and convenient service, and it’s an expected courtesy, even from the largest vendors and service providers. The speed and ease to which issues are resolved are customers’ second-most important expectation.

Despite the increasing number of ways we can communicate, and a growing tendency to utilize multiple digital channels, not every company can offer that individualized service.

Part of the issue is one of infrastructure and costs. Equipping customer care departments with multiple applications to cover voice, email, social media channels, messaging platforms and so on is a complex and costly process.

Additionally, expecting staff to jump from one platform to another, depending on a customer’s chosen method of communication is a drain on time, and it doesn’t create a joined-up, personal service. A recent study found that 74 percent of agents have to toggle between applications to reach a customer resolution, wasting up to 60 minutes a day.

Favored communication platforms vary from location to location but one clearly developing trend is that customers are becoming more reliant on messaging companies via their mobile devices: this asynchronous communication often comprises customers sending messages out of hours, at their convenience, sometimes when the customer care functions aren’t staffed.

This trend is part of customers’ omni-digital habits, who regularly use multiple channels to contact brands: they may switch from a messaging interaction to social media and then start to message again to finish the conversation later.

Coping with these requirements in customer care requires an omni-digital communications platform, like RingCentral Engage. Engage draws together the different communications platforms prevalent across the different parts of the globe and presents a unified view to personnel tasked with customer interactions. Staff work from one normalized interface, so no hopping from one platform’s software to the next, and conversational threads are automatically drawn together. This unified view makes the interaction easier and limits customers’ frustration, knowing that 88 percent of people hate having to repeat themselves when interacting through multiple channels.

The trend towards asynchronous, app-based communications is reflected in the increasing number of large companies that are creating business-focused messaging apps. WhatsApp Business, Facebook Messenger for Business, and Apple Business Chat are being quickly deployed by companies eager to offer customers quick and convenient ways of interactions.

For consumers, customers and service users, the applications available on their always-on devices grant great convenience and ease of use and, as well as text, users can send video, pictures, geolocation, and plenty more metadata. This is enriching interactions in ways that benefit both business and customer and lets the increasingly internet-savvy population use rich messaging to ask questions and provide & receive information. These advantages explain why 67 percent of people now expect to use messaging apps to talk to businesses.

As these new channels arrive and are adopted by companies keen to satisfy user demand, the RingCentral platform integrates them into its omni-digital communication offering. That means customers are “met” (in both virtual and physical senses) right where they are, and convenience is the first big advantage that RingCentral-using companies gain. The RingCentral CEP (Customer Engagement Platform) uses each channel or app’s native features, using the same interface, so activity is smooth when using any of the different communication methods offered.

Thanks to asynchronous messaging’s nature, care agents can respond to multiple queries and requests at once; there’s no need to have to focus on one conversation at a time. The beneficial impact for the business, therefore, is faster responses, which drive up customer satisfaction levels and help departments hit KPIs. Average interaction handling-time drops, but at the same time, thanks in part to the rich messaging context, first-contact issue resolution rates are much higher than otherwise possible.

Organizations with international presence may have been perplexed up until now as to how best to cope with the geographically-driven differences in messaging platforms. The list of RingCentral Engage’s integrations is broad, however, and that gives customer care teams all over the world many more options to share out work, or route customers according to personnel’s specialisms.

So why not look at the next-generation Customer Engagement Platform from RingCentral? It’s the multi-platform, multi-continent solution that’s driving businesses forward and developing companies’ ability to create individualized, personal service. Get in touch with a RingCentral Engage Expert today to arrange a demonstration.