Gone are the days when businesses would put potential or existing customers on hold for long periods when the latter reached out and get away with it. Swamped with choices, customers today are an extremely picky lot and won’t settle for less when it comes to customer service. In fact, multiple surveys show that they can dump a brand after a single subpar CX. Long wait times, having to repeat their requests, low query resolution on first contact, increased handling times, poor communication from brands about delays in order shipping or initiating returns are only some of the reasons that lower customer satisfaction. Customers are now willing to pay more for a more convenient experience. They value their time and expect businesses to value them. They want brands to be easily accessible and hyper responsive. What’s more, they typically prefer brands that are accessible across multiple digital channels – like voice, SMS, live chat, messaging apps, email, etc. – and provide a consistent experience no matter what the channel.
For businesses across industries, the writing on the wall is clear. They know that customers now have limitless choices and that they must act with a whole new level of responsiveness if they want to thrive. Simply having a great product isn’t enough – brands need to provide world-class customer service to keep customers coming back for more. They must not only strive to create multiple digital touchpoints in order to be available to diverse customers (each with their own channel preference), they must also reduce response times and serve them as speedily as possible. This though is easier said than done.
Especially for businesses with a huge customer base of thousands who expect instant responses to their inquiries, requests, or complaints. A huge impediment in offering fast, effective and consistent service is the siloed nature of teams and systems that store customer data. Customers are scattered across online channels that are not integrated, and can use multiple channels during the course of an interaction. They may initiate contact via emails but later use live chat or messaging apps to have specific questions answered or to raise complaints if their earlier queries were not attended to. An agent sitting in a contact center will find it difficult to get a clear picture of what the customer wants unless he has access to the customer’s entire history and all past interactions with the brand across all channels. Currently, most support agents at contact centers have to open up at least four to six four to six different applications to complete a single customer interaction. They need to log in to individual channels to reply to customers. Also, they often need to ask customers to repeat their issues and resubmit their authentication details at every new engagement. This increases customer wait times and annoyance and creates a poor brand image. Not only does agent productivity go down, the overall business takes a hit.
However, the most successful customer-centric brands have figured out a way to work around this challenge by managing communication across multiple channels from a single, intelligent interface – the chat center. It is the secret ingredient that facilitates streamlined collaboration and communication between different teams and channels and makes interactions feel seamless.
What Exactly is a Chat Center and How Does It Boost Customer Service?
A chat center is a single intelligent interface that enables a brand’s contact center to process customer requests coming in from all non-voice channels. A cloud-based solution, it can be easily integrated into a business’s existing IT infrastructure and also supports integration with various systems like CRM, CDP, HelpDesk, time management systems, recommendation services, telephony systems, and chatbots. Also, a chat center can support diverse forms of content including text messages, audio and video images, stickers, emojis, GIFs, documents with comments, and so on, meeting customer communication needs comprehensively.
By connecting different systems via APIs and SDKs, a chat center eliminates the need for agents to switch between multiple channels when assisting customers. Agents can pull in customer data right next to ongoing conversations and look at their past history with the business from across channels such as chats from mobile apps, WhatsApp Business API, email, Telegram, Viber Business Messenger, Apple Business Chat, and web chat widgets. They can understand their customers’ pain points better and assist them in a better way.
A chat center breaks silos and facilitates better collaboration between teams by acting as a single workspace for different roles like agents (contact center operators), their managers, and for admins who work on the general settings of the chat center, like segmentation, routing, agent chat settings, chatbot configuration, and more.
Compelling Chat Center Features That Supercharge Customer Service
edna, one of the leading digital communication solution providers globally, offers a chat center solution with advanced capabilities that can help brands transform how they serve customers. Some of its best features are:
- Automated Ticket Routing to the Most Suitable Agent
While routing may happen behind the scenes, it has one of the strongest impacts on customer satisfaction. One of the most advanced features of a chat center is its ability to intelligently route incoming queries to the most suitable agent. Traditionally, routing takes place manually, i.e., support teams need to tag tickets according to several criteria and route them to suitable agents. Not only is this process repetitive and time consuming, keeping customers on hold, there are also greater chances of errors like a misrouted ticket, which can really stretch the waiting time for customers.
A chat center automates ticket routing. Chatbots connected to a chat center can be trained to analyze incoming tickets from any platform and route them to the most suitable pool of agents – the routing could be on the basis of priority levels, customer profiles, their intent, language, location, priority levels, the department the thread needs to be transferred to, or even the customer’s preference to talk to an agent who had already handled the query earlier. This significantly improves metrics first response time (FRT) and first contact resolution rate (FCRR), driving up customer satisfaction levels. Agent productivity also improves.
- Always-On Customer Support
Customers sometimes need to reach out to businesses even outside of business hours for assistance. For such times, chatbots connected to chat centers can be trained to greet customers with welcome or away messages, inform them about expected wait times before agents become available, and answer routine FAQs. Bots can also be trained to initiate dialogue with a customer without waiting for the customer to carry on the conversation. Such responsiveness tells customers that businesses value them and care for them, increasing customer satisfaction. Chatbots have the added advantage that they can significantly bring down call volumes by providing routine questions on chat, freeing up agents to focus on trickier queries.
edna’s chat center solution enables a business to leverage the “API for Bot Connect” to connect its existing chatbots with the chat center. The business can either use a single bot across different channels, multiple bots for multiple channels. edna’s powerful chat center can also can send vital information about a customer to the chatbot via web hooks, for example:
– the business’s internal client ID (which identifies the customer)
– the channel which they are using to chat
– the device they are using to chat (Android or iOS),
– additional fields with client information like segmentation parameter info, time when message was received, URL and name of attachments received (if any)
– the date of last thread, and so on. - Seamless Integration With CRM, Ticketing Systems, and Third-Party Services
A chat center unifies communication across channels by easily integrating with a business’s CRM as well as third-party systems. It can access and synchronize all the data in the CRM – so agents have a complete view of customer profiles, including their contact information, purchase history, and interactions across various channels. This helps agents deliver personalized and contextually relevant CX. Also, agents don’t need to switch between systems when they need to update any information. They can create or update records, track log activities directly from the contact center software interface.
A chat center also integrates with the ticketing system, helping agents to sync chat conversations with legacy ticketing systems. Agents can create ticketing issues directly from chat conversations. This streamlines the process of logging and tracking customer-reported problems, ensuring that issues are properly recorded and assigned for resolution.
- Efficient and Personalized Customer Support
Personalizing customer journeys is critical to improving engagement as well as loyalty. A chat center has a number of personalization tools that make customer interactions more tailored to the particular needs to customers. A few examples are – customer segmentation based on communication parameters as well as CRM parameters, customized chat buttons, routing based on geolocation, intent, user’s language preferences, and more. All these help to personalize outgoing messages. - Agent Empowerment for Quicker and More Effective Support
Support agents can impress customers only when they handle requests in a quick and efficient way without asking customers to repeat their issues again and again. A chat center enables agents to quickly request specific information about a client using universal commands to fetch and share data from other systems instead of asking the client themselves. They can view the client’s profile enriched with data from other systems. This reduces processing time and boosts responsiveness. Agents can also support clients via Suggested Replies, automated FAQs, etc. to share information faster. If accommodating a request is likely to take time, agents can even pin the request and get back to the client later with a finished solution. They can also add internal comments to a thread so that other team members can see it see it when they view the chat history. They can use message templates for quick replies, search conversations using various filters, schedule tasks, and do more. The result? An unparalleled customer service that will turn customers into brand advocates. - Customer Satisfaction Metrics to Monitor Efficiency
A chat center helps businesses to monitor agent as well as chatbot performance via dashboards, graphs, and tables with different filters. The dashboards can be customized as per the business’ needs. Managers can track their team’s performance by viewing the number of threads assigned to users (assigned, reassigned, in-progress, waiting), the number of active and inactive agents, the first answer service-level rate, agent idle time, and so on. Dashboards are frequently updated to show the latest results. The business can generate reports related to operational performance, agent status log report, agent workload, feedback report, and so on. Valuable insights such as NPT, CSAT, AHT, FCR, ASA, and CES help manager assess customer satisfaction levels and make data-driven improvements to processes wherever required.
Closing Thoughts
Customers today practically live online and prefer to get in touch with businesses across multiple touchpoints. They even prefer businesses that make themselves available across multiple channels. This reality is not going to change any time soon. So for businesses, it makes perfect sense to invest in a super tool that can them manage cross-channel communication from a single interface. Not only does a chat center help a business offer seamless interactions across channels, it does so cost-effectively – enabling businesses to do more with less. Fewer agents can handle more queries, call volumes are reduced drastically, lowering the need to maintain a large call center staff. If you want to learn more about how a chat center can address the specific needs of your business, talk to us now.
