Digital engagement expands your customers’ experience

Xavier Martin

December 18, 2018

Digital engagement is about harnessing the power of the digital world, including social, cloud, mobility and big data analytics.

Next-level technology and digital engagement are taking customer service into the modern marketplace. Digital transformation is expanding the customer service experience such that anyone in the entire company can now participate in supporting a client. In a world where brand loyalty is down and you are only as good as your last customer rating, engagement is key to ensure a satisfied customer.

Companies need to embrace digital transformation and consider how they can use new technology to better serve their customers. With the combination of new digital forces including social, cloud, mobility and big data, organizations need to find the best way to connect with their customers and serve them as efficiently as possible.

What’s driving digital engagement?

Digital engagement is a crucial step forward in the customer service space, but what’s really driving the evolution for companies today?  We believe there are two main drivers:

The first one is based on the fact that many companies are embarking on their digital transformations. As part of this push, a stronger digital presence must consider the opportunities for engagement. Re-defining customer engagement is a crucial part of the transformation journey.

The second main driver comes from today’s customer base, who expect that they should be able to use the same tools to communicate with businesses as they do in their consumer lives. Customer demographics are changing and that’s impacting engagement. Baby boomers and generation Xers will more likely connect through call centers and phone calls, whereas millennials won’t even think about picking up a phone. Any company whose customer base is born after the 1980s will need to have a digital engagement strategy, or risk losing prospects.

What trends are we seeing?

Getting a grip on digital transformation, and digital engagement, at the same time can be a daunting task. We’re seeing a lot of companies struggle to deal with the all of the digital possibilities, all at the same time. Success will come by focusing on the elements one at a time, by harnessing the cloud, then mobile, then social, then big data.

Another trend is the move towards the entire business becoming more involved with the customer experience conversation. We’re moving beyond the time when the customer service agent was the sole interface for serving customers. Now, virtually anyone in the company can act as a representative and expand the customer dialogue.

Supporting digital transformation

Digital transformation is made easy with Alcatel-Lucent Rainbow™ delivered from the cloud. Rainbow provides two functions: The first as a Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), and the second as a Communication Platform as a Service.

It’s the CPaaS approach that’s really critical to digital engagement because it lets you integrate platforms and link customer engagement platforms. For example, with Rainbow and APIs, you can easily propose a chat from any browser or mobile device and bring real-time communications to your customers. You can then use the system to quickly move the chat discussion to a live telephone conversation. What is really unique about this feature is that the conversation is not just assigned to the next available agent. It can be directed to the person in the company most qualified to deal with the situation based on the context of the call.

Rainbow integrates with business applications, which means that companies can access their data and capture context to support conversations with their customers. Rainbow also enables real-time communication capabilities as part of an open technology strategy to ensure users get the best end-to-end solution for the customer journey.

What’s ahead?

The more data that is collected, the more we can ensure that customer service personnel have the right information in real-time when dealing with customers. Digital engagement will enable people to access valuable information that adds context to the answers that customer and service representatives provide and expand the customer service experience.

As we move forward, artificial intelligence will not only retrieve information but will use that data to provide recommendations based on patterns recognized by algorithms. The first step will be to leverage the capabilities offered by AI. Not far behind are technologies such as voice and face recognition, to identify customers for tentative transactions, to shorten enrollment processes, and to automate certain activities.

Learn more about how Rainbow can expand digital engagement and take your customer experience to the next level.