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Put the power to chat in the hands of your customers and live agents.

Holiday season sales have been steadily rising in recent years as eCommerce purchasing, free shipping, and seamless returns have become the norm for both US consumers and shoppers around the world. This year will likely be a banner year for holiday shopping – edged to new heights by COVID safety protocols and the expected tangential increase in eCommerce spending. Salesforce expects record US and global holiday digital sales volumes, with totals to reach $221 billion and $940 billion respectively. This highwater mark will mean that roughly 30 percent of US retail sales and 18 percent of global sales for the season will be transacted digitally. Just as digital sales will break records this year, experts predict digital returns will reach new peak volumes. UPS projects US holiday returns will peak on January 2 with 1.9 million – a 26 percent increase from last year’s peak returns day. The National Retail Federation estimates that as many as 13 percent of all holiday gifts are returned after Christmas. Overall, roughly one-third of people in the US expect to return at least one of the gifts they received this holiday season. While most returns will be made with no questions asked, there will be a considerable number of returns that will require contact center support. There are new ways to incorporate chat communications through channels like WhatsApp into your contact center workflows to reduce call volumes, saving your business time and money and dramatically improving the customer experience. Use chat to deflect call center volumes Up to 80 percent of contact center incoming calls are easy-to-answer and repetitive – they are common questions and can be answered or solved with very simple explanation. Knowing that many contact centers’ most frequently asked questions can be quickly and easily answered, and also lead to consistent contact center outcomes and satisfied customers, chat call deflection and resolution solutions should be a top priority. Clickatell’s Chat Desk helps companies add chat functionality on WhatsApp (with more chat app platform support soon to come) to the contact center while maintaining live agent support. While Chat Desk allows for contact center deflections to WhatsApp chat to answer questions, it also provides the same human touch experiences contact centers need to solve customers’ complex problems, including call management tools that give supervisors the power to have immediate access to real-time reporting and visibility into agent activity and customer escalations the customer benefits from a smarter, streamlined customer service experience. Use chat to provide better experiences to customers To substantively reduce costs, busy contact centers need to decrease the number of incoming calls while also maintaining or increasing customer satisfaction scores – no easy task. Integrating chat solutions to resolve customer queries more quickly and easily allows contact centers to evolve from a customer service trouble spot into a true business advantage that strengthens customer relationships and bolsters brand reputation. Personalize the Experience We live in a hyper-personalized world where customers are provided with ads based on their buying habits and search history, offers based on their social media likes, and greetings across their digital world that refer to them by name. The contact center offers an important opportunity to serve your customers as individuals. Chat solutions deliver personalization during every interaction, allowing businesses to communicate with each individual and deliver a personal experience during every interaction and back-and-forth engagement. Personalized chat helps businesses create differentiation in their customer support experience. Customers see personalization as an extension of digital innovation, and contact centers that drive improved customer experiences – especially via chat – will increase customer retention and brand loyalty. Drive Customer Experience Innovation Across Customer Touchpoints Customers want the same experience in-store as they do visiting a business’ website on a desktop or via mobile. If they connect with a business on a social platform they have an opportunity to be recognized during their interactions with the business. While every business is in a different phase of the journey to deliver a unified customer experience, utilizing chat solutions via SMS messaging or chat in WhatsApp in the contact center can help to quickly demonstrate the customer-first approach your business needs to stand apart from the competition. Intuitive Use Case and Anytime Response Today’s consumers want things on their time and their terms and the companies that can deliver both will thrive in the coming decade. Chat solutions offer an ideal solution for customer support because they enable interactions 24/7. Customers don’t have to sacrifice time during their work hours to resolve return issues – they can reach your contact center and initiate a chat communication that can be continued and resolved in minutes, hours or days – there is no time limit to the chat communication, no time-outs and, of course, no dropped calls or long wait times to speak to a live agent. More than 5 billion people actively use chat apps, with the overwhelming majority using WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or WeChat on a daily basis. Consumers spend 90 percent of their screen time on five mobile apps—with the most used chat app receiving the majority of attention. People like using chat as a communications channel and translating this use case to your business is a net positive in every way. Conclusion Holiday season is in full gear and your contact center may already be fielding large volumes for returns or exchanges. Utilizing chat solutions to solve common customer issues and lessen the strain on your contact center live agents will save your business time and money and deliver innovation and convenience to your customers. Improve your workflows, enhance your customer experience with shorter wait times and better live agent interactions, and create a contact center that works smarter and saves money with Clickatell Chat Desk .

The modern customer contact center is critical to any consumer-facing business. Contact centers must maintain the stringent customer experience standards of your business while working with customers that have urgent questions and problems that need to be solved. Your customers want to be satisfied with every interaction with your business - including service and support functions. And their evaluation of an overall brand experience with your company will be end-to-end, from the quality of your products and services to the Web or in-store experience to their wait time and customer service interactions when they require help. For too many businesses, the contact center is a weak link in an otherwise excellent experience across customer touchpoints. Customers view the contact center experience as inconvenient, time-consuming, and frustrating, filled with redundancies and long IVR menus. Incorrect call routing takes them to call handoffs and ID authentication is often required repeatedly during the same call. What’s worse, there is little flexibility in the experience. Regardless of the complexity of the customer issue, the process seems to be the same; even simple questions turn into complicated 30-minute calls. The contact center could do so much more for the customer – and for your brand. Great customer support builds goodwill and loyalty. But a bad experience – even in a contact center – can deeply damage the customer relationship. Poor contact centers cost businesses revenue. Digitize the contact center Clickatell Chat Desk is one of the most advanced digital contact center software solutions for live agents in the world. Chat Desk provides an extraordinary level of support and value, reducing workload pressure on your call center and giving supervisors more insight into customer issues and more control into elevations. By giving supervisors the power to have immediate access to real-time reporting and visibility into agent activity and customer escalations the customer benefits from a smarter, streamlined customer service experience. Chat Desk was built to improve the live agent experience because human interactions are needed to solve complex customer problems. Our solution decreases wait times and helps contact center live agents to deliver high-quality engagements that matter most to customers. Happy customers are repeat customers. Improve the customer experience Clickatell Chat Desk helps get customer inquiries to live agents over chat or to resolve queries on their own through automated FAQs. Contact center experts know that the majority of customer questions are the same, so by enabling automation and pre-populated answers, call volumes are decreased and complex issues can be more quickly and efficiently routed to live agents. Customers can also interact directly via mobile device with support and utilize chat through  WhatsApp or SMS with more chat channels and capabilities on the way. Significantly decrease the number of incoming calls and email inquiries. Reduce contact center costs and increase customer satisfaction scores. Turn your contact center into a business advantage that strengthens customer relationships rather than erodes them. Performance and reliability of the cloud Chat Desk is cloud-based, for fast deployments and instant updates, and is CRM agnostic, allowing for easy integrations into your CRM of choice and other contact center toolkits. Our cloud-based approach ensures that your contact center system will always be optimized for speed and flexibility and also mitigated against slowdowns. Chat Desk is also future proof – we will maintain compatibility and optimal performance with new contact center software and systems as your contact center continues to improve and evolve. Conclusion Digitizing your contact center has never been more imperative for your brand and your bottom line. Your customers expect high-quality experiences during every touchpoint with your business – they reward companies that meet their expectations and walk away from those that do not. Improve your workflows, enhance your customer experience with shorter wait times and better live agent interactions, and create a contact center that works smarter and saves money. Contact us today to learn how to dramatically improve your contact center and deliver the experiences your customers have been looking for from your contact center.

Imagine turning your contact center into one of the most efficient, cost-effective, and most loved customer touchpoints in your organization? You can—by making WhatsApp a key part of your customer communication path and seamlessly weaving together intelligent automation and human-agent interactions. Here’s how. Eliminate costly repetition. Repeat. Up to 80 percent of incoming calls involve questions or issues that have been reported by and solved for other customers. Another study found that agents only answer their questions 50 percent of the time. While the actual numbers vary for your contact center, enabling an experience where your most frequently asked questions are answered immediately, automatically, and consistently in a trusted channel like WhatsApp is one of the most effective, and cost-effective, ways to enhance your customer experience. When done right, not only do customers not mind the inclusion of automated responses in WhatsApp, they appreciate the time they save, the ability to get answers any time and from any location and device—without having to deal with an IVR, sit on hold, or wait for a response via email or callback. The best solution is a combination of automated bot interaction, coupled with the option to connect to a live agent should the customer wish to do so. With technologies like call deflection the client can request an agent to phone them from the WhatApp menu and Clickatell’s orchestration engine, Flow, will add the call to a contact center queue which will then trigger an outbound call for the agent. Introducing the Clickatell Touch Platform Built to help you easily meet the needs of today’s instant-answer, chat-loving customer, Clickatell Touch is a no-code solution that enables you to pull together and push out an automated FAQ process to your customer base in just a few hours. Clickatell Touch Flow Our intuitive orchestration engine lets anyone in your organization jump in and designs your customer assistance path—with no technical or coding experience needed. Clickatell Flow is an easy way to implement a bot-based FAQ experience. Touch Flow also enables companies to integrate backend service to offer personalized and client-specific content to the end-user. Clickatell Chat Desk lets you easily bring human interaction into the experience. With Chat Desk, your customers can connect with a live agent right from WhatsApp if they aren’t getting what they need from your automated answers. This delivers not only the ideal experience for the customer, but also enables any brand to have live agent support at their fingertips. Together, Clickatell Flow + Clickatell Chat Desk gives your enterprise a complete end-to-end contact center solution that delivers what your customer wants and needs—in a way that’s easy to set up, maintain, and update. Create and deploy flows and interactions once and distribute across multiple channels Use drag and drop functionality to build your business logic and interactions once for WhatsApp. Want to branch out to other channels Facebook Messenger, Google My Business Messaging (coming soon)? No problem. You can easily apply new channels in just a few steps to take advantage of the functionality nuances inherent in each channel. Speed up your time to market No tech or code knowledge needed. Within a few hours, any business user in your organization can design the flow of your FAQ experience for WhatsApp, and deploy it with the click of a button. Want something custom or to integrate backend systems? Clickatell also provides professional services to assist Rely on Natural Language Processing (Agent Assist) Advanced natural language processing in Chat Desk recognizes the way we humans speak to connect your customer to the right information. When your customer types, “I want to return something,” Chat Desk uses the relevant works to create context and provides the contact center agent with suggested responses that they can then edit and customize accordingly before sending. Create an escalation process Including an option to connect to one of your live agents puts user experience at the forefront—and gives the customer a clear path to resolution. At Clickatell, we are all for enabling great user experience, and when a client cannot find what they want on the FAQ section you can seamlessly enable them to connect with a live agent via WhatsApp. Regardless of requirements, it is by far the best customer experience—and one that lets you leverage the significant expertise of your contact center staff. Leverage your existing tech stack Clickatell Flow and Clickatell Chat Desk give your seamless end-to-end solution that is as easy to use as it is to implement. However, if you’ve already invested in an orchestration engine or agent desk, they seamlessly work and co-exist with your existing tech stack. With so much riding on the customer experience today, successful companies can’t afford to delight their customer at every turn. The great part? It’s actually very win-win, enabling the customer to access what they want in the quickest and simplest way—while at the same time freeing up the most expensive aspect of your contact center, your live agents, to focus in on the more involved and unique situations that demand human interaction. Want to find out more? Curious about how automating responses to your company’s most FAQ? Find out more here. source: Google Books

Think of a recent call you made to a call center. Almost assuredly, your experience was disappointing. Between seemingly never-ending menu trees, long hold times, dropped calls, and finally reaching a customer care agent—only to find out she’s not the right one to help you—it’s unsatisfying all around. What’s more, the customer is likely already upset before they call—a full 66 percent of them were according to a recent survey . But these calls are critical and it is a business imperative to get it right. Your customers are calling, of course, because they couldn’t resolve their issue or query another way. To win them over, the best thing your company can do is to help them get what they need, quickly, in as few steps as possible. The cost of not doing so, of having a customer having a negative experience, is steep. According to customer service expert Ruby Newell-Legner, it takes 12 positive customer experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience. Worse, many of today’s customers won’t complain, they simply won’t come back. Forward-thinking, high-growth companies need innovative thinking in every area of their business—and the contact center and call center is no exception. It must deliver a streamlined and efficient experience that not only satisfies your customer but delights her. Here’s how to start: 1. Evaluate how well your contact center aligns to your larger company customer experience Identify the points in your contact center where the customer experience is not meeting your standards. Map the customer journey Identify the top reasons customers call. In nearly every business, a handful of reasons generate the majority of calls. Once you’ve identified three to five reasons, map a customer journey for each. What information is the customer getting before they call—through an in-person visit, an email, a letter, or interaction with an app or website? How about after? How are customer issues handled downstream? Mapping the customer journey reveals inconsistencies, bottlenecks, and/or failures that consistently yield callbacks, which can easily yield  20-30% of calls. Crunch the numbers Collect the data and establish benchmarks that you can measure against as you retool your customer contact experience. Measure the customer experience: What is your average call abandonment rate, percentage or blocked calls, and average time a customer is in the queue before they reach an agent? Check in on your response: measure your  service level so you know the percentage of incoming calls answered within a certain period of time. What is your average speed of answer (ASA), average handle time (AHT), and after-call work time spent on tasks like writing call notes, updating data in a CRM, or emailing the caller? How often are call issues resolved on the first call (FCR) and how many hours a day are your agents are involved in work-related activities? The goal of measuring all the above is to provide your customers with a better customer experience. Customer satisfaction is the ultimate KPI, one to measure frequently through after-call customer surveys. Ask questions Survey your customers: What are the biggest pain points in their customer service experience with you? What is working well? Dig into your operations: Where are they struggling? What would help them? Ask your agents: What particular frustrations do they hear again and again from customers? What would allow them to help customers more effectively 2. Reimagine your call center as a pivotal brand builder By weaving together direct agent interaction with technology solutions, you can deliver a truly interconnected, seamless experience that is richer and more immediate and pleasing to customers. Your contact center can be a high watermark of your customer’s experience. Key components consider: Artificial intelligence , initially used for call routing, is increasingly becoming a more robust tool for more direct service tasks Strong analytics let you to turn data—like call and screen recordings, chats, SMS messages and more—into truly useful feedback for your agents Omnichannel communications enable a customer journey to begin on one channel and enable the communication to seamlessly continue in a completely different channel Widespread adoption of cloud communications creates a site-agnostic contact center that lets you easily grow and contract Continued emphasis on self-serve gives customers instant access, thus reducing call center volume Two-way social media conversations create a superb customer experience by unifying communications across channels into one stream There are many options available to address the above. Some tackle one piece only, others bundle multiple aspects together. Look at the areas you identified in step one as wanting to enhance in your contact center as you consider what is right for your company. 3. Re-engineer your call center (now customer center) to be customer first Chat technologies, including automated FAQ bots and human-in-the-loop solutions that pull in humans to verify initial assumptions made by machine learning, top the list of the technologies that will create immediate efficiency and heighten contact center customer experiences. What’s more, they utilize the everyday chat technologies that customers use daily, to talk to family and friends. They create an easy and intimate connection with your customer that is unique, based on capturing customer data before initiating a chat and providing a unified conversational experience. Your agents provide a more efficient, more satisfying way for your customers to get their queries answered, while at the same time reducing call volumes. Clickatell’s 20 years of experience with forward-thinking global brands shows that the optimal approach is one that brings it all together in one end-to-end solution. The Clickatell Touch Platform seamlessly incorporates mobile chat apps into your contact centers, enabling your agents and chatbots to instantly resolve customer queries using SMS messaging and popular chat applications including WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. What’s more, Touch integrates with your existing support, CRM, and enterprise systems—or it can be used as a stand-alone customer support tool. Touch is unique in the marketplace because it combines AI chatbots, automation and human-in-the-loop technologies for a more streamlined, customer-centric call center experience that delivers a great experience to your customers—and across your company internally. Contact us today to find out how chat solutions can help you turn your customer support experience into a function that truly puts the customer first.

Lengthy contact center wait times and annoying IVRs are challenging for both businesses and customers. Expectations for call center experiences are already low, with many people expecting long hold times, call bounces, and repetitive security protocols even before stating their query. Add to this the uncertainty and even higher call volumes borne from the Covid-19 pandemic and difficult call center customer experiences are becoming worse. These customer experiences don’t have to be negative. In fact, with the implementation of the right new technology, your contact center process can become one of the bright spots of your customer engagement. Poor Customer Experiences Damage Brand Loyalty and Reduce Sales Business leaders understand that negative customer experiences damage a brand’s reputation and hurt the bottom line. And the data supports this. Forrester Research on the future of customer service found that 53 percent of US online adults would likely abandon their online purchase if they could not find a quick answer to their question; 73 percent said that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with good online customer service. Research company Walker found that by the end of 2020, customer experience will become the top brand differentiator, topping both price and product as the key brand differentiator. According to Temkin Group , companies with earnings that exceed $1 billion can expect to realize an additional $700 million within 3 years of investing in customer experience. In our hyper competitive world, customers expect personalized experiences and vote with their pocketbooks. Quite simply, the companies that fail to deliver top notch customer experiences in customer support and contact centers will have a near and longer-term impact on sales. Every business tries to prevent or mitigate difficult customer experiences across the business. For example, Target and Amazon have developed sophisticated systems to ensure returns are fast, easy, and no-questions-asked - a happy customer is a repeat customer. They know that any negative experiences may mean that their customers will go to a competitor for their next purchase. Most companies understand the frustrations of their contact center and call center customer experience. The human element of support centers make time to resolutions lengthy and scaling the process a challenge. Also, there are different numbers for customers to reach specific departments (support, sales, queries, returns, and more) that make it complicated for customers. Fortunately, there is a solution now that can help address these core problems – messaging through popular social chat applications. Chat based Solutions Improve Call Center Customer Experience Chat based engagement platforms offer cost effective, easy-to-implement, and operate customer care solutions to alleviate voice based call center limitations. Not only does chat allow customers to use a channel they already feel comfortable using, but it also allows asynchronous communication, support, and engagement with customers that a voice-based approach cannot do. Chat based solutions can scale up call center operations by allowing for call centers to receive their customer queries instantly and be able to respond and resolve in-channel without keeping the customer “on hold”. Consumers are already chat savvy. They prefer to communicate through chat messaging, as evidenced by the reduction of voice calls and peer to peer SMS and usage worldwide. Digital natives, tech savvy Gen X and Baby Boomers are very comfortable using social media applications or live-chat platforms to communicate with brands. Customers have come to expect fast, seamless brand interactions across all touchpoints – and delivering them as part of contact center experiences don’t just make good business sense, it’s common sense. At Clickatelll, we offer Self-Service options to help businesses get started to enable contact center chat experiences and tools like Flow that can help you automate your customer journeys across multiple channels. Flow is capable of delivering a wide range of business responses – from general queries and frequently asked questions, to account information look-ups and convenience/utility workflows. We have enabled scores of businesses to enable chat to streamline their customer support functions and we can help your business too. Contact us today to find out how to chat solutions can help you turn your customer support experience into a function that truly puts the customer first.