DELIVER

We all know this: Customer retention has never been more important. Customers have choices and creating a positive experience with every connection you have with them leads to the long-term loyalty every business is seeking. Today, the essence of the customer experience hinges on how well companies can connect and communicate with individuals according to their needs. Companies that are successful at retaining customers and earning positive word-of-mouth understand the importance of keeping them engaged across all channels of choice – voice, print and digital. And the first stop in this connection is often a company’s contact center.

Managing the challenges and opportunities of a contact center environment is no longer a matter of dispatching information or simply resolving an issue. With consumers having access to multiple devices and engaging with businesses through multiple channels day and night, contact centers are fast realizing the need to find communication solutions that make it possible not only to adopt a single customer view, but to empower contact center staff to interact with them in that manner as well.The ability to deliver a coordinated, consistent approach through all available channels has become a business standard.

Streamlining the ability to respond to customers in a way that creates and maintains loyalty requires every business to start thinking of the contact center as a viable extension of marketing. By offering customers a variety of ways to reach your organization, and by using technology that enables a more personalized and relevant interaction, the opportunity to strengthen relationships and engage clients is in the capable hands of those who connect with the customers most often: service representatives.

To turn this requirement into a consistent and seamless experience, the technology implemented needs to be collaborative in nature and make possible the rapid delivery of approved, compliant correspondence, while reducing the time and cost required to serve customers.

Your contact center should be a fully integrated customer engagement hub that has the ability to shift seamlessly to a range of channels with the messaging remaining intact. For example, what happens if a customer completes a transaction via the Internet, yet your next mailed statement doesn't reflect the change? To avoid that type of disconnect in communication and the frustration that results, it is critical to have technology in place that ensures every channel is synchronized.

When determining what technology is right to guarantee the delivery of consistent and relevant messages to customers across all touch points, ask the following questions:

• Does the solution guide front line staff through an intuitive systematic process to create personalized correspondence?

• Can CSRs use preapproved templates and make selections on predefined content options and data prompts for document assembly?

• Are there automated business rules that act as referees, enabling freedom of personalization within the corporate and compliance guidelines?

• Is there a built-in proofing environment so the full document, including variable data, can be viewed on screen instantaneously?

• Can archives be automatically created for each document so that they can be retrieved instantly by authorized CSRs for immediate reference?

• Is there a central repository that can be easily updated and maintain all templates and content?

Every link in the corporate chain – from marketing to operations to IT – is beginning to recognize the potential of the customer contact center as a significant means for getting closer to the customer. Contact centers have the opportunity to create tremendous value in the customer engagement process as new ways to communicate continue to evolve and technologies continue to influence how companies deliver customer service. The steady development and expansion of both hardware and software have brought about – and will continue to bring about – much-needed changes in the management of customer service, highlighting the continued need to give the contact center staff the flexible, effective tools they need to better serve customers.