These days, customer expectations are higher than they ever were. Customers expect personalized and timely support across all available channels. Whether speaking with an associate or an automated self-service, they expect top-tier service. That’s why the future of contact centers isn’t limited to a single channel. Contact centers are expected to provide a 360-degree view of the entire customer journey.
Entrepreneurs understand that a successful customer experience (CX) relies on digital transformation. This can help improve customer insights, call deflection, and personalization. Your automation services will also be optimized for better customer service.
For example, a cloud-based contact center provides accurate customer data to analyze and act on. You’ll have customer feedback from voice calls, mobile, social media, and more as a basis. A 360-degree view of customer behavior would involve knowing the customer’s last transaction or last channel used in the company. This allows contact center services to provide relevant and personalized support. Hence, you can also resolve your customers’ concerns quickly and efficiently.
What is a Digital Contact Center?
A digital contact center is a customer service operation that gives support through digital channels. Examples of these are email, chat, SMS, and social media, among many others. The support given these channels is usually in addition to traditional phone support, but the system keeps evolving.
Customer demands have much to do with the transformation of contact centers into digital ones. Consumers, especially Millennials, find digital channels more convenient than phone support. In 2019, some studies found that chat customer satisfaction scores tied to phone support and digital channels are close.
Now, digital contact centers use a variety of channels and tools to assist and answer customer queries. It’s also common to encounter problems with these products, so there should be support for digital contact centers. Contact center solutions will help your team get back on track in supporting customers in no time!
How Different Are Digital Contact Center Services from Call Center Services?
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It’s time to understand that “call center”, “contact center” and “digital contact center” aren’t interchangeable terms. Each one represents the industry’s evolution for over 60 years, so let’s get to that.
Before the internet, customers had to visit the company, mail a letter, or call over the phone to get in touch. And if a company wanted to extend its reach beyond the local market, it hires door-to-door salespeople. They would also attempt to call every number in the phone book to reach prospects.
In the 1960s, companies started hiring people specifically for the purpose of answering customer phone calls. They’d put together telemarketing teams who endorsed and sold products over the phone. As this business trend became the norm, the term “call center” was coined.
But then emails were introduced and started taking over people’s work and personal lives. It didn’t take long for businesses to see how this could be used for marketing and sales. With new technology and ways to market, the term “call center” feels outdated. If companies wanted to present themselves as modern, they started using the term “contact center”.
But humans don’t stop to make progress, and a few years later, the world is in the middle of a digital explosion. Technologies are advancing and changing faster than anyone anticipated. The internet connects everyone and everything across various devices. People can web chat, text, and send instant messages, which beats traditional methods.
This is where digital contact centers come in to incorporate technology into the customer experience. It also includes agents and supervisors who can make full use of technology for marketing. This makes managing businesses easier, more convenient, efficient, and effective. Hence, the difference between those three terms is based on their history and method.
What are the Benefits of Digital Contact Centers?
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- You’re Available When Your Customers Need You
Having a digital contact center means you’re available to cater to your clients worldwide. Usually, your business would hire overseas workers who can work during the times your customers need help. This ensures your company can enact customer care collaboration anywhere.
- Your Business and Contact Center Grow Together
An online contact center is housed in the cloud which is a highly flexible storage environment. It can scale, grow, and change to meet customer demands, resulting in better customer satisfaction.
Whether it’s adding new technology based on business or customer demands, the digital contact center is flexible. And these changes can either be short or long-term depending on that necessity.
- You Have Clear Insight Into the Customer Journey
A digital contact center can give you the operational benefits of the cloud in a single browser-based view. You can extract insights from different channels. Then you can deliver comprehensive customer context to the agent interface.
By giving agents access to what they need in one application, you improve efficiency and reduce customer frustration. That’s because they won’t need to keep repeating the same issue to different agents.
- Moving Everything to the Cloud is Cost-Effective
Organizations and businesses always look at alternative ways to get the maximum return from their budgets. Digital contact centers see the positive effect that using the Cloud has on their capital expenditures. You won’t even need to worry about the cost of future upgrades because it updates continuously.
Conclusion
With the advancement of technology comes an increase in customer expectations and demands. Thankfully, technology helps take care of all those expectations and increase customer satisfaction. The evolution of the call center into the digital contact center is a living example of that.
Digital contact centers help incorporate technology into the work of agents and supervisors. It helps the operation be more convenient and efficient for both parties, especially with the current tools. Your agents will be available to help customers 24/7 no matter where they’re from.
It won’t be a problem for your systems to keep up with your business growth as well because of its flexibility. Your team will have better insight into the customer journey, hence providing better customer care. You’ll have more happy customers than frustrated ones and, in effect, happier agents as well.
