Context-rich omnichannel support is the key to empowering support teams and delighting customers in a digital-first age, says Kodainayaki Seenivasan, senior solutions engineer at Freshworks.
Speaking at the ITWeb CX Summit, where Freshworks was the event sponsor, Seenivasan said customer delight depended on delivering instant, personalised support on the digital channel of the customer’s choice.
However, she noted that in many organisations, the customer experience was still fragmented, and support agents struggled to achieve full context of the customer journey. “Today’s experiences are often broken. Customers get inconsistent and disparate experiences on different channels. Meanwhile, businesses are struggling to meet customer demands and expectations,” she said.
She cited that businesses have focused their attention on adding more channels and as a result have added a lot of separate solutions to their often older call centre platforms. “Because of these poorly stitched together systems, support agents have to toggle between multiple screens to close out just a single ticket. They are unable to see the full customer history and context," she said.
Seenivasan said contact centre volumes were becoming overwhelming, with the Freshworks Future of CX 2022 report indicating that for every 100 extra monthly tickets per agent, there was a 1% drop in CSAT scores. The report said the highest CSAT scores occurred with a 2+1 formula: one message from the customer, stating the problem, one reply from the agent, resolving the problem, and possibly a third message – a response from the customer, saying “Thanks!”
To improve the customer experience, organisations need a centralised omnichannel interface to give a unified view of communications and interactions across multiple channels, Seenivasan said.
“Agents need a full engagement history and customer profile for a holistic view that allows them to deliver exceptional service and world class, personalised support,” she said.
They also need live chat support, with seamless bot-powered self-service across apps, website and messaging channels, as well as social media support to manage Twitter and Facebook from within the customer service platform.
“Collaboration is more important now, than ever before. Teams cannot work in silos and need tools that help them collaborate in real time,” said Manish Mishra, Senior Director and Head of MEA Business at Freshworks. "To help teams come together they need solutions that support real-time discussion, with context. This helps customer facing teams deliver delightful experiences."
Seenivasan said that with the right tools, such as Freshdesk Omnichannel Suite, organisations could reimagine more meaningful conversations and turn service agents into customer champions by deploying AI and automation to support engagements, and integrating context from across all channels for context.
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