In today’s customer-focused business environments, customer satisfaction is no longer enough. Instead, the market leaders in every vertical talk about the quality of customer experience. That’s an important distinction, as “customer experience” means more than just the satisfaction expressed from a single transaction, like a sale.

Creating customer experiences means multiple touchpoints between the company and the end-user. That might start with an interactive website, or a banner ad on an app. Sometimes, a prospective customer might see a powerful message in their social media stream, or see one of their friends posting about the great product they’ve just bought or a company they’ve had dealings with.

Those messages that reach out to new customers are the first step in creating meaningful and profitable customer experiences. From directed marketing to the first C2B direct interaction, purchase, follow-up, and from then on, the customer experience is continuous and interconnected.

That means a company needing to get ahead of its rivals needs to use technology to unify their communications with prospective and existing customers, using a centralized system that keeps the customer’s personalized history and lets the company create fully joined-up, end-to-end interactions every time, with every individual customer.

At Tech Wire Asia, we know that choosing such a platform that can literally make or break a company is a difficult task. That’s why we’re featuring three vendors of the type of cloud-based technology that can create brand advocates out of prospects. But why are we looking at cloud solutions? Because they offer the best and quickest return on investment for companies of any size.

Cloud vs. on-premise

A few years ago, the acquisition of any new piece of software required a significant investment in hardware and supporting systems (like network infrastructure, storage, and staff to maintain everything). However, with a cloud-based solution running your contact center, there’s none of that. Instead of a significant entry in the CAPEX financial ledger, paying for cloud-based solutions is a pay-as-you-go model. If things don’t work out, simply switch supplier.

Steps to meaningful customer experiences

The geography of the APAC region means that companies and organizations must be aware of regional differences. In the US, or in Northern Europe, those differences are not so extreme, although they do exist. If your company operates in Asia, and/or intends to offer services in Europe or the US, it’s vital that you offer a choice of modes of contact to connect with your customer call center.

Depending on the demographics of your audience, you will need a contact center solution that can handle voice calls, text message, email, social DMs of different types, and social platforms in general. That’s because it’s vital to be able to reach out on the right platform, at the right time to keep the momentum going between the company, and your customers.

But whichever platform your customer prefers for specific communication, the underlying customer care solution you deploy must keep all information in one place, creating a living history for each customer: that’s the start of hyper-personalized services.

From initial contact, through to purchase, then feedback, post-sale problems, returns and technical queries, your call center staff all must be working from the same source of information.

That’s why a cloud solution is so very powerful. Pulling data into one place, a so-called “canonical source” means customers get joined-up experiences, never have to repeat the same information twice, and can seamlessly switch from one communication channel to another, as they see fit.

Fitting in

Of course, no vendor of customer care solutions would expect you to tear down the technology you already use and start again. Your existing CRM and marketing software may not need replacing (although some of the solutions featured can substitute for them, and excel, too), and so integration is also a crucial component in your choice.

The free interchange of data via APIs (application programming interfaces) means that there needs to be no data duplication, with human operators having to manually copy & paste data from one system to the next. Ensuring data flows from the cloud contact center solution to other apps and services should either be simple enough for non-technical users to set up or be a guided installation with significant help from your chosen vendor.

The stakeholders

Here at Tech Wire Asia, we know that there are many more stakeholders in the business than the end-user or the customer. Your customer care teams have KPIs and targets to hit. Monitoring results going forward, therefore, is important when driving up standards in call times, and customer satisfaction metrics.

Providing a joined-up service to customers is paramount, but similarly, ensuring there’s good progress made with regards staff skills, and ensuring the “higher-ups” are aware of the rising standards in every customer contact.

From the offices of Tech Wire Asia, we recommend you consider one of the following three providers as the vendors that can make your customers’ satisfaction turn into positive and long-term customer experiences.

GENESYS

In the era of the ultra-consumer, an omnichannel and personalized approach to customer experiences is not merely an option, but an absolute strategic necessity. With digital transformations happening at breakneck speed, customer experience is the single biggest differentiator for businesses to maintain their competitive advantage. The Genesys® customer experience platform, backed by AI (artificial intelligence) and cloud technologies, aims just to do that. It helps solve a critical challenge faced by many organizations – fragmented customer experiences. One of the main reasons for such fragmented experiences is due to the fact that the technologies behind these interactions typically exist in “silos”, resulting in large volumes of isolated data.

To tackle this, Genesys recently released new orchestration capabilities that connect disparate AI-applications and make it possible for them to work together harmoniously in real-time. Leveraging all relevant data throughout a customer’s journey, the Genesys AI solution can orchestrate, measure and optimize processes at every touchpoint. This enables businesses to introduce new levels of personalization by tailoring automation, communication across all channels and marketing and sales offers – built for individual customers not just profiles based on aggregate data models.

These AI capabilities are delivered by Genesys Cloud, the company’s high-velocity innovation platform that provides new ways to optimize customer and employee journeys. Built on nearly 30 years of innovation, Genesys Cloud is designed to allow businesses to consume the latest innovations in AI, digital channels and more. With the platform’s open APIs, powerful orchestration and built-in integrations, businesses seamlessly connect data, processes and systems for a unified customer experience

Genesys powers more than 25 billion of the world’s best customer experiences annually. Our success comes from connecting employee and customer conversations on any channel. Combining the best of technology and human ingenuity, Genesys builds solutions that mirror natural communication and work the way you think. Our industry-leading solutions foster engagement across all channels and can perform efficiently on-premise and in the cloud. To learn how to experience communication as it should be: engaging, efficient and empowering — read more here.

AVAYA

Avaya’s range of platforms enables companies of all sizes to achieve their goals, be that a more efficient collaborative system, better comms or an increased efficiency in the integration of communication platform and workforce user space.

Today, mobile messaging is as important as was the telephone on its own, in past decades. Avaya’s resilient yet cost-effective mobile solutions can either be built standalone, or will integrate seamlessly with third-party applications which might be already embedded in the software stack; legacy like Microsoft Exchanges Message Store.

The California-based company is all about achieving maximum efficiency either with new systems or with existing communications systems, whether those are in the cloud or on their clients’ premises. Legacy stack, or new frontier? There’s no need to choose!

End-users’ ease of use continues in management and administration facilities, which lower infrastructure costs and allow rapid deployment across the business. The ease of installation and the power of Avaya’s systems means that from day one, organizations can begin to innovate, perform, and communicate across all channels, the way today’s customers expect.

Once inside the Avaya environment, existing channels can be optimized or new ones added, according to business requirements; that means that rather than the technology dictating which methods of communication are used internally or in customer-facing roles, you do. Avaya allows a business to dictate to IT, not the other way round.

CISCO CONTACT CENTER

Currently in its v12.0 iteration, the Cisco Contact Center Enterprise (CCE) is designed to handle workloads for as few as ten, up to many thousands of call center agents, for large enterprises with multiple contact points. The packaged CCE includes Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Unified Customer Voice Portal (CVP), and comes with built-in chat and email, Cisco Unified Intelligence Center, and the Cisco Finesse web-based agent desktop.

Customer care functions are naturally provided with contextual information for each touchpoint, meaning they can provide a proficient and importantly, knowledgeable response to any query in omnichannel centers.

For managers and department heads, the platform comes with the Unified Intelligence Center packages which create real-time metrics as the working day progresses, but also provide the places where insightful reports can be created. For departments working to KPIs or SLAs, that aspect of the platform is worth the investment alone.

Both the admin console and each operator’s individual interface provides a single, configurable view, making the Cisco Suite perfect for a variety of settings: win-back, after-care, helpdesk, marketing outreach and much more.

For extensible, scalable and powerful solutions (backed with the legendary Cisco reliability metric), get in touch with a Cisco representative today.

*Some of the companies featured are commercial partners of Tech Wire Asia