article
IDC Analysis: Unifying contact center management tools for seamless customer interactions
To be competitive, brands need a holistic approach to deriving actionable insights from all conversational interactions and journeys
May 23, 2022 • 4 minutes
Unity makes everything better, doesn’t it?
This mindset is especially important for creating both an unmatched customer experience and a streamlined contact center management experience. And it’s made possible by capitalizing on customer intelligence and business data across all channels and throughout entire sales journeys.
As conversational commerce and customer support models increase in market regularity across global industries, cohesive contact center software, communications, and analytics systems must be prioritized in order to remain competitive today. An April IDC spotlight, sponsored by LivePerson, reveals many of the common operational challenges that even a successful contact center manager faces.
Read on for a breakdown of the spotlight’s key findings and assess whether your brand’s contact center operations need a more unified approach to remain competitive.
Local and regional markets seek the tools to leverage rich customer data for unbeatable CX
Contact centers worldwide want to improve legacy interactive voice response (IVR) systems and avoid disjointed communication channels with premium customer service expectations. In fact, 63% of IDC survey respondents cited the ability to provide data for analytics as the most valuable aspect of speech recognition technologies for their business. Brands are realizing that conversational interactions with a human or an AI-powered virtual assistant — across all channels of communication — produce an invaluable set of customer intelligence data, insights that can provide a competitive advantage.
LivePerson’s integrated voice and conversational intelligence can deepen your contact center metrics.
Integrated data management capabilities is one of the most important factors for considering a Conversational AI partner
Integration with customer relationship management (CRM) tools and other related systems that provide a full picture of customers’ interactions with the brand is priority for nearly half of those surveyed. Such integrations improve agent performance by surfacing relevant knowledge about the customers’ buying journey and increase customer satisfaction by streamlining actions to quicken response times. According to IDC, other integrated capabilities that contact center managers should keep top of mind in choosing their Conversational AI platform include:
- Predictive behaviors – the ability to make recommendations based on customer behavior and history
- Personalization engines built on top of conversational analytics to provide bespoke customer engagement opportunities
- Ability to recommend next best actions to agents
Getting back to unity, global brand leaders are quickly realizing that integration systems with traditional telephony and IVR capabilities, virtual assistants, and all the popular digital channels customers use every day can provide the seamless omnichannel experience that consumers increasingly expect. Plus, unified integration systems can also provide a far more pleasant experience for contact center employees, keeping attrition rates low and agent morale high.
LivePerson’s unified contact center management software helps provide conversational customer interactions that are efficient, personalized, and available 24/7 on any device.
Contact centers should answer the call: Give customers a choice in how they communicate
That’s right, voice calls are still coming in hot. Therefore, utilizing voice channels with speech recognition technologies is an important aspect to unifying your contact center management strategy. With a unified customer experience across digital and voice channels, call centers of all sizes can provide a consistent, personalized, and customer-centric experience that only benefits a brand in return. When the data from those conversations and interactions is brought onto a dashboard for analysis, brands can gain a complete picture of their customers’ overall journey in real time, providing everyone from the CMO to front-line contact center agents with a powerful competitive advantage.
IDC believes the market for Conversational AI and conversational intelligence will continue to grow
Leveraging the right contact center management tools for Conversational AI and conversational analytics will help unify the contact center’s view of the customer, the full journey of a customer’s interactions with a brand, and the customer experience overall. For example, looking at that conversational data alongside other business data lets brands better analyze the customer churn rate, identify trends, and discover potential drivers of good or bad experiences. Is the issue related to services and products? Or does the call center manager need to revisit agent best practices?
Beyond the analytics, though, this integrated contact center technology approach makes seamless, omnichannel experiences entirely possible. By connecting interactions across various digital channels, from telephony to digital messaging (a brand’s entire ecosystem), we can satisfy customers’ desire to communicate anytime, anywhere, while preserving historical context to reduce repetition and frustration.
Another huge benefit to unifying contact center communications and intelligence is the reduced attrition rates that can follow. Seamless tools and actionable insights based on a full vision into the customer journey on a single dashboard is a surefire way to boost agent morale, confidence, and employee productivity. Happy customers plus happy agents equals one successful brand.