Poor silos. They just don’t work. They don’t work for innovation, they don’t work for business intelligence—and they don’t work for customer service.
Customers today “are very much fluid, going across all those channels,” noted Ann Sung Ruckstuhl, senior VP and chief marketing officer for LiveOps, during a recent interview with ContactCenterSolutions at ITEXPO Miami.“So it is not necessarily the right way to do things to become proficient and an expert just on telephone support vs chat or vs e-mail,” she said.
The average consumer is very busy, said Ruckstuhl, multitasking, texting, Facebooking, Tweeting, answering e-mails, etc. Marketers have grown to love social media as a way to promote brands and products, but now consumers want two-way communication with companies via social media.
Yet most companies are not ready for the demands of the modern consumer. They haven’t kept up.
“The consumers are technically in some ways more advanced in communicating with each other than companies are in terms of stepping up and engaging with them in that way,” said Ruckstuhl.
“It is really difficult to deliver good customer service today, and also it is very expensive to do that,” said Ruckstuhl.
See the full interview below.
It’s getting really expensive to build each channel to have the staff trained in the technology and applications that define the channel, she said. At the end of the day, businesses have tons of agents who are really specialized, but they can’t be leveraged across the channels and customers still get no satisfaction because they feel like companies don’t really know them.
The solution is a truly integrated approach, where marketing and all customer service channels merge, according to Ruckstuhl.
LiveOps delivers this integrated customer service approach with its LiveOps Cloud Contact Center. The LiveOps Cloud delivers flexibility and multichannel routing, real-time reporting and interaction recording across every channel, whether it’s Facebook or SMS. Its infrastructure runs some of the largest contact centers, according to Ruckstuhl, including Symantec, TriplePlay and Salesforce.com.
“It doesn’t matter what service or product you offer, eventually you’re going to get commoditized. And what will differentiate you is how well you know and serve your customers,” she said.