How to Make a Cost-Effective Digital Transformation in 2021

Posted on by suzanneleigh

In 2021, companies that continue to underestimate the need for technical and culture change will find it difficult to compete — let alone survive. The pressure placed on enterprises by the pandemic to move more business processes online has made cost-effective digital transformation an urgent matter.

Abrupt economic disruptions caused by the coronavirus caught many enterprises in various stages of digital initiatives off guard, forcing a rapid shift in spending priorities. 

This has led to more and more companies rolling out their digital transformation in phases. Using targeted technology aimed at immediate solutions, organizations are able to gradually employ new strategies to stay agile and competitive rather than making huge investments in comprehensive digital overhauls. 

Find out how incorporating the right tech tools enables cost-effective digital transformation that more than keeps you afloat without completely rocking the boat, or the budget. 

 

What is digital transformation?

 

Digital transformation is technology-enabled change — change in business processes, roles, workflow, customer engagement, and company culture.

Digital transformation often means shedding long-standing business processes and legacy systems in favor of relatively new practices that are continuously being innovated. But it doesn’t have to happen all at once.

You can still meet digital challenges without having to forfeit a massive amount of resources and time — and with minimal disruption.

 

Digital transformation is never complete because it isn’t static.

In truth, as technology continues to advance, we are the ones who transform by adapting to it — and the culture that grows up around it. Because of this, IT and enterprise business leaders are increasingly opting for a phased digital transformation approach. 

By adopting a combination of cost-effective smart bots, live chat, and custom automation, companies can achieve their digital objectives, empower employees, and deliver better customer experiences.

 

Why digital transformation is critical now

 

Digital life and social media had already changed consumers’ perspective of promptness and efficiency before the pandemic. The immediacy and availability of everything online have increased consumer expectations.

Restrictions placed on movement and purchasing behavior have fueled consumers’ expectations — and put incredible pressure on enterprises to adapt immediately. 

 

End-user experience drives digital transformation

 

Companies are finding that there is a gap between what they can deliver and what consumers need.

In a digitally transformed culture, you need to adapt to your audience if you want them to engage with you. This translates to seamless, compelling customer experiences across all locations, teams, and platforms. 

Companies need to transform digitally because consumers already have.

2021’s consumers want consistency. They hate repeating themselves to different agents. They expect their information to be right in front of you, no matter who or where you are and what platform, channel, or device you’re on.

As most consumers use a mixture of digital channels and devices, enterprises need uniform reach across all consumer channels to create a consistent brand experience. 

 

Engage customers wherever they are

 

You don’t need a significant increase in overhead for digital transformation. Artificial intelligence (AI) powered tools like chatbots are even more cost-effective than a phone call. 

Chat’s omnichannel reach allows you to meet customers wherever they are by integrating with your website, social media channels, and SMS. 

Interacting with visitors on your site adds that extra human touch that makes it easier to gain their trust and move forward. Chat can even tap into diverse markets with multilingual capabilities.

Live chat is also a leading player in relationship marketing. Its customizable features demonstrate your brand’s personality and gain trust. In today’s unsettled world, consumer confidence is incomparable when building the relationships necessary to retain long-term customers. 

 

Track your progress with analytics

 

Chat analytics give you a clear overview of your best-performing channels. This makes it easier for your marketing teams to shift channel strategies towards your best performers. 

Analytics help you understand how your customers use different touchpoints along their purchasing journey. The insight gained from analytics can tell you about the experience clients had interacting with your brand so that you can make informed decisions going forward.

For deeper performance insights, you can even integrate Google analytics and expand event tracking capabilities, such as tracking the engagement rate of a Proactive chat, or any other trackable event.  

 

Give employees the tech tools they need to perform 

 

The pandemic has changed how employees communicate and perform. It’s made it difficult for staff to deal with information overload and technology sprawl as more and more business processes are pushed online.

Technology and user experience are inextricably woven in digital transformation — Employees are end-users, too. With an ever-increasing number of channels and devices, communications are coming from every direction.

Remember, it’s not the technology itself that transforms but the people using it. Take a more holistic approach to digital transformation by making it user-centric. Companies need to look through the lens of digital employees and aim for a seamless and productive digital experience.

 

Internal communications affect customer service.

When you have multiple teams across locations, you need strategic tools like smart global routing techniques to scale real-time interactions throughout your organization.

SnapEngage Smart Routing Technology can intelligently route customers taking pressure off of staff. Routing technology can capture simple requests and respond through automation or route customers to the appropriate team agent or team. Bots can solve issues from many angles.

  • Chatbots recognize where visitors are coming from making it easier to route them to the right employee the first time.
  • Smart bots empower teams by freeing them up to focus on more complex customer solutions without sacrificing leads or simple customer support.
  • Guide Bots generate more visitor engagement with contextually appropriate messaging and guide customers to the right solution instantly.
  • Answer bots connected with any supported knowledge database decrease resolution time and provide self-service capabilities for customers by responding to up to 80% of routine questions.  
  • Info Capture Bots capture needed client information even when employees are offline or unavailable — maximizing lead potential.
  • Chatbot API enables clients to develop their own Chatbot solution (on any platform) and fully integrate it with SnapEngage. 
  • Agent Tiers and a chatbot online allow you to leverage staff skillsets and reduce client queue time while providing 24/7/365 customer service across all time zones. 

Smart bots and configurable automation workflows that integrate with databases allow employees to deliver the kind of digital customer experience that exceeds consumer expectations

 

Ongoing support for cost-effective digital transformation tech tools

 

Many feel that the pandemic induced digital working life is like toothpaste out of the tube — it’s never going back. It’s even been referred to as a defining point in working history. Enterprises need to consider how employees will evolve with changing technology.

Rip-and-replace digital transformation strategies are expensive and disruptive.

A rip-and-replace digital transformation event would require a significant investment in onboarding and ongoing training. But cost-effective digital transformation tech tools like SnapEngage make it easy for your staff to stay abreast of changing tech without the expense. 

SnapEngage chat tools reduce infrastructure costs and increase performance by offering professional onboarding assistance services and award-winning client support. 

Help Center makes it easy for remote employees to access information independently to answer their own questions.

Analytics help you discover trends amongst staff. You’ll be able to identify high performers, and know where you might need to provide additional support.

 

Why you need strong technology partners 

 

Data governance is a hot topic in 2021. Data will continue to grow exponentially, but data governance has only been buzzing in the background for several years. This is no longer the case. Today data governance is no longer negotiable.

The ability to collect, store, protect, unlock, analyze, and act on data is not only foundational to growth but paramount to survival. 

While moving to the cloud may be the primary driver behind many digital transformation initiatives, cloud migration is better thought of as an evolution rather than an event. 

A hybrid-cloud environment can support a smoother transition as resources are migrated from legacy platforms to cloud services over time. 

Many SaaS applications and cloud strategies exist today, such as Salesforce, Hubspot, and others, making cost-effective digital transformation accessible to organizations of all sizes. 

SnapEngage integrates seamlessly to work in tandem with a broad range of CRM, helpdesk, project management, knowledge base, and other database and workflow systems providing you with the data you need when you need it.  

 

Choose technology partners that you can trust

 

Enhanced data privacy and security laws have emerged both internationally and in many US states.

Laws such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) demand meticulous data governance with severe penalties for non-compliance. 

As data privacy becomes convention, transparency and trust are the new major players in generating brand loyalty.

Properly structuring and protecting data collection, data streams, and data storage are vital to avoid data privacy compliance risk.

If your technology partners aren’t compliant, you aren’t.

For you to be in compliance with data privacy laws, your technology partners must be compliant.

The first step in discovering your organization’s compliance risk level is to understand how to comply with data privacy policies. 

SnapEngage upholds data privacy compliance principles for all global users. We’re committed to staying abreast of privacy policy changes with continual updates of new features for easier compliance. 

 

Targeted technologies grow with you 

 

The agility of a hybrid approach allows you to scale with demand faster — with less effort and expense. Cost control is easier when you don’t have to worry about a significant upfront investment.

Targeted technologies can solve a host of issues by focusing on improving the end-user experience. They’re easier to adapt to and can demonstrate immediate ROI without lengthy deployment times.

User-friendly tools help staff communicate and collaborate more efficiently. The more teams are supported, the stronger your digital company culture becomes.

Live chat technology can be deployed incrementally. As you gain the experience and the data you need to take advantage of more advanced features, you can even deploy purpose-built bots to perform specific functions for more customized service.

Explore more SnapEngage live chat solutions to find out how you can take a more holistic approach to solving digital challenges with a cost-effective digital transformation.

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How to Select a Digital Conversation Solution

Posted on by marketing

Free Live Chat Buyer's Guide

Drive Revenue and Exceptional Customer Experiences

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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.



%

more leads from chat, compared to forms & email

%

increase in CSAT after implementing live chat

%

of online prospects prefer live chat for real-time resolutions

%

of consumers prefer live chat support

What’s Covered in the Buyer’s Guide?

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Leverage Chatbots and Humans for 24/7/365 Customer Service

Before going into research and demonstrations, strategize your dream chatbot scenario and ask to see how providers address it. Chatbots can qualify leads, answer frequently-asked-questions, schedule meetings, and more.

Find a Solution Tailored to You and Ramp up Smoothly

Researching, evaluating, and purchasing software and services for your business can be a challenging task. Choosing the best fit solution for your unique needs can and will have a lasting positive impact not only on your sales and customer support teams, but on your entire business.

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Keep Your Business Secure and Compliant

One of the most important considerations when researching and evaluating digital conversation providers is your organization’s internal security, privacy, and compliance protocols. These requirements are often non-negotiable and the chosen live chat vendor must comply.

Optimize Performance With Reporting and Analytics

As with any marketing, sales, or customer service endeavor, tracking performance via analytics and reporting is a central, ongoing component of a successful live chat software implementation. Choose a live chat provider that helps you track marketing, sales, and customer service KPIs related to your website chat strategy directly within the chat tool.

Convert and Retain With Integrated CRMs and Help Desks

Integrating website chat with your existing CRM and/or Help Desk makes it easier to convert MQls to SQls, optimizes the chat solution, maximizes the efficiency of your sales and customer service teams, and automates the flow of live chat data directly into your preferred platform(s).

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Improve Engagement With Omnichannel Functionality

Sales and customer service teams need to be able to communicate with prospective buyers and current clients wherever they are. today, more and more consumers routinely engage across multiple channels.

Quality Customer Service Is Paramount

It’s also critical to research and understand the post-sale experience and have a well-informed understanding of what kind of support you can expect after you become a client. Luckily, today it’s easier than ever to conduct comprehensive research on a vendor with testimonials, client case studies, third-party software review websites and more.

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Increase Engagement With Proactive Messaging

In the world of sales and customer service, the importance of timing cannot be overstated. Selecting a chat software provider that offers advanced proactive messaging capabilities will boost your website chat engagement rate while simultaneously boosting internal efficiencies.

Live Chat Use Cases

Engage Smarter With Chat

There are many things to consider when choosing live chat for your business.
Our expert Live Chat Buyer’s Guide will help you understand top considerations for sales, marketing, and customer service professionals and determine what matters most to your business.

Our 12 page digital download will help you through the process and ensure you choose the right chat based on the criteria that matters most to your business.

Download Live Chat Buyer's Guide

Introducing Reserve Tier: Flexible, Powerful Chatbot Strategies at Your Fingertips

Posted on by marketing

Custom chatbot strategies are just that – custom. These strategies typically involve chatbots and humans in a hybrid model, with each serving a different purpose. For some, chatbots are the first line of defense and human agents are backup. For others, the opposite is true.

The Reserve Tier creates easy and seamless chatbot and human combinations. It is a new functionality that pairs with our latest advanced Guide Bot as a way to smartly route visitors to the right place at the right time. The Reserve Tier enables faster, more powerful and more intuitive chat routing configurations across bots and humans to support the automation and customization needs of complex organizations.

How the Reserve Tier enables hyper-flexible customer experiences

Our State of Chat report found that businesses tend to implement chatbots to handle highly specific job functions and business workflows. For example, a proactive Guide Bot that engages visitors under only specific conditions, like when items are left in a cart. This bot has a customized set-up and content that only makes sense to visitors if they have items in their cart.

The previous best practice to ensure that no visitors accidentally end up with the “Cart Abandonment Bot” was to add this bot to its own widget. All bot conditions were controlled separately from other widgets/departments.

However, we found that this is not cohesive to the digital conversation experience. Metrics were separate and the custom bot strategy overall required more time-consuming setup and ongoing upkeep.

Enter the Reserve Tier.

With the Reserve Tier, specialized bots with one specific functionality (for example, contextual proactive bots that engage visitors with items in their cart) can exist in the same widget, or ecosystem.

These bots can be easily combined with other tiers of agents and chatbots, so that each website visitor has the unique, personalized experience they expect. This is extremely critical for business success, as research from Epsilon indicates that a whopping 80% of customers are more likely to purchase a product or service from a brand who provides personalized experiences.

The Reserve Tier simplifies complex customization and routing needs

It’s important to first understand the SnapEngage tiering system in order to understand the true value of the new Reserve Tier. Priority Tiers represent the order in which chats are assigned, with Tier 1 being the first line of defense. Tier 1 can be home to human agents and chatbots alike.

All incoming conversations route to Tier 1 first to see if an agent or bot is available. If no one is available in Tier 1, the conversation is routed to Tier 2 to check for available agents or bots. This goes on until an agent or bot is available.

Prior to the Reserve Tier, it was more challenging and time-consuming to configure customized chatbots that are not part of standard Priority Tier routing. Typically, the best way to accomplish this would have been to place each chatbot in its own widget, and then selectively embed the widget into your website wherever appropriate. As you can imagine, this is a more complicated approach and comes with its own challenges and limitations.

This situation is likely fine for an organization that does not need a complex, multi-layered bot strategy. However, we built the Reserve Tier knowing that many of our clients need to carry out highly sophisticated bot strategies and therefore require a solution for handling complex bot routing situations with ease.

The Reserve Tier makes it possible to combine many specialized chatbots in a single widget, and use them as part of proactive or multi-function bot strategies, and greatly simplifies the overall implementation. It’s also possible to add specialized human agents to the Reserve Tier (such as a team manager or a specialist) whom you do not want to include in standard chat routing.

Integrate with and maximize existing custom chatbot strategies

The Reserve Tier allows you to avoid awkward mis-routing situations by only engaging visitors under the right proactive conditions at the right moment. This flexibility allows for multiple chatbots and handoff points. For example, a chatbot might proactively ask if a visitor has billing questions, another might ask if they require product assistance. Both bots can then have conversations routed to another general bot to collect standardized visitor information for follow up.

Additionally, a Survey Bot designed only to ask customized survey questions should never be in the regular rotation for incoming visitor questions. Now, it’s possible to proactively launch a specialized Survey Guide Bot which exists in the Reserve Tier and only triggers based on key criteria.

The Reserve Tier also eliminates the need to create additional widgets for special-case bots, which greatly simplifies setup, upkeep and even reporting.

Example scenarios to help you incorporate Reserve Tier into your 2021 chatbot strategies

Whether you fall into one of the following four verticals or if you’re looking to drive customer engagement in a completely different vertical, these common scenarios can be applied readily to your unique business and operations workflows. Here’s a few sample ideas to get you started:

Scenario 1: Implement multiple “secondary” proactive bots for a manufacturing company

A manufacturing company has several proactive bots that initiate whenever a lead views certain products on the website (such as tools, safety equipment, or accessories). After a website visitor engages with one of the conditional proactive bots, the lead is transferred to a shared general bot where they input standard information such as email, phone, company name, budget and timeline to purchase. Then, the lead is routed to a human sales agent who uses this prior data to quickly and easily set appropriate next steps with the lead.

Scenario 2: Implement a proactive survey bot to gather customer feedback for a healthcare practice

A healthcare practice would like to collect Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey data from patients after they complete and submit an online health questionnaire. They would like to use a proactive chatbot to accomplish this so that the entire process can be automated. They set up a survey Guide Bot (using the Rating prompt Step type) to ask how likely the patient would be to recommend the practice’s services to a friend or colleague (on a scale from 1-10) and place this bot in the Reserve Tier. Then, they set up a special proactive rule which will launch the survey Guide Bot whenever a patient submits the health questionnaire.

Scenario 3: Enable complex configurations with human agents participating in multiple widgets for an e-commerce company

An e-commerce company that sells outdoor gear has a human agent, Emilio, who is trained to provide support across all company product lines and is configured on the following product line widgets: Footwear, Climbing, Camping, Men’s Outerwear and Biking. Every few days based on order volume and current demand, Emilio rotates product lines based on which area is experiencing the highest demand and requires more backup support. As needed, the SnapEngage Admin (also Emilio’s manager) moves Emilio to the Reserve Tier for product lines experiencing low demand and keeps him in standard Priority Tier routing for other product lines experiencing high demand.

Scenario 4: Set up specialists or managers to handle specialized and escalated inquiries for a banking institution

A bank has a Customer Service team of human agents who assist with general banking customer service and questions about topics such as making a payment, ordering checks, applying for a credit card, loans and fraud reporting. All of these Customer Service team agents exist in Tier 1 and handle all incoming chats from the bank’s website. In addition, the banking team has one human agent who specializes in Fraud and another human agent who specializes in Loans. These two agents are configured in the Reserve Tier to ensure they don’t receive standard customer service inquiries so they can focus on other tasks. Whenever a customer has in-depth questions about Fraud or Loans that the Customer Service agents cannot resolve, those agents can perform a direct transfer to one of the specialized human agents that exist in the Reserve Tier.

You can also learn more about the Reserve Tier here. Stay tuned for more product updates, including the upcoming Post-Chat Survey Bot release.

Are you ready to drive increased customer satisfaction results with your customer base? Our team of dedicated bot experts can help you determine the best ways to use the new Reserve Tier to enhance your existing bot strategies and achieve your 2021 customer engagement goals.

Schedule a chatbot strategy session now

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Law Firm Tech Tools to Reach a Broader Legal Audience

Posted on by suzanneleigh

Regions across the US and EU are home to multiple different language speakers. The SnapEngage Berlin office, for example, hosts native Greek, Turkish, Spanish, and French speakers, to name a few. Many law firms are challenged to increase diversity across the board. But even if you don’t yet have multiple in-house language speakers, simple tech tools can help law firms reach a broader legal audience. 

Reach a broader legal audience with more diverse messaging 

Many firms are adopting both in-house and outsourced translators for legal client interpretation services to support a more diverse client base. Human translators are necessary when it comes to the precision of legal language. 

But human translators are expensive and can only be used so far. Not all law firms can support multilingual chat agents for customer service, marketing, and onboarding new clients.

If you want to reach a more diverse audience, you’ll need to support more diverse messaging. 

Law firm tech tools that manage this for you to help you reach more diverse language speakers and increase your client base. 

Depending on your structure, you can either refer potential clients to your Interpretation Services team for onboarding or set up an appointment with translation services and securely accept payment from web site visitors — entirely in their native language.

Measurable Goal:

Increase client base by reaching a broader audience.

How:

Empower chat teams to speak 100+ languages. Upsell translations.

Outcome:

Onboard more clients, increase referrals, and maximize caseloads.

Empower all teams to chat and book appointments in multiple languages 

Easily remove the barriers non-English speaking prospective clients face by encouraging site visitors to use their own language in the chatbox using Auto Translator. If a visitor starts a chat in a different language, SnapEngage will automatically detect it and translate it for the agent. The agent can respond in their native language, and SnapEngage will translate it again for the site visitor into their language. .

Cater to the languages you have internal support for  

If you offer Interpretation Services for specific common languages, you can easily set up Live Chat Shortcuts to inform the visitor of your language services. 

For example,  Shortcuts can let visitors know about your firm’s language options — “I speak English and am using Auto-Translate to chat with you in your language. We have Interpretation Services in Spanish for in-person appointments.  I will help you schedule an appointment with our Spanish-speaking Interpretation team.” 

Sell translation services and securely accept payment via chat 

If you outsource language support, you can create a system to set up appointments for that as well ‘— all in the site visitors’ own language. SnapEngage is easily customizable to your organization’s structure, size, and capabilities.

For example, if you charge for translation services in French and Spanish, you can create different Widgets in Design Studio to separate Spanish speakers and French speakers. 

Agents will receive chats from these widgets, can take payments through Secure Data Transfer, and apply them within your payment system to set up a translation assisted appointment.

Tools to reach a broader legal audience

Speak more languages, book more appointments with Auto-Translate

Cater to specific languages using Widgets and the Design Studio

Gather payment information with Secure Data Transfer

Build rapport through effective communication in all languages

Booking new client meetings is all about building rapport through effective communication.

Meeting clients in the language they understand creates satisfied clients who will market for you within their own communities. 

Diverse clients celebrate businesses that cater to their needs. Let SnapEngage help you reach a more diverse audience with some simple tools. 

Book a Demo to learn more about how Chat Technology can elevate your firm

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CRM Chat Integrations Maximize Legal Lead Capture

Posted on by suzanneleigh

Law firms that adopt technology for client intake and operational efficiencies are pulling ahead of those that don’t. In 2020 alone, law firms using CRM integrations for legal lead capture and client management saw a 26% increase in revenue.  

Technologies that streamline client intake and management help generate new casework and assist in creating trusting relationships with clients by enabling quicker engagement and more efficient routing.

Chat and CRM integration increase legal lead capture 

In competitive markets, law firms need faster engagement with potential clients. Consumers’ expectations have advanced, along with technology. Firms slow to respond to client inquiries in a digital age will struggle to keep up. 

By integrating SnapEngage with your law firm’s CRM, such as Salesforce, Hubspot, or others, you’ll be able to automatically capture lead information, schedule callbacks, and categorize and manage leads by legal department — even after hours or when no agents are available.

 

Measurable goal:
  • Increased legal lead capture
  • Efficient client management
How:
  • Schedule calls with offline forms
  • Categorize, filter, and manage inquiring leads with your CRM
Outcome:
  • Increased caseload = increased revenue 
  • Better client engagement for building trust and rapport

 

Quickstart Legal Lead Capture Toolkit

Customize client intake with Proactive Chat. Chat analytics help you understand which pages on your site perform the best. You can create triggers on your site that fire Proactive Chat messages for visitors. 

Customize your Proactive Chat messages to collect valuable information that is automatically captured by your CRM for future lead nurturing. Test different Proactive Chat messages to discover improvements and enhance visitor engagement. 

Schedule phone appointments after hours by creating offline forms in Design Studio. When clients visit your site after hours, use an offline form created in Design Studio that connects directly with your CRM to schedule a call. 

Once a visitor completes an offline form, a task is automatically created for a team member who can easily see their itinerary as soon as they enter the CRM. 

Offline leads allow clients to book appointments directly into your law firm’s calendar so that agents can find them immediately. 

Categorize leads 24/7 regardless of whether agents are online or not. Easily categorize leads using Labels when team members are online to route visitors to the correct legal department’s available agent. Labels allow you to customize your call routing according to the legal specializations of your firm.

When agents are unavailable, client data is integrated and categorized in your CRM for easy follow-up and lead nurturing later. Even information from dispositioned chats (chats that are ended) can be collected and organized for more efficient client management.   

 

Grow your law firm’s caseload with your legal lead capture toolkit

 

Proactively reach out to site visitors using Proactive Chat
Customize online and offline visitor experiences with Design Studio
Organize online conversations with Labels
Streamline the new client process with a CRM integration 

Convert more legal leads into legal cases

When your firm can manage leads in a systematic and structured way, you’ll be able to convert more of those leads into clients which will increase your firm’s caseload and revenue. 

Lead tracking and management categorizes your leads and makes it simple to prioritize and manage inbound customer communications. Client intake via chat with CRM integration reduces the number of lost client opportunities. It provides you with a clear advantage over firms that take longer to respond to client inquiries.

Get started with legal tech solutions today that can help you create a streamlined system for client communications management that allows your team to focus on client legal issues instead of client management.

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Live Chat for Contact Centers – 7 steps to the perfect integration

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Most traditional contact center systems were originally designed to provide phone support only. Live chat through digital channels is often either an afterthought or not available at all. While many of these providers have started to add digital channels such as web chat or SMS – these live chat features are not nearly as developed or comprehensive as a dedicated live chat solution like SnapEngage. For this reason, it makes sense to use SnapEngage for omnichannel live chat alongside your contact center software.

Fortunately, SnapEngage has been designed to integrate well with contact-center systems. This allows you to keep the best of both worlds – premium phone services combined with world-class live chat. The following seven features describe how to make this integration as seamless as possible.

1. Integration API

The SnapEngage Integration API allows developers to easily interface SnapEngage with other applications, sending chat transcripts and data to the system of record. Typically this will be the contact center software itself, but may also be a CRM (SnapEngage has many dedicated CRM integrations as well). This ensures that any conversations that take place in chat are kept with other client conversations like phone records.

2. Get Contact API

The open Get Contact API allows SnapEngage to retrieve a customer’s information from an external system of record. The API can use the visitor’s email address to look up the rest of their information from your customer database. You can use it to determine exactly which data you would like passed to SnapEngage. For example, contact information like name and phone number, or a record of recent conversations.

3. Agent Status API

It is very difficult to handle both live chats and phone calls at the same time. Some organizations solve this by creating separate teams for each. However, this approach can be inefficient. Ideally, the entire system could notice when an agent was on the phone, and not send them chats until the phone call was finished. Likewise, the chat system should let the phone system know if an agent is busy with one or more chats. The Agent Status API does exactly this – it allows you to synchronize the status of your agents across both systems ensuring maximum flexibility and efficiency, without the need to manage teams separately.

4. “Call Me” Integrated Telephony

Sometimes during a chat, an agent or customer decides that a phone call would be easier or more effective. The SnapEngage “Call Me” enables either to transition the conversation to a phone call. The system bridges the two using either computer audio OR your existing telephony system. The call is direct, and doesn’t require the customer to navigate an IVR menu, or repeat their problem – they are connected directly to the agent they had been chatting with.

5. Logs API

The SnapEngage Logs API allows developers to batch-export the logs for a particular SnapEngage workspace or entire account. This API provides a good way to customize your own reporting, and send this data to third-party applications such as a CRM, call-center or Business Intelligence tool. It is one more way to ensure that all your data stays in sync.

6. Single Sign-on

One of the common objections to using two separate software systems is that it requires agents to “sign on” twice, and manage 2 separate accounts. With the SingleSignOn (SSO) feature, it is possible to login to SnapEngage using a SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) identity provider, rather than logging into SnapEngage with a username/password from our sign-in page. In a nutshell, SAML is a standard for authentication that allows a user to login one time for separate web applications that require password authentication. By providing your team with their SSO accounts, they will be able to login to SnapEngage (and call center software) once without having to create and manage different login information and passwords.

By implementing SAML, SnapEngage is not strictly tied to only one SSO provider but can potentially be used with any of them using the SAML protocol. We have an established integration with Okta but we would be happy to test any other SAML Single Sign On provider you are using.

7. Combined Interfaces

If you want to take your call-center integration all the way, you can combine parts of the two systems’ interfaces. SnapEngage has the ability to embed external pages into the SnapEngage UI itself (for example, certain pages or data from your call center software). Alternatively, it is also possible to embed the SnapEngage chat Hub interface into a call center window. Either approach helps ensure the most seamless integration for your agents.

If you are operating a traditional call center and would like to add world-class omnichannel live chat and chatbot capabilities, contact us about making the integration work for you.

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How SnapEngage Builds Great Products by Listening to Clients

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Hint: it doesn’t mean always saying “yes”.

For well over a decade, client feedback has formed the cornerstone of everything we do at SnapEngage. We’re passionate about building successful products that bring value to our clients, and we deeply believe that the only way we can accomplish this mission is by listening to client feedback. As Scott Miraglia writes, “Customer feedback is the fuel that will help you connect the dots between design, technology and business to create amazing products.”

At the end of the day, we believe what matters most is how real, everyday users perceive, feel and interact with our product. 

Like many product companies, we routinely receive high volumes of product feedback and new requests from all kinds of clients. Some of these requests are little enhancements, some are massive requests that would take months and an entire team of engineers to complete, and most fall somewhere in between.

Upon hearing this, your first instinct may be to assume that our #1 goal as a customer-obsessed product company is to approve and ultimately carry out as many of these customer requests as possible. After all, isn’t this the next logical step in the process? Isn’t the customer always right?

Yes. And no. 

Customers are always right in the sense that their perceptions and requests are an accurate reflection of what they are experiencing and what they are trying to accomplish in their day-to-day lives. And, like everyone else working on software products, we have limited resources and time. To be successful, we must achieve a core mission that focuses on helping a core set of constituents realize maximum value. Put another way – every customer has slightly different needs, problems and processes. We can’t possibly satisfy everyone, or even most customers, individually.   

At SnapEngage, we avoid blindly saying “yes” to incoming feature requests at all costs. This isn’t because we don’t take customer feedback seriously or don’t have our clients’ needs in mind. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. We undergo a rigorous evaluation process for every single request, and we do this because it’s the only way we can ensure we’re constantly serving our clients’ needs and best interests and continually building a product that will deliver the highest value to the greatest number of clients possible.

So, what are the critical conditions that need to be met to give that elusive green light?  We ask 5 core questions of each enhancement, feature or request:

  • Does it generate measurable business value for our clients?

  • Will it generate growth for SnapEngage?

  • Are the benefits to clients and SnapEngage greater than the costs and complexity they introduce? 

  • Is it aligned with the product vision?

  • Has it been validated by many clients?

Each of these is a complex question that requires more exploration. Let’s break them down. 

1. Will the new feature or enhancement bring measurable value to our clients? Will it solve real problems in their business?

This may seem glaringly obvious, but it’s far too frequently overlooked and may be the single most important factor to consider. It’s paramount to understand whether or not the request will have a measurable business impact for our users. Will it positively impact our clients’ critical metrics like sales revenue, profit margins or customer acquisition costs? What about metrics like customer adoption, customer churn, customer satisfaction and customer engagement? We also consider secondary metrics like productivity or efficiency. Product companies such as ours won’t be able to retain customers if the product is not able to help customers impact top-level metrics like this.

We consider the many stakeholders that were involved when purchasing our product and each of their individual roles and responsibilities. Does the proposed feature or enhancement solve for actual problems that our customers and their teams face on a day-to-day basis? Will it positively impact our clients immediately post-launch? In three months? What about three or even five years from now?

We ensure that we’re constantly assessing the perceived and actual value of product updates by performing extensive market research, collecting usage data and gathering honest client feedback on an ongoing basis.       

2. Will the new feature or enhancement grow our business?

If a new product enhancement will bring clear value to our clients and solve real problems for them, we’re off to a great start. But what about our own business? We carefully consider whether and how much the new feature or enhancement will grow the very business that serves as the foundation for our product.

Business growth comes in all kinds of forms. Of course, one of the most obvious is increases in the sales and marketing realm. If the product enhancement will translate to outcomes such as increased qualified lead volumes, improved conversion rates, increased deal size, etc — then we likely have a favorable candidate for our product roadmap.

Business growth comes in many other forms, too. For example, new features might lead to increased usage, or improve customer retention or reduce customer churn. Features may increase the way our clients engage with the product, making it more “sticky”. All of this translates into growth of the product and business. 

Growth buys us the time and money to further enhance and improve the product. It is a virtuous cycle that benefits us and our clients. Changes to the product that don’t drive growth are not sustainable, and in the long run, are a disservice to our clients. 

3. Will the new feature or enhancement’s benefit outweigh the internal effort it takes to launch it? What about the user’s reward vs. effort?

Another critical factor to consider is a classic cost-benefit analysis. We think carefully and realistically about how much time, effort and resources will it take to launch a particular product enhancement. It would be wonderful if all product managers (ours included) had endless amounts of engineering resources at their disposal and boundless time in which to craft beautiful products, but they don’t. 

We must also be mindful that the initial cost of development is rarely the full cost. Every change and addition we make has the potential to make the product more complex, and carries maintenance, support and other obligations with it. 

Another key question: Will the new feature’s eventual benefits and value brought to our company and users measurably outweigh all the effort that needs to happen up front to eventually pull off the launch? If we hesitate when answering this question or the analysis is too close to call, we’re going to think twice before putting it on our roadmap.

4. Does the new feature or enhancement align with our product vision?

Every successful product-oriented company has a clear company vision and a clear product vision, and each serves as an internal compass and provides a sense of purpose. When considering incoming feature requests, it’s critical for our team to honestly assess whether or not the new enhancement actually aligns with our product vision.

A lot of people mistakenly think that a product vision is simply our team trying to build what we want. In reality, product vision is about understanding a core group of customers, what their challenges are, and how we can help solve those problems in a uniquely valuable way. 

SnapEngage is one of the most customizable digital conversation platforms for companies with complex technology ecosystems. A central theme of our product vision is that we see conversations as a key to amazing customer experiences and valuable customer insights. This overarching vision guides our product work day in and day out. 

Like any other product company, we routinely receive hundreds of incoming feature requests from all types of clients and other key stakeholders. We evaluate every single incoming request against whether or not it will uphold and align with our product vision. We operate under the mindset that anything that does not fit this vision would only serve as a distraction and therefore does not receive a coveted spot on our product roadmap. 

5. Has the new feature or enhancement been fully validated? 

Even if we’ve said yes to all of the above questions, we know that our work has barely started if we have not yet validated a feature request with extensive quantitative and qualitative research. 

Extensive market research consisting of everything from surveys to focus groups helps us uncover key insights about our target markets/personas and the problems they’re trying to solve. We also carve out time to stay aligned with our own team members, such as front-line sales and customer service representatives, and participate in their meetings and calls with clients. They’re able to provide a wealth of valuable information because they’re directly interacting with our buyers and customers every single day.

We layer in additional user research in the form of field visits, participatory design sessions and UI/concept testing to further identify gaps within our products and uncover user insights and needs. This type of research helps us understand how the incoming request fits in the larger picture and whether it’s actually necessary and going to solve a specific problem. We’ll often discover that the initial feature request will not fully solve the original problem the client experienced or instead requires an entirely different solution. If we can’t solve a problem well in a way that is useful to most users, and in a way that is obvious and unobtrusive, it becomes a burden to us and to most clients.

Closing Thoughts

Building a successful product is an incredibly challenging (and rewarding) experience. It’s pivotal that we keep these five questions in mind when evaluating every single incoming request. These are a few key evaluation questions that guide our product work at SnapEngage, but you may find that there are different or additional questions that serve your business and product vision best. 

Most importantly, we hold our teams accountable to avoid the trap of making exceptions for requests that don’t check all the boxes. Saying “no” is difficult in the moment but ultimately paves the way for building a lasting product that will fulfill our most critical user needs and delight our clients long into the future.

If you as a client suggest something or request a particular feature, and we say “no”, or “not now”, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. MOST ideas are good ideas. But, being a good idea is not enough to justify building it. 

We hope this article expresses how we make these decisions. 

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Upcoming Webinar: State of Chat 2021

Posted on by marketing

What’s your strategy for the new year?

SnapEngage has always been centrally focused on the feedback and needs of our clients. We solicit this feedback in many forms. In 2020 we ran an extensive “state of chat” survey to better understand our clients’ strategic needs and expectations for 2021. In our upcoming webinar on the state of chat in 2021, we’ll dive into this data with you, and take Q&A.

Our survey asked 25 strategic questions, covering everything from measures of success to goals and plans for chatbot usage. We have aggregated the responses and broken them down both by company size and industry. This allows you to compare your own chat strategy directly with your peers, either by size or industry.

We hope that by looking at this data, you will gain insights or ideas that will apply to your own strategy as you look at the year before us. For example: seeing that many of your peers have started deploying chatbots, you will understand how they are using the bots, and what they hope to do in the future; it may also give you confidence to start exploring this technology if you haven’t already.

What Industries?

The following industries were involved in the survey:

  • Communication Services
  • Consumer Discretionary
  • Consumer Staples
  • Energy
  • Financials
  • Government
  • Healthcare
  • Industrials
  • Information Technology
  • Materials
  • Non-profit
  • Real Estate

    • Sneak Peek

    Just a taste of what this report contains: It may interest you to note that the Industrials sector had the most “balanced” overall use of chat – using it for all aspects of the customer journey from sales/marketing to customer service and technical support. Industrials companies were also most likely to see live chat as a key to unified customer experience (CX) – so it is not surprising that they use it across all teams and use cases.

Join Us

Come join us at our webinar on this topic where we will review some of the highlights of the report and share the data with you (if you haven’t already downloaded it). After presenting the highlights, we will take Q&A about any of the topics discussed, and also generally try to answer your questions about preparing for 2021.

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How Check City’s Customer Satisfaction Scores Improved by 15% with SnapEngage

Posted on by marketing
Check City and SnapEngage

Published January 28th, 2021

About Check City

Check City is a lending company that offers a wide variety of financial services including personal loans, check cashing, tax services, title loans, and payday loans online to a broad customer base.

Check City has been helping customers with their finances since 1986 when they first opened as a simple check cashing store in Virginia. As they continued to grow, they quickly realized the role that proactive, digital communication would play in growing their business.

 

The challenges

The world has changed since Check City first began business in 1986. Now, no matter the size of your company, your online presence, services, and availability is of utmost importance.

As Check City’s business grew, the need for an effective means of digital communication grew too. With a wider customer base and expanding locations, they now had a bigger consumer audience to service and manage.

Check City is a licensed lender in 15+ states with 70+ storefront locations. Along with this wide geographic reach, they have both in-person and online customers. In order to effectively scale, they needed the ability to help all online and in-person customers so all customer experiences are smooth.

50,000+ website visitors each month reach out to Check City for help with their loans and answers to common questions. They also need to follow ever-changing state and federal regulations as a licensed lender. State regulations are also different for each state they operate in.

These constantly changing licensing regulations mean that Check City needs to update their website frequently. This leads to more frequent customer questions as their loan approval processes and underwriting change regularly.

Providing pristine customer experiences to a large customer base both online and in stores also calls for higher confidentiality, security, and privacy. Check City needed a way to connect with customers while keeping customer chats and surveys completely private and confidential.

SnapEngage example on the Check City website

 

The need for more feedback

In addition to the challenges already mentioned, Check City also needed, like many growing companies, a way to gather more feedback from its customers.

A business can only perform as well as the feedback they have about their product. A company can’t satisfy customers if it doesn’t know their particular needs and preferences.

Key feedback includes:

  • Discovering where customers have problems on the website to ensure those problems are fixed as fast as possible
  • Understanding when stores and website traffic are busiest so they can schedule staff accordingly and be prepared for peak hours
  • Recognizing the types of devices customers use so they can optimize for those platforms
  • Getting notified when issues arise with specific employees who need more training

Trial and error is one way to figure all of this out, but that process takes a long time and often includes more errors than success. It’s far superior to see exactly what’s going on using analytics and data, rather than guessing and hoping you’re right, guessing again when you’re repeatedly wrong, and wasting time fixing and changing the wrong things.

With more customer and website feedback at your fingertips, a business is empowered to be more mindful, self-aware, economical, and successful.

Check City found the solutions they were looking for and the customer feedback they needed with SnapEngage.

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Monthly website visitors

Storefront locations

%

US state coverage

The solution

Since starting a partnership with SnapEngage, Check City has seen great improvements in customer satisfaction, customer service, and their ability to integrate customer feedback. Now, Check City has a direct line to customers that companies need to grow, improve, and succeed.

Check City uses SnapEngage’s chat services to help over 100 customers a day, all on SnapEngage’s highly secure platform. SnapEngage keeps customer chats secure by being compliant with privacy laws within the US.

With SnapEngage, Check City implemented an automatic customer satisfaction survey after each online chat is finished. The insights from these surveys help Check City make vital adjustments and created an overall customer satisfaction increase of 15%.

Check City average survey scores over time

This insight doesn’t just help with face-to-face customer service. It also helps identify problems with the website that customers are repeatedly experiencing so they can be addressed as quickly as possible.

For example, Check City can now identify the high-touch website pages where customers chat most frequently. This helps them identify where on the website Check City customers need the most assistance so they can optimize these pages.

SnapEngage’s chat services and surveys also provide important insights into business trends specific to Check City and its services. Now they can predict peak hours and prepare staff and the site for times of high demand.

Check City is even able to learn what type of device their customers were using, like mobile, tablet, or computer. But that’s not all. They are also able to see what they were using to interface with Check City, like whether they are using android, IOS, Win7, Win10, OS X, Chrome OS, and more. Then they can update their website so that every customer, no matter what platform they prefer to use, has a seamless and easy experience.

Check City chat review

The results

SnapEngage’s product line has empowered Check City to improve overall customer service. More importantly, customer satisfaction scores have increased by 15%.

The customer conversations and surveys that SnapEngage provides gives Check City the clear insights they need to make the right decisions the first time when making improvements, adjustments, and changes.

With SnapEngage, Check City can be successfully self-aware, recognize problems quickly to find fast solutions, analyze their own business trends, and make their processes smoother and less work for everyone involved, staff and customers alike.

Check City chat survey
Wendy Gibson, Contact Center General Manager at Check City

SnapEngage has helped our team operate more efficiently by enabling us to help multiple customers at once. With the ability to service several chats simultaneously we have significantly reduced wait time and improved customer service. Chat allows our customers to leverage another contact method when a phone call might not be possible and we can communicate with our customers over their preferred method of contact.

Wendy Gibson

Contact Center General Manage, Check City

To learn more about how live chat and automation can increase customer satisfaction and improve the quality of incoming leads, schedule a complimentary strategy session with us. 

Schedule a free strategy session today

Release Notes January 25th, 2020: Horizontal Bot Buttons, Labels Improvements

Posted on by Jan Worath

Hello SnapEngagers,

here is what is new with SnapEngage in the new year.

 

New Features and Improvements

– The Guide Bot buttons can now be configured to appear horizontally as well as vertically. The option can be found in the button configuration of the individual steps.

– Labels are now visible to chat agents after a transfer to a different widget, even if the label category is not available in the new widget.

– We have added an option to filter out Social Security Numbers from the chat transcript under the Options tab -> Extra Security settings.

Resolved Issues

Guide Bot:

– Fixed an issue where the Hours of Operation configuration in other widgets was not recognized.

– Fixed an issue where emojis in the button options were not recognized.

– Fixed an issue where some responses in the SMS channel were not recognized.

– Fixed an issue where the same bot prompt was displayed two times.

Visitor Chat:

– Fixed an issue where copy&pasting into the input area did not work.

– Fixed an issue where the the button disappeared in mobile browsers when the proactive chat was triggered in some configurations.

– Fixed an issue where the chat creation failed when the content of the JavaScript Variables section was too big.

Other fixes

– Applied some improvements to improve the Hub handling connection problems, which caused chat messages from the agent not being delivered to the visitor.

– Fixed an issue where some non-credit card numbers were filtered out in the Hub when they were sent as the first message.

– Fixed an issue where text with apostrophes was not displaying correctly in the JavaScript Variables section of Hub.

– Design Studio: Fixed an issue where the size settings for button images were not retained after saving.

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