How ice Contact Center is Addressing Businesses’ Top Customer Service Challenges – Part 2

A 2022 Gartner publication identified some of the top customer service challenges that organizations expect to face. Learn how ice Contact Center can help organizations address these challenges.

According to Forbes, businesses that lead in customer experience outperform their lagging counterparts by almost 80%. Considering this, it’s no surprise that customer service challenges are important to so many organizations.

Gartner, a leading information technology research and advisory company, has identified some of these challenges. In their research, they asked respondents, “Thinking of your organization, how important is it to address each of the following challenges in the next 12 to 18 months?” The results were published in their 2022 article, Equip Your Customer Service Reps to Support Seamless Customer Journeys. The article identified 11 challenges and ranked them according to percentages of respondents who stated that the challenges were either “Important” or “Very Important.”

Organizations can address many of these challenges by investing in their contact center. In particular, ice Contact Center allows organizations to address challenges, grow, and thrive by using ice’s built-in features and available integrations. Our previous blog, How ice Contact Center is Addressing Businesses’ Top 3 Customer Service Challenges (Part 1), explored how ice addresses the 3 most highly ranked of these challenges. But ice’s capacity for solving problems extends beyond the top 3 in the list. Read on to learn how ice Contact Center addresses other challenges identified by Gartner:

“Automating Customer Service Processes”

68% of survey respondents identified this as an important challenge to address in the next 12-18 months. Fortunately, there are many ways to introduce automation into customer service processes. Chatbots automatically provide instant responses to customers’ inquiries without agent intervention. They can be used to either help customers with self-service tasks on their own or gather context before transferring the conversation to a live agent. Chatbots also allow for extended service time outside of staffed hours.

Outbound messaging to customers can be automated with iceAlert. iceAlert allows organizations to automatically send reminders, important updates, and more without the need for individuals to do it manually. This saves staff members’ time and ensures consistent messaging for all customers.

A Workforce Management (WFM) integration can automatically generate schedules for customer service representatives optimizing the schedule while saving managers’ time. The integration allows the WFM tool to forecast demand based on historical contact center statistics and automatically build a schedule that ensures the contact center is appropriately staffed while considering factors like requests for time off, lunch breaks, and more.

If your organization uses outbound calling campaigns for initiatives like lead generation, promotions, win backs, upselling, and more, ice can help. Outbound campaigns can be automated with ComputerTalk’s iceCampaign tool. iceCampaign has four different dialing modes, allowing you to choose the level of automation that works best for your organization’s needs.

Multiple customer service processes can be automated with ice Contact Center’s CRM integrations. Starting at the beginning of an interaction, delivery of contextual information to agents is automated with screen pops. Relevant information about a contact, such as purchase history, is automatically popped to the handling agent’s screen, eliminating the need to waste time on contextual questions or manually look up contact details. A CRM integration also automates the creation of activity records for new customer interactions, ensuring complete and consistent record-keeping without additional effort by agents during wrap-up state.

“Personalizing the Customer Experience Through Data”

This challenge was identified as important by 65% of respondents in Gartner’s research. A CRM integration is one of the best ways to use data to personalize customer experiences. With this integration, relevant information about the customer reaching out is screen popped to the handling agent as soon as the interaction comes in. Agents can use the information provided in the screen pop to deliver personalized service. They can greet customers by name or preferred title; they can recommend products that are complementary to previous purchases; they can proactively provide updates on open tickets. With CRM screen pops, agents have instant access to view and leverage all the important data the organization has collected on the customer over time.

ice Contact Center also enables personalized experiences through intelligent routing. Customers can be routed to the agent best suited to handle their inquiry based on a variety of considerations. With a CRM integration, customers can be routed based on fields in the CRM system. They can be routed according to agent skill. One ice customer, Bob Barker Company, routes calls according to the caller’s region, ensuring that customers talk to one of the same few agents they’re familiar with every time.

“Shifting from Reactive to Proactive Service”

This was identified as an important challenge by 65% of respondents in Gartner’s research. There are a number of ways that ice Contact Center can help organizations address this challenge. iceAlert lets organizations send proactive reminders and other notifications, keeping customers informed and serving them even if they don’t reach out themselves.

iceSurvey empowers organizations to proactively improve their customer service by collecting customer feedback through pre- and/or post-interaction surveys. This allows organizations to find out what their customers think about them without waiting to be told.

With the many tools and integrations available in ice Contact Center, it’s no wonder that it empowers organizations to address and overcome the biggest customer service challenges that they’re facing now and expect to face in the future. To learn more about how ice Contact Center can help your organization to improve customer service, check out How ice Contact Center is Addressing Businesses’ Top 3 Customer Service Challenges – Part 1.