Remember the supposed “good old days” when your customers dialed your toll-free number, explained their problem to someone on your help desk staff, and went away happy, or happy-ish?

The system wasn’t perfect. It also wasn’t the obstacle course it is now – for customers and businesses alike.

Your Frustrated Customer 

In the name of efficiency, and naturally only with the best of intentions, you’ve succeeded in turning customers’ remote interaction attempts into Odyssean quests of heroic proportions. 

Live chat platforms, SMS texting, social media, and mobile apps with integrated feedback features have sped up response times and automated answers to customers’ routine questions. But the reality is that in the digital era, the customer who’s looking to resolve a more complex issue – or two issues at once – is going to have a hard time of it. 

It’s no wonder 53% of customers abandon their online purchases. 

But what about your faithful customer who’s trying to resolve a support issue, and also has a question about a new product? They have no idea your help desk and your CRM don’t talk to each other. All they know is that their experience is anything but seamless, and absolutely frustrating. Forced to repeat account numbers and other information to multiple people or platforms, while being passed from pillar to post, is simply enraging.

For you, the increased churn that results from poor customer experience is just the tip of the iceberg. Because chat is just one element in a multi-layered ecosystem that requires you to handle different types of customer interactions with separate tools and strategies, you have a bunch of other problems too. 

A disjointed approach ends up creating a poor customer experience that degrades customer satisfaction and increases churn

Why It’s Time to Evolve to Unified Chat

For better or worse, today, real-time messaging and conversational tools such as live chat, SMS, chatbots, and social media are now the dominant channels for customer experience management. Alongside the risk of negative customer experiences, the following are some of the challenges arising from the fact that these channels are not integrated, and each requires a separately managed platform:

• Incomplete information: Without synergies between systems, the flow of data and customer feedback is impeded. This means leaders are unable to gain an accurate picture of the health of their business and make informed decisions around improvements in sales productivity and customer support.
• Difficulty scaling customer support, sales, and marketing functions: Configuring multiple platforms and tying their back-end systems together requires hefty integration and data aggregation efforts. These are costly and resource intensive. 
• Bloated costs, redundant services: Where sales and support teams both need to use the CRM’s chat option and the helpdesk’s chat option, the company must purchase not two, but four sets of digital engagement licenses. Then, since the platforms work in isolation, the company will also pay redundant chat deflection fees for every conversation not handled by a human. 

It’s time to evolve chat

Modern chat isn’t only one tool, it’s an integral aspect of a complex communicative ecosystem. Today’s business ecosystem demands organizations to properly address all kinds of customer interactions with non-integrated, specialized tools and strategies. When companies approach the digital space in a way both disjointed and separate, they create a negative experience for customers that erodes satisfaction and balloons churn. A unified customer experience is missing.

In today’s world, online communication isn’t simply a bonus, it’s mandatory. Many businesses annually spend millions attempting to dislodge internal silos and improve all facets of conversation and collaboration. That said, many of these companies also build and buy disjunct and unintegrated technology stacks, further making those exact same silos in the first place. To be competitive in the digital space, it’s mandatory to unify the customer experience and adapt a unified live chat solution.

What are your top requirements in a digital conversation solution?

Live chat is one of the most valuable channels for engaging, converting, acquiring, and retaining customers. However, with so many options to choose from it’s become challenging for businesses to differentiate between vendors and evaluate potential solutions against business goals and requirements.

Use this live chat buyer’s guide to select and rank your business’s priorities, learn more about key considerations to keep in mind, and formulate a list of critical questions to ask potential live chat vendors.

What’s Your Live Chat Strategy for 2021?

In 2020, we ran an extensive survey of our clients to better understand their live chat expectations and strategies for 2021. We’ve anonymized and aggregated the results so that we can share these insights with you. Respondents are from a variety of industries, including the Information Technology sector, Consumer Discretionary sector, Healthcare, Communication Services and Non-profit sectors, the Financial, and Industrials and Materials.

It’s important to note that we have defined “SMB” as organizations with 1-500 employees and “Enterprise” as organizations with 500+ employees.

We have found that this breakdown aligns well with how companies implement chat. Those with over 500 employees tend to have far more complex use cases, while those under 500 typically have more focused implementations.

Reach more people across new channels

Around the world, organizations are adopting digital transformation initiatives and investing in new technologies at an accelerating rate. Enterprises across industries are seeking what “digital-first” organizations already know: digital tools that create new growth opportunities, increase competitive advantage, help control costs, and improve operating efficiency.

For complex, customer-centric enterprises — those with multiple lines of business or a presence in multiple markets — digital transformation is more than just backend efficiency. They also need to deliver superior digital customer experiences across all platforms. Because when they do, they can boost customer satisfaction rates by as much as 20-30% and increase revenues by as much as 50%.
Complete the form to download our E-book & learn more.

Rapid change drives the rush to transform

Tomorrow will bring new expectations, furthering the need for greater flexibility, agility, and responsiveness of a digitally transformed organization. Direct customer conversations and elevated experiences are vital to competing in an evolving digital-first landscape because getting them right can lead to many positive outcomes.

Undertaking a project to digitally transform the customer experience is increasingly necessary, but it doesn’t come without risk.

Staring Down an Existential Crisis

Enterprises have long looked to business process outsourcers (BPOs) to handle front-line customer support, incremental revenue programs, and lead generation efforts because outsourcing these services is essential to free up in-house resources so they can focus on more strategic activities.

But as a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) powered chatbots and customer engagement systems emerges, many BPO companies and even internal contact center leaders worry that technology will replace the need for qualified, well organized, human-powered customer support and engagement teams that are core to their business. Complete the form to download our E-book & read more.

New Challenges Create Uncertainty