Moving From Contact Center to Customer Engagement

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1 Daitan White Paper Moving From Contact Center to Customer Engagement USING THE CLOUD, BIG DATA AND WEBRTC TO GET THERE Highly Reliable Software Development Services Daitan Group 2014

2 Moving from Contact Center to Customer Engagement Using The Cloud, Big Data and WebRTC to Get There 1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: FROM TRANSACTIONS TO RELATIONSHIPS For many years, operations within contact centers have been about reducing costs and increasing overall efficiency. The focus was on managing queues of customers, processing tickets, routing calls, maximizing transactions and keeping human interaction to a minimum. But the world is changing fast. With Social Media and Mobile Connectivity becoming central to how consumers interact with brands, companies providing service through contact centers must consider customer relationships in the context of the overall customer experience to remain competitive. Gartner defines this next evolution of the contact center as the customer engagement center (CEC) which refers to a logical set of technologies and business applications that are engineered to provide customer service and support, regardless of the interaction (or engagement) channel. The goal of the CEC is not only to provide service to customers as they move among communications channels including social media and community forums while retaining the customers context, but also to deliver the appropriate business rule to determine the next best action, information or process with which to engage the customers. (Gartner, 2013) Looking at the market and the software systems supporting customer engagement centers, we can identify the following technology trends: Software-as-a-Service Deployment of software in The Cloud (as opposed to older on premise solutions) allows fast deployment of new system functionality without disruption and with reduced capital costs. Web Analytics Use of new Big Data techniques allows systems go beyond the simple quantitative metrics by collecting and analyzing vast amounts of data. It becomes possible to deduce context, draw insight, identify patterns, and predict behavior. Multi-Channel Integration New browser standards such as WebRTC enable the seamless integration of communication channels so that conversations can happen over and switch between social media, voice, website, , etc. without loss of context as opposed to from segmented communication customers experience today. Daitan Group

3 This paper is written for Developers of Contact Center or Customer Engagement Center Solutions who need to translate advances in technology into functionality that enables their customers achieve their goals in a market that is more complex, demanding, mobile and social. We will examine the trends above in some detail and the technologies involved in implementing them. 2 THE MOBILE SOCIAL CUSTOMER The medium we use to communicate with others affects not only the way we interact, but can also impact our thought process and our behavior. The generation that grew up with the Internet ( digital natives ) and, more recently, adopted the smartphone as the preferred digital device now forms the mainstream portion of consumers, suppliers and workforce. Market experts and analysts consider specifications and rank products, but they are no longer the strongest influencers. With the widespread use of Social Media, the impact of the customer experience is multiplied as customers propagate their positive or negative perceptions through their social media platform. More and more often, consumers are making decisions based on peer reviews and recommendations, which are based mostly on their experience with the product, the service and/or the company; from research to purchase to post-sales service and support. So it becomes necessary to optimize and extend business processes for a positive impression throughout the customer experience. Mobile Customers expect seamless transitions between communication channels (e.g. from app to voice to ) without loss of context. They also demand the immediate resolution of problems. The contact center systems with Interactive Voice Response (IVR) often suggest that customers access the website for the desired information or to complete a transaction instead of waiting on the phone for an agent. Many centers have websites that ask customers to switch from the browser and initiate a chat or send an request. More often than not, the context of the inquiry is lost or incomplete when such channel switches happen. New systems need to provide a seamless, mobile, complete, and positive experience. Contact centers that are moving in the direction of becoming customer engagement centers provide click-to-call controls on the website and mobile apps let customers call and agents to answer in context of what customers were doing at that moment. In many cases, customers can share their screen instantly to explain the difficulty they are experiencing. Daitan Group

4 In some cases, customers can post messages on Twitter while agents monitor social media and respond through or call back on the phone, all within the same system and the interaction is recorded properly and continuously. 3 THE NEW CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT CENTER IS VIRTUAL AND IN THE CLOUD In addition to the new demands from consumers described in the previous section, Contact Center Agents also become an important constituency. They can no longer act as robots blindly following a linear call script. If agents are to deliver a satisfactory customer experience, they must be fully informed about the context, including current ticket and history of the relationship with the customer. They also must be knowledgeable about the product or service they are supporting, and empowered to make decisions and solve problems on CHECKLIST 1 behalf of the customers. The performance metrics for the call center should not be based on how fast agents complete a call, how many calls they can take per hour or even how many issues they resolve. Customer engagement centers include evaluations based on the quality of the experience they provide. These customer engagement centers (CEC) are now at the core of the relationship with their customers and are the key not only to the current customer experience, but also with the projection of the brand in the market and acquisition of new customers. Moving to the Cloud Cloud Architecture Multi-tenancy Scalability VoIP WebRTC The CEC might also be geographically dispersed, not hosted in a monolithic call center building. It needs to leverage skills where they are and operate 24/7, in real-time. Agents might be working from home using diverse types of equipment, but they need to appear to the customer as a cohesive team, working to provide a coherent and consistent customer experience. This places new demands on the center s systems. They cannot count on a tightly controlled hardware infrastructure. They need to operate efficiently and securely over the Internet, with both customers and agents using a heterogeneous set of end devices, with different screen sizes and available modes of communication. The interaction data is no longer in a centralized database. Customer Relationship information might be in a CRM system (often also deployed in the Cloud), much of the customer interaction might be occurring in Social Media or over the web. The center s Daitan Group

5 system must be open and able to exchange data with both other corporate systems and the web at large. Moving to the cloud provides companies with an alternative to the huge capital investments required by a dedicated infrastructure and on premise software, and all the benefits of virtual, scalable and distributed system. 4 WEB ANALYTICS AND BIG DATA In the contact center, much of the analysis of data has been quantitative and operational in nature. The goal was to manage the workforce efficiently by using Performance Analytics. Typical metrics included number of calls, average wait time, call length, etc. CHECKLIST 2 Analytics and Big Data NoSQL Hadoop Distributed Computing Social Media APIs Real Time Analytics More advanced contact centers moved on to the next stage and started also to measure and analyze the performance from the customer perspective through the use of Customer Analytics. Typical measurements included first-call resolution rates, number of calls to resolution. With the emergence of new techniques, this is changing further. Customer engagement centers are adopting new tools that allow detection of useful patterns and context from data generated by user interactions, be it on the browsing history, record of customer relationship, chatter on social media, etc. It can get as advanced as detecting mood and sentiment through voice analytics or anticipating problems or predicting behavior through data analysis. Here are a few examples of emerging analytics applications: Real-time Analytics Collects all structured and unstructured data from both previous interaction ( s, calls, etc.) and external sources (user profile, social media content, etc.), and analyze it in real-time to generate insights and provide recommendations while interactions are still in progress. Predictive Analytics Uses pattern detection algorithms to recommend the best way to serve a customer and anticipate problems and their solution before they happen. Web Analytics Captures browsing data and measures the effectiveness of the self-service web resources available to customers even before they call. This can be used not only to improve content, but also to provide context to the call agent when the customer call arrives. Customer Experience Analytics Beyond quantitative metrics to measure the quality of the customer experience interacting with self-service resources and Daitan Group

6 live agent support, providing direct evaluation of the real purpose of the contact center, i.e. provide a better customer experience. Speech Analytics Can take recorded conversations and turn it into structured data to identify root causes and common CHECKLIST 3 customer issues for analysis. Seamless Channel Transitions 5 WEBRTC AND SEAMLESS CHANNEL TRANSITIONS WebRTC is an emerging standard to enable realtime communications (voice, text, video, and data). The real-time communications engine is embedded directly into the web-browser. WebRTC Social Media APIs STUN/TURN Gateways VoIP, SIP Protocols Because the browser is such a ubiquitous application, then as WebRTC gains critical mass, it will be available in any client device and will interoperate across platforms and operating systems without requiring the installation of proprietary applications. WebRTC enables application developers to incorporate rich real-time communication capabilities (e.g. click-to-call buttons, chat rooms, video conferencing, screen share, file uploads, etc.) to apps and webpages with just a few lines of Java Script code. The developer doesn t need telecommunications experience, since all the heavy lifting is done by the engine embedded in the browser or the SDK. For the first time, web browsing, voice, video, screen sharing, file sharing, text messaging can all be integrated over a non-proprietary layer of functionality that works across multiple devices. As an example, a customer engagement center incorporating WebRTC could offer the following capabilities: Click-to-Call Controls on a website and in mobile apps that allow customers to call in-context, so that they can be routed to the right agent, who gets context information about what exactly the user was trying to do. Screen Share and Co-browsing Customer can securely share their screen with agent and agent can co-browse with the user to fill forms, change configuration and diagnose problems. Video Conferencing WebRTC enables seamless transition from text or voice to a full video-conference, which might be useful to add a human touch to a conversation, bring in an expert to solve the problem in real-time, or let users show a problem they are experiencing using the camera. These capabilities can be offered without requiring software downloads on the client side with WebRTC or through a custom app if the platform is not WebRTC-enabled. Daitan Group

7 6 CONCLUSION: NEW TECHNOLOGIES OFFER OPPORTUNITIES FOR SMALL COMPANIES TO COMPETE The coupling between the phone system, dedicated hardware infrastructure, and the software solution has made the contact center a very conservative environment for decades. New entrants were kept out of the market by larger contact centers because the service and integration components of the solution were too complex and expensive for smaller companies to tackle. In this paper we examined the trends that are leveling the playing field. New players are gaining ground with customer service solutions that operate in the cloud, using exclusively VoIP, with services that don t require on premise hardware or infrastructure. These new players may still lack some of the scalability and reliability features traditional contact center solutions inherited from telecom systems of the past, but they are starting to succeed in large installations that were out of their reach before. The new capabilities are compelling offering companies of all sizes to go beyond basic contact center support by phone and into new channels of communication for a complete customer engagement service. DAITAN GROUP CAN ACCELERATE YOUR DEVELOPMENT Daitan provides highly reliable software development services. We partner with technology vendors to help them develop their next software solution in Telecom, Unified Communications and Cloud/Web Solutions. Daitan combines Telecom expertise with expertise in the new technologies listed in the Technology Checklists provided in the previous sections. Our team can help you with product development challenges, whether it is to bring an existing contact center solution up-to-speed with new trends or build a new, scalable, and reliable customer engagement solution. Moving to an on premise system to the Cloud? Implementing a Big Data system? Incorporating WebRTC to your product? Daitan has worked with multiple contact center solution providers and has the expertise and experience to help your solution evolve quickly. To find out more about Daitan, please visit our website at Daitan Group