The costs of not providing a holistic, personalized, proactive customer experience can include lost customers, missed sales opportunities and lower revenue, and reduced loyalty, according to 93% of business managers in a recent Avaya survey. Fortunately, the collaboration and communications vendor has stepped up with new and enhanced Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions to help businesses eliminate the fragmented, high-effort service that jeopardizes customer loyalty and revenue growth.
The latest offerings unify and simplify multichannel self-service and proactive engagement with a single, software platform, said the company. They transform customer service strategies with combined SMS, email, and phone-based campaigns that ‘increase results’, intelligently coordinating services and resources based on real-time insights.
The issue of customer experience is both complex and disconnected, said Cory Glover, Senior Marketing Manager, Customer Experience Solutions, Avaya. This helps close the loop, he told IT Trends & Analysis. “It’s a new set of solutions around Avaya… that helps to solve both of those problems.”
The benefits will vary according to customers and their situations, but at the very least Avaya is providing a new array of choices, a broader palette, said Glover. “The impact will vary according to where customers are” in their contact center capabilities.
While most companies are still using on-premise contact-center solutions, 39% were using a hosted or on-demand service, 38% were evaluating these approaches and only 23% were using an on-premise system and NOT evaluating the hosted or on-demand model, according to a new IDC report. U.S. spending for on-demand (cloud) contact center services will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.5% to $1.6 billion by 2018. “End consumer demands combined with a need for speed, flexibility, and cost reduction are all driving companies to evaluate hosted and on-demand solutions,” said Melissa O’Brien, Research Analyst, Worldwide Contact Center Services.
IDC stated that as customer experience becomes more of a strategic focus for enterprises and the pressures for speed, flexibility, and multi-channel increase, hosted and on-demand contact center services must continue to evolve to keep up to client expectations and support consumers’ future channels of preference. The factors contributing to the growth of hosted and on-demand contact center services include cost reduction and pricing model, cloud-based outsourcing, increased shift in spending, and multi-channel customer care.
“True integration of the customer experience across all available communications channels, devices and applications is the holy grail of customer service, and Avaya is one of the few vendors that offer it today,” said Nancy Jamison, Principal Analyst, Customer Contact, Frost & Sullivan, in a prepared statement. “Using a single platform to design and deliver an omni-channel experience will enable the consistency, insight and operational benefits both companies and customers want today.”
Glover said this week’s announcements touch on the collaboration environment they introduced last year, with Avaya Snap-ins around better context management, better ways of aggregating and collecting customer information. These and additional add-ons due out later this year will match the right resources to the right customer, based on the value of that customer to the business and how you want to treat that customer. “It’s getting it down to the individual level.”
That’s critical, according to the Avaya research, he added. “Almost 7 out of 10 of us expect brands to treat us individually,” he said, and 92% expect that when companies identify a problem, they expect us to engage us proactively.”
Unfortunately, while 93% of business leaders acknowledge they need to manage their customers more holistically, 83% said they weren’t able to deliver on that need.
Under The Hood
Available now, the new capabilities are offered through the following applications:
-Avaya Aura Experience Portal 7.0 application platform for omni-channel inbound and outbound self-service and contact routing applications from Avaya and Avaya DevConnect Partners builds on the platform’s open, Web services-based architecture with support for two-way SMS and email, and new zoning capabilities make it easier to localize delivery of customer care calls and reduce network charges;
-Proactive Outreach Manager brings together management of all outbound communications, from agent-based predictive dialing campaigns to automated voice, email, SMS alerts and services into a single solution managed on Avaya Aura Experience Portal; and,
-Intelligent Customer Routing helps optimize each and every interaction through real-time visibility into caller intent, cross channel interaction history and other business insights, adding even finer control based on target service levels, enterprise resources, and customer segmentation.
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