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“It is that first experience, when a customer picks up the phone, or sends a message that is
vital – and it is the first response that sets the tone for any further correspondence.”
Sunny Dhami, Senior Director of Product Marketing at RingCentral
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of much debate but has this
become a reality? Customers
now expect to communicate
with brands in the way they
prefer. at might be chat,
social, a good old-fashioned
phone call or a combination
of several methods at di erent
points in time. e question is,
have we really got there yet?
Matteo Kotch, Cloud
Business Development Manager,
Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise says
“Given how customers are
increasingly engaging with
businesses through more and
more channels, I think that
conversations around omnichannel
absolutely do still
need to happen. However, it
is important to mention that
there is a di erence between
‘omnichannel’ and ‘multichannel’.
Multi-channel, which
refers to simply being present
on ‘multiple’ channels such as
email, phone, social media etc.,
in this day and age can most
certainly be considered as ‘table
stakes’.
“Customers have grown to
expect businesses to respond to
their queries regardless of the
channel used to communicate
with them, and call and
contact centre software vendors
have adjusted accordingly.
However, unlike with multichannel
where customers often
have to repeat themselves
when engaging with agents
on di erent channels, a true
omnichannel experience
enables the customer journey to
progress seamlessly, regardless
of the channel used. In other
words, regardless of whether
the customer has previously
contacted you via social media
and over the phone, if they then
decide to send you an email,
your agents should be able to
easily view the entire history of
interactions with that customer
across each channel. is type
of technology is still highly
sought after.”
Martin Taylor, Deputy
CEO and Global CMO at
Content Guru commented “ e
conversation might be exhausted
but most organisations have
still not implemented a
truly omni-channel
approach to customer
service. What we
typically see is
“multi-channel”
operations, with
siloed components
working adjacent
to one another,
rather than a series
of channel focused
microservices
running together
within the same
platform. So, as the job
of consolidating these
multi-channels is not yet done,
neither is the omni-channel
conversation.”
The Role of Artifi cial
Intelligence
e Inner Circle Guide to
AI, Chatbots & Machine
Learning’ report, released by
Contact Babel in February 2019
found that only 13 per cent
of UK-based contact centres
are actively using AI-based
solutions. In the same report
it found that 36 per cent of
respondents stated they intend
to implement AI or machine
learning tools in the year to
come. at is a lot of growth for
partners to get stuck into in just
the next 12 months alone. So
where is AI having an impact in
the Contact Centre right now?
Matthew Clare says “We
often think about AI in the
contact centre as chat-bots. By
leveraging this type of AI as
part of a customer experience
strategy, companies can better
optimis e human resources to
carry out higher value work
that AI cannot perform. In
reality, however, live assisted
human-to-human interactions
are never going to go away. In
fact, those live assisted human
conversations are becoming
more high value and important
than ever. After a sophisticated
self-service experience with a
bot, the customer expectation
is that they will talk to a live
subject matter expert. Here’s
where the true value of AI
comes into play, because
you can leverage the same
AI used for virtual agents to
silently monitor, whisper, and
coach agents to respond in an
e cient, e ective manner. To
really bene t from AI, though,
contact centres must not rely
solely on this technology, rather
they should nd the right
balance between using it in a
smart way and supplementing
their valuable personnel
resources.”
Dhami agrees with Clare,
“When anyone mentions
the application of arti cial
intelligence (AI) to contact
centres, everyone almost always
thinks of chatbots. But there is
much more to AI than chatbots.
“One of the major areas that
is already seeing improvement
from AI in contact centres is the
customer queuing experience.
AI can now be built-into
platforms that integrate many
di erent digital channels in one
place. rough this combined
use of AI and integrated
channels, service reps have the
power to see the entire customer
journey in one single interface.
Agents can ick between these
di erent channels with the AI
November 2019 | Comms Business Magazine | 25
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