The future of customer care lies in choice & convenience, with RingCentral
Providing customer service and the highest quality customer experiences is all about providing choice and convenience. Those two aspects are especially true when it comes to how your customers communicate with your business. Choice is important because, without it, the company is dictating to the customer to use the phone or stating implicitly that sending an email is the only way they will get a response. That’s not a good start for any conversation, because it may not be convenient — customers don’t have time to bother with email formalities while on-the-go.
So, offering as many relevant communication channels as possible for customers and customers-to-be is critical in presenting the type of customer experience that most people expect today. But within each channel, there are subtle nuances and differences that the best companies and organizations will note to provide their audience with the highest service levels.
Messaging is a prime case in point. There are multiple messaging platforms with varying degrees of familiarity depending on context and geography, as diverse as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Apple Business Chat. Each appeals to different demographics and are best suited to specific situations. Local service providers, for instance, may wish to feature on Google Business Messages with on-page messaging right on a search engine results page. Others may prefer WhatsApp, accessible via a phone number or a button on the website. But across the board, the adoption of these channels is high, with 80 percent of all adults messaging daily.
Naturally, as a customer service provider, you will want to offer as many channels of communication, especially text-based messaging, as possible. And as most customer care professionals know, having an omni-digital communications hub is, these days, an essential part of the business. As a place where all customer information & communications can come together, the omnichannel communications platform is a mainstay of ensuring a comprehensive history of customer interactions and providing highly personalized services.
The details matter
Providing multiple channels is important, but providing a consistent experience across all of them is more so. Live-chat is a standard channel but due to the temporary nature of the website-based sessions, conversational threads are lost.
Nevertheless, live-chat has its place, and many customers prefer it over a phone call (sometimes difficult in a noisy environment, for example) or an email (which don’t usually get a response quickly enough). However, there is now an exciting new alternative from RingCentral that combines live-chat immediacy with the capability of the conversation forming an integral part of the customer journey. It’s called Engage Messaging, and it can be deployed in three ways:
– As a live-chat icon floating on a website,
– As an embedded messaging platform on a web page,
– On any iOS or Android device into the brand mobile app.
That gives the company using these new features significant advantages. Conversations are captured whether or not the customer authenticates, so if they move to another channel, the conversation’s details move with them. Furthermore, the text can be passed through the RingCentral Engage Digital’s well-proven comms scanning technology that’s aided by advanced AI for live-chat trigger phrases. That helps solve tier-one inquiries and leaves agents more time to devote to more complex queries. Because of the nature of text messages, operators can also field multiple conversations simultaneously, each backed by full customer data pulled from the different sources in use across the enterprise, like a CRM such as Salesforce.
The geography matters
Also new from RingCentral is the platform’s integration with Google Business Messages. Here, customers and prospects can converse with agents right from the company’s listings on Maps or search engine results pages. If it’s a quick delivery locally or an inquiry about services available, the conversation — like all the channels in the RingCentral Engage Digital platform — is captured and presented to agents in one seamless picture.
The merging of digital identities means that every customer has just one profile, which enables the company to offer a wider choice of channels plus a better, more convenient customer experience. Responses to any query or issue are not hampered by re-authentication, and agents’ performance improves because they can immediately get right to the heart of the matter.
That speed is especially relevant for inquiries that are for businesses operating primarily for a local audience. It’s in contexts like Google Business Messages where responses have to be immediate: “yes, we can do that for you right now,” and “we will hold your table until then” carry so much more weight than “we will respond to your message in the next 24 hours”
Conclusion
The next era of service places the customer and/or prospect at the priority list’s head. That means an openness to the customer’s convenience and the customer’s choice. Putting those two things foremost is impossible without a new era of communications platforms, and primary among those is RingCentral Engage Digital.
You can learn more about how the company offers enterprises the means to provide world-class customer experiences by reading more here.
