A recent study from the Customer Contact Council indicates that going above and beyond when responding to customer service requests does not improve the customer loyalty. Answering their questions quickly and efficiently—in other words, reducing their customer effort—is emerging as the new way to make customers loyal to your brand.
WebRTC—Web-based real-time communications—will play a huge role in the future of contact centers as companies look to streamline the way they interact with customers. "In call centers, we can have the right person with the right effort, but now with WebRTC we have the right mode of communication that the customer wants," said Chris Vitek, managing consultant at WebRTC Strategies, told Webrtcworld at ITEXPO East 2014.
"The number of consumers globally is expected to triple in the next 20 years, and this will have a profound effect on the contact center," Vitek said. "Businesses will need to be smarter and be different to make this successful. Think about it—if we reduce effort for customer, we are also reducing effort for the contact center."
If transactions start on the web, Vitek argued, why are people picking up a handset to call customer service? The contact center needs to evolve, especially with the growth of big data. Real-time analysis would allow customers to get target communications when they reach the contact center. "Now enter WebRTC and the ability to blend the website and the contact center," Vitek said. "It's a real conduit to integration. It won't replace, but will rather enhance, what's going on in the contact center."
According to Vitek, WebRTC is the onramp. The WebRTC signal is converted to a SIP trunk that is natively compatible with legacy contact center technologies. By bringing WebRTC into the contact center, the contact center goes from being traditionally disjointed with CTI, IVR, and email to better consolidation of these channels.
In this new world, Vitek said:
· Customer effort goes down
· The need for IVR is reduced or eliminated
· Micro-targeting increases
· Call duration goes down
· Call center labor is reduced
· PSTN costs go down
· Loyalty increases
· Marketing spend goes down
The bonding of web context with real-time interaction reduces effort for the customer and reduces cost for the enterprise. This is enabled by SIP trunking, which make the integration of website telephony with legacy PBXs plug and play, and a confluence of technology and software availability and accessibility that makes website telephony possible.
This is an evolution for many companies, Vitek said. "It's not a revolution," he said. "It may take 20 years for some companies to get there."
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
