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Voice to Digital: Building a best-of-breed omnichannel experience
Conversation shifting and more with LivePerson
June 05, 2024 • 6 minutes
There’s nothing more valuable than time. As consumers become increasingly time-poor and options-rich, the status quo of navigating phone trees and waiting on hold isn’t going to cut it anymore. It’s time to bring voice into the digital fold.
Much like your customers, your brand is also strapped for time, and the idea of ripping and replacing your legacy telephony systems is enough to give even the most seasoned project manager a headache. Not to mention, 80% of contact center leaders found that replacing their existing systems gave them less functionality and robustness. But voice channels aren’t going anywhere anytime soon and neither should the tools and systems you’ve been using to power your contact center. Instead, bring your voice solution into the digital ecosystem by integrating it with the digital and AI technologies you need to create a best-of-breed omnichannel experience.
Building a best-of-breed omnichannel experience
8 out of 10 consumers are more likely to purchase from businesses that connect their interactions across voice and messaging, according to LivePerson’s 2024 State of Customer Conversations report. In fact, 76% of consumers simply want the option to seamlessly switch between calling and messaging depending on their preference at the moment. It’s no longer enough to have just voice, or email, or messaging. Consumers have high expectations and they want options — they want that seamless customer experience across multiple channels.
A best-of-breed omnichannel customer engagement strategy allows brands to build connected and flexible customer engagement with the technologies and vendors of their choice so that they all integrate into a single, unified customer conversation solution. LivePerson believes that a best-of-breed omnichannel approach empowers brands to create the best possible conversation experience for their customers — and their employees. This is why we’ve built our messaging and conversational AI solutions to integrate effortlessly with your trusted voice partner to deliver a truly seamless omnichannel customer experience.
LivePerson’s Voice to Digital solution
At our recent Spark event in May, we launched a collection of new and enhanced Voice to Digital platform capabilities to support brands looking to bring their legacy voice systems into the digital fold. Here’s a look at these new capabilities:
New Partnership: Avaya and LivePerson
First up, we’re excited to announce our new partnership with the global enterprise customer experience voice solutions leader, Avaya. Together, we’ve teamed up to unify voice, digital, and AI capabilities in a single omnichannel solution. This new partnership integrates LivePerson’s conversational intelligence, AI, and messaging with Avaya to unlock voice of the customer data from all channels. With this integration, you’ll be able to measure outcomes from conversation insights and make them available to the rest of the business to improve processes, inform R&D, and drive strategy.
Unified Agent Workspace (coming soon)
Integrate LivePerson with your existing voice provider (like our friends at Avaya) to manage and facilitate voice conversations in Agent Workspace, our modern omnichannel agent interface. When all of your interactions are managed in a single unified workspace, agents can easily access conversation history across the different channels to ensure a more consistent customer experience.
The Unified Agent Workspace enables agents to elevate conversations from voice to messaging and from messaging to voice as needed so you can support customer preferences. With agent-facing generative AI tools like agent assist, coaching, and automatic summarization, agent productivity and efficiency for this multichannel customer experience will be at an all-time high.
Conversation shifting
One way to meet customer expectations of omnichannel convenience is to offer seamless transfers of voice conversations to the messaging channel of your customer’s choice. Shifting voice traffic into digital channels can help your brand reduce your cost per call by upwards of 40%. LivePerson’s conversation shifting is easy to build and can be deployed in as little as two weeks — so you can start saving sooner.
Voice AI
Automate voice conversations using LivePeron’s award-winning generative AI. Voice AI helps to get customers off hold and into self-serve conversations. LivePerson’s Voice AI is safe and reliable, easy to deploy, and intuitive for your customers to interact with.
Analytics Studio voice features
Voice Capture
Bring conversational voice data from providers like Avaya, Genesys, NICE, and more into Analytics Studio, LivePerson’s advanced conversational intelligence solution. With no need to export media files or write ingestion code, our near real-time recording ingestion allows you to start analyzing calls faster without extra development time or resources.
Omnichannel Dashboard
Connecting your voice transcripts to Analytics Studio is only the beginning. Our new Omnichannel Dashboard will help you measure the impact of your voice to digital transformation strategy. Quickly identify intents that could more efficiently be handled through messaging, understand the effectiveness of shifting voice calls to messaging via IVR deflection, and follow the customer journey from messaging to voice to pinpoint reasons for escalation all within the new dashboard.
The voice to digital customer experience in action
LivePerson has been helping brands create a more omnichannel experience for years. Here’s a look at some of the results existing customers have seen:
Delta Dental
Delta Dental was able to reduce their average talk time by 10% with voice analytics in Analytics Studio. By determining the common factors driving customer calls, they were able to deploy self-serve systems to reduce agent handling time. As a result, they improved both their customer satisfaction and agent productivity.
David’s Bridal
Implementing conversation shifting via IVR deflection helped in David’s Bridal’s ecommerce transformation, driving a 700% increase in sales via messaging. The bridal company found that 41% of their customers opt to use messaging over waiting on hold, leading to a rise in NPS and a first call resolution rate of 90%.
The RealReal
Faced with a growing customer base and staffing restraints during COVID, The RealReal leveraged LivePerson’s conversation shifting as part of their improvement to digital customer experiences. Moving customer calls to the messaging channel of their choice was pivotal in reducing wait times to less than a minute on voice and increasing customer satisfaction by 10%.
LivePerson’s voice-to-digital omnichannel solutions are here to help brands accelerate their digital transformation goals without a complete overhaul of their legacy systems. Taking a best-of-breed approach to an omnichannel experience, brands can integrate their existing tools and systems with LivePerson’s digital conversation technology quickly and efficiently. Ultimately, this will help brands reduce wait times, cut costs, and improve customer satisfaction as they bring voice into the digital fold.
