Welcome to Ask the Experts, brought to you by CloudServicesUniversity.com. In this video, Intelisys’ Cloud Evangelist Brandon Knight discusses how next-gen portals with omnichannel functionality improve cost and customer outcomes with NICE InContact’s Aaron Goodwin. Learn more about contact center solutions from the NICE InContact team here: https://cloudservicesuniversity.com/supplier-directory/incontact/
| Brandon: | Hey guys. In this segment of Ask the Experts, we’re continuing our conversation on next-gen portals. So we’re bringing to the studio Aaron Goodwin from InContact. How’s it going Aaron? |
| Aaron: | Doing great. Thank you. |
| Brandon: | Good, good. Thanks for joining us, man. So we’re continuing this conversation on the ability to combine multi-channel and other resources to make the agent experience a little better, which of course makes the customer experience a little better. What have you seen out there as far as what people are, what type of channels they’re able to combine for the agents now? |
| Aaron: | Well, what we find is that in this day and age–because we are in the “age of the customer” as Gartner and Forrester and a lot of the analysts would say–it’s just critically important that you’re providing avenues to access communication with your business that the customer wants. And you do it in a way that avoids, reduces confusion. So the concept of omnichannel is critically important when it comes to the contact center. |
| Brandon: | Okay. And a lot of what we’ve seen has also been—just in consulting with contact centers, we’re talking about sometimes agents are using two and three screens, sometimes they’re accessing multiple systems. You know, the olden days, if you can call it that, there may have been a separation of an agent who took a phone call versus an agent who took a chat versus an agent who did email. Are you seeing that be more of a universal experience now? |
| Aaron: | Yeah. It really needs to be. Providing an omnichannel portal for agents is critically important because while multi-channel attempted to get there in offering multiple ways to communicate with a brand, in some cases it also caused more confusion in that individuals trying to email or self-service and then moving themselves over to a chat session and then getting frustrated and moving themselves to a phone call. They kind of had to do so at their own whim. And in each experience, they found that the agent that they were communicating with didn’t have any idea of their kind of, the prior experience that customer had. |
| And so the concept of omnichannel–providing an omnichannel portal for agents–is important because what it does is it allows for that channel-hopping to occur in a more efficient manner. So customer attempts to self-serve; maybe that business recognizes that customer’s been on a self-service page for a little too long, and so they proactively reach out with a chat session. Maybe that agent and the customer are chatting for a bit. Agent recognizes that the path to resolution would be done quicker over a phone call and can initiate a phone call right out of that chat session. | |
| So collapsing that whole workflow from hours or days into a few minutes, and keeping information about that customer journey all encapsulated within that single session. So great outcomes for the customer. Great outcomes from a cost and an overall CSAP perspective for the business. | |
| Brandon: | Yeah, absolutely a much better experience for that customer. But before we close out here, I do want to touch on one thing, because you guys have kind of taken a huge step forward in this whole conversation about an agent portal concept with a new product that you’re offering now. Why don’t you tell us about CX1? |
| Aaron: | Great. Yeah, thanks. So CX1 is a full platform offering provided by InContact so that businesses don’t have to go through the complex nature of integrating multiple different systems together and then keeping them together in order to deliver an experience. |
| So CX1 brings literally every piece of technology that runs a contact center in on a single platform. It brings entire Visual IVR building tool. Builds the capability obviously to proved maps of self-help capabilities to capture calls within the IVR. Provides the entire omnichannel suite of communications; so all channels, maps of reporting package, a big data analytics package, which is really what’s starting to move the needle for lines of business leaders. Meaning tells us about what customers are saying to us. Not just by the words they use, but the way they’re speaking to us and tell us what that means so that we can proactively act on that. | |
| And then bringing obviously a full suite of workforce optimization software; so workforce management, performance management or quality monitoring tools, and a full speech analytics platform. And so the importance of that is that this stuff’s already pre-built and connected. It all exists within our data centers. No need for professional services, no need for integration. Just the ability to turn on features and functions when you need them. | |
| Brandon: | That’s actually amazing, and it’s taking us a huge step forward in this overall concept we have to get a complete agent portal. So Aaron, thanks for your time. And for those of you who want to find out more about InContact, please check them out on our University site. |
