In order to stay ahead in today’s highly competitive environment, the realization is that businesses must prioritize digital transformation or be passed by. For retailers, this has meant investing in cloud-based technologies and finding new ways to connect with their customers and expand their digital footprint. While there has been significant growth across e-Commerce, mobile apps, alternative payments options and much more, one area that is currently ripe for digital transformation is customer support.
Today, according to Salesforce’s 2019 State of Service report, 80% of customers now consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products. Moving to a cloud-native contact center, or a Contact-Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) platform, can provide retailers with the tools they need to turn customer support from a cost center into a revenue driver.
Here are three reasons why the time is now for retailers to move their customer support to the cloud:
Streamline Operations
Cloud-based contact centers not only help retailers better connect with their customers and deliver a better experience, they also give support leaders the ability to tap into a larger contact center ecosystem that can help them to streamline their operations and run a more efficient and effective support center. And unlike on-premise large infrastructure systems, CCaaS solutions can operate without the need for large continual investments.
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Workforce Management (WFM) and Quality Management (QM) integrations help support leaders get a better understanding of peak hours and seasons, highly used support channels, as well as the ability to better monitor and track agent efficiency and productivity so they can strategically and effectively staff and hire. It gives retailers the ability to make operational adjustments in real time, ensuring that customers are not being left on hold but instead receiving the support they need.
Integrations into Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools like Salesforce, Zendesk, Microsoft Dynamics and more allow support agents to securely access relevant customer data in real time. This data helps agents gather more context as to who the customer is and why they might be calling in, allowing them to provide a more personalized experience where they can not only resolve issues faster, but provide suggestions, tips, and even identify upsell opportunities.
Expand Support Channels
Customers today communicate with each other both visually and contextually and across multiple channels. Conversations today may start with a phone call but quickly expand into SMS, chat, video and more. A key aspect of the retail and e-Commerce experience is to allow customers to communicate with the brands they love in the same way that they would communicate with each other.
The reality is, the more accessible customer support can be, the better the customer experience will be. The growing expectation of being able to reach people from anywhere and at any time means support teams must understand where their customers are when they have questions — and not only make these channels easily accessible, but allow customers to seamlessly flow between them. Whether customers are on the web, on their mobile device or even inside your mobile app, the experience should be consistent.
Connect Actionable Data
Arguably no one interacts with customers on a daily basis more than customer support, meaning they have a wealth of customer insights, feedback and knowledge at their fingertips. Cloud-based CCaaS support platforms allow companies to not only leverage this knowledge and the voice of the customer within customer support, but across the entire enterprise.
Extending voice of the customer data to teams outside of customer support can help numerous other arms of an organization. For example, marketing teams can get a more developed 360-degree view of their customers, allowing for more strategic messaging, content development and ad spend. Product teams can benefit from further insight into product usage, malfunctions and general feedback in order to help prioritize updates and rollouts of different features, functionalities and product lines.
Cloud-based software has emerged as the preferred way to not only empower teams and inspire collaboration, but do so in an efficient and cost-effective way. Retailers moving to a CCaaS support platform are able to connect into a much larger digital ecosystem and take advantage of customized features and applications that can not only digitally transform their operations, but provide the modern, personalized and one-of-a-kind digital customer experience needed to surpass competitors and thrive in today’s market.
As Founder and CEO of UJET, Inc., Anand Janefalkar has 15 years of experience in the technology industry and has served as a technical advisor for various startups in the Bay Area. Before founding UJET, he served as Senior Engineering Manager at Jawbone, and also previously contributed to multiple high profile projects at Motorola.
