UC-Enabled, Social, Customer Care

I have long been an advocate of UC-enabled self-service applications to offset the demands of expensive live assistance when not really necessary. Clearly, this was difficult to do with legacy telephony systems and call centers, but all that is changing with rapid consumer adoption of personalized, multi-modal smartphones and tablets, access to "mobile (online) apps," and social networking communities. 

Now, the challenge for all organizations is how to migrate gracefully from old call center technologies to the many benefits of what I have been calling the "UC Contact Center," which is evolving quickly in new, "cloud"- based environments.

Here is a brief post on that subject provided by Ashley Furness, a CRM Analyst with Software Advice

 How to Create an Effective Customer Care Community

Customer self-service communities are among the most effective means for cutting down help desk operational costs. But you can't just flip on the switch. Public knowledge bases, customer groups and discussion forums are useless if no one wants to use them.

This week Software Advice interviewed JD Peterson of Zendesk to find out what strategies companies can use to build an effective customer service community. Petersen recommended focusing on five concepts: usability, gamification, employee engagement, measurement and smooth integration with other customer service channels.

Usability

Think of usability as a science, rather than an art. Peterson recommends hiring a consultant or freelance usability expert who knows the specific places navigation signals should be placed to foster engagement--or where the customer natural gravitates to find service channels. This person should also consider titles and topics headings that are appealing and eye-catching, but also immediately meaningful to the visitor. 

"Don't guess with this kind of stuff. If you don't have usability experts internally, look for a partner or vendor that can drive those best practices… how to develop the structure of you community," Petersen said.

Gamification

Gamification means adding elements of the gaming world to your community, such as leader boards and score boards. Developers should set up communities that award points or "badges" for actions such as answering another visitor's question, or voting on an answer from another user. This recognizes customers for their contribution.

Integration

In order for the self-service channel to work efficiently, Peterson recommends integrating with traditional service means. He calls this the "escape value."

"If I can't ultimately find the answer I am looking for I need an easy way to get from the community to another channel - phone, or email or live chat," he said.

Employee Engagement

Even if the community is focused on the user, customers will interact more if they know your company is actually listening. Staff should keep a close eye on discussions and chime in if the answer isn't available. Customer service staff can also pick up on valuable customer feedback that can then be shared with product and feature development teams.

Measurement

Only way you will get an effective community is to continually improve it. This is best done through trial and error. Look for trends, such as which topics are getting the most comments and views, reoccurring negative feedback or hot topics people search.

Visit this link to watch the entire video: http://blog.softwareadvice.com/articles/crm/how-to-build-a-strong-self-service-customer-community1061312/

Avaya Moves To the UC Contact Center

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All the major business telephone system providers face the challenge of gracefully migrating their legacy voice-based technologies to a mobile, multi-modal, UC-enabled communications environment. Under it's "Customer Experience Management" portfolio, Avaya recently announced some new UC-enabling capabilities for self service "mobile apps" for premised-based contact center operations under the label of "Customer Connections Mobile."

This announcement included continued support for mobile voice self-service applications using VXML (IVR). Such voice applications, which can be most useful for hands-free applications (e.g., when driving a car), include: driving directions, emergency notifications, voice access to email, voice dialing, and directory assistance applications. VoiceXML has tags that instruct the voice browser to provide speech synthesis, automatic speech recognition, dialog management, and audio playback." 

 Avaya described it's new multi-modal customer service capabilities to me this way:

"Customer Connections Mobile (CCM) has two primary functions.  One is a visual self service menu in which the user navigates through screens to access information.  Should the user require additional assistance or wish to speak to an expert, they can request an agent."  



"If an agent is available, the caller (who started out in self service) will receive assistance from the agent.  If there are no agents available, the caller will see their estimated time to answer (ETA) and will be able to request an immediate callback or a scheduled callback (at a time of their choosing). "

"Customer Connections Mobile does not include a ‘click to IM chat’ element, handle speech recognition (though might be possible), or accommodate text-to-speech.  The ‘click for assistance’ is to speak to a live agent…if one is available or request a callback (as described above)."

This announcement by Avaya is evidence of progress in evolving the "UC Contact Center," both as on premise technologies and as "cloud"-based services. Note, however, when Avaya talks about "visual self-services," they mean real-time video chat or "video IVR." Online interactive self-service applications will come from Web portals, but, with appropriate CCM APIs, can invoke the above described flexible access to live assistance.