To develop better relationships with their customers, businesses want to engage with them more often and in as many ways as possible. Utilizing the capabilities and reach of various channels to communicate with customers is essential in today’s world. It’s all facilitated by technology. You’ll find that NICE CXone’s customer engagement tools can be a huge help in this endeavor.
To better understand how to manage customer engagement, it’s important to understand what customer engagement is in the first place.
Customer Engagement
The term customer engagement is a reference to the richness and depth of the relationship between the business and its existing customers. The engagement is the total of all the various interactions that a customer has with the company. This could be through commercials and advertisements that they see, emails they receive, posts on social media, products or services, and interactions that occur with the contact center.
The act of engagement occurs whether it’s active or passive, whether it occurs through a third party, or is direct with the business. Each time there is an engagement, there is an opportunity to strengthen the relationship with the customer. Of course, improper engagement or poor management could also weaken customer relationships.
Customer engagement is so important because it is a driving force behind customer behavior. Customers who are highly engaged and who have been treated well by the company are far more likely to become or remain loyal customers. Great customer engagement helps lead to more referrals and word-of-mouth marketing via the customer.
Customer Engagement Management Matters
Customer engagement management helps to drive an increase in customer value. It helps to retain customers, and it helps to encourage customers to buy from your business. NICE CXone is the leader in call center software, which can help immensely with your customer engagement strategies and management. The cloud-native software works to allow your agents to deliver the best possible customer experience, and our solutions are aimed at ensuring optimized and successful customer engagement.
You’ll find a suite of applications in CXone that will help with your needs, along with many features for you and your agents to use. Additionally, you’ll find integrations for UCaaS and CRM, which is beneficial if you’re using other software and want to have it integrated with the products from NICE CXone.
Some CRM integrations include:
- Bullhorn
- Microsoft Dynamics
- NetSuite
- Oracle Service Cloud
- Salesforce
- SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C)
- Service Now
- SugarCRM
- Zendesk
For the UCaaS integrations, some options include:
- Atos
- LogMeIn
- Microsoft
- RingCentral
- Zoom
Let’s take a closer look at some of the various tools that help with customer engagement management.
Omnichannel Routing
The Omnichannel Routing from NICE CXone provides contact routing along with interaction management. The product helps improve customer engagement by allowing your agents to interact with your customers productively and positively through various digital and voice channels.
We understand that customers today have many needs and requirements they need to have met. They also have preferred ways of contacting and interacting with your company. Some of them may be comfortable using phone contact, but that’s not always the case. Often, they will prefer another method. You will find a wealth of channels through which they can connect including:
- Voice
- SMS/Text
- Work Item
- Interactive Voice Response
- Online Chat
- Social
In all, there are more than 30 native digital channels available. There’s inbound, outbound, and blended voice, work item routing, and more. It is fast and easy to add new channels, locations, agents, routing changes, and features when needed.
Automatic Contact Distributor
One of the main reasons that customers are unhappy with service is because it takes too long for them to reach someone who can help. They may be sitting on hold for a long time, they may not receive an email response for days, or they might never receive a response to their online chat.
When these types of things happen, it leaves them feeling as though your company doesn’t really care about them or their business. These are the customers who don’t come back. They are the customers who end up leaving negative reviews and telling their friends, family, and everyone on social media that they shouldn’t do business with your company.
Many of these issues can be alleviated when you utilize the NICE CXone Automatic Contact Distributor, thus improving customer retention rates. This is an omnichannel routing engine that can quickly and easily connect your customers with the best agent for the job in the shortest time possible.
It can utilize all the 30 contact channels mentioned above to ensure that customers not only get in touch quickly but also using their preferred method of contact, both of which will please your customers.
Interactive Voice Response
Interactive Voice Response is an interesting feature. Even though there is no customer-to-human contact, it is still an important engagement tool. The feature can reduce the number of messages/requests coming into the contact center that agents would typically handle. The AI system uses natural speech to collect caller info and determine the best means of interacting with the customer.
In some cases, it means providing AI voice or text responses to certain questions that are common and can be answered without the need for a human. They might be questions that are asked often and that have relatively simple answers, for example.
Using AI chatbots from NICE CXone can handle many types of interactions with your customers. The bots utilize AI and machine learning, along with speech recognition as a means to better interact with customers. The bots are becoming sophisticated enough to have conversations and to answer questions. They feel quite real to customers, and they can provide results faster than waiting for an agent to respond in many cases.
The customers will still have around-the-clock contact with your company, and the AI can handle these types of questions. It helps you to save on costs, and it ensures that the customers still have a positive engagement with your brand.
Personal Connection’s Proactive Outbound Contact
Inbound contacts are not the only way NICE CXone can help. With Personal Connection, proactive outbound contact is made easier. This is a predictive dialer that can connect agents to customers by automatically dialing. The software helps the agents by speeding up the connections and dialing, and by eliminating the silent pause that tends to occur with most of the other dialing technology in use today.
It’s during that pause that many people hang up on the call, which results in wasted time and money and, in some cases, negative customer feedback. It also means that the agents will not be speaking with customers, or if the customer does stay on the line, they already have started to form a negative opinion. No one likes saying hello multiple times before someone on the other end of the line connects and responds. This tool provides a seamless customer experience that’s helpful for the agents as well as the customers.
The dialer allows agents to handle more calls each day, as well. Although these benefits might seem like small things, they do make quite a difference in the way the customer perceives your company. Therefore, they are an important part of customer engagement management.
My Agent eXperience (MAX)
Known as MAX, My Agent eXperience from NICE CXone is a tool that will help to simplify the contact center interactions regardless of the channel being used. It can allow for more personalization when the agent is in contact with the customer, and personalization is a key to better engagement. When the agent and the customer can develop more of a rapport with one another, it will help to increase the customer’s level of satisfaction with the contact.
The system allows for collaboration tools, rich media, and emojis for more personalized contact. It also allows agents to handle multiple channels and to be more productive. Agents can switch the channels they are using quickly and easily whenever needed.
Additionally, the agents will have full customer context and conversation history. This provides your agents with more insight into the customer, which allows them to have a more personal experience when communicating with one another. Your customers will feel like they are more than just another person in a queue waiting to be helped. They will feel like they matter.
Ensuring the customers know how important they are is an essential part of customer engagement management. This tool helps to make it much easier.
Workforce Optimization
Making improvements to your workforce is an essential part of customer engagement management, even though you might not realize it at first blush. If your agents and the supervisors on your team aren’t up to par with the services they are providing through the contact center, it directly affects the engagement and satisfaction of your customers. Therefore, you’ll need to be sure that your workforce is fully optimized.
NICE CXone Performance Management provides you with the tools to do just that. It provides features that let your employees improve themselves and better align with the goals of your organization. The system provides transparency and continuous feedback in a social, web-based environment that’s easy to use. You can customize the key performance indicators and dashboards to reflect your business.
By encouraging and inspiring your agents to improve themselves and the work they are doing, it improves their customer interactions. With improved customer engagement, customers will naturally be happier about the service they are receiving.
Never forget just how important all of your agents are when it comes to the customer experience. These agents are essentially the “front line” that represents the company. It makes sense to ensure they have the proper training and coaching needed, and that they have means of improving their performance. This tool helps immensely.
Customer Satisfaction Surveys
How successful are the customer interactions that occur at your contact center? One of the best ways to get a true sense of what’s happening with your customers is to provide customer satisfaction surveys. These surveys should be given right after the contact with your agents, and they should be available using the same channel that was used for the contact. The experience from contact to survey should be seamless. If you wait a few days to contact the customer, they may not fully remember their interaction, which means the data you get will be skewed.
Customer satisfaction surveys can provide you with a wealth of information about your customers and their experience. You can get a better understanding of your customer’s perspective, you can get feedback from them, measure customer engagement, and can better determine where your company needs to make some improvements. The results are easy to track and can provide you with some valuable insight.
When you provide customer satisfaction surveys, which you can do using NICE CXone, it shows the customers that you care about their experience. Even if they had a bad experience, knowing that you’re asking about it and that you want to improve can help you retain those customers.
The surveys allow the customers to have a more active role. The information gleaned from those surveys will allow you to see what you’re doing right and what you need to do better. Reviewing the surveys is some “behind the scenes” work that can pay great dividends as you continue to improve your business. It will help to ensure that future interactions with all of your customers are better.
Analytics
Analytics is important for all businesses, and it can help you with your customer engagement management. The information that you get through analytics provides you with data that can be used to drive measurable improvements and to better understand the omnichannel experience the customers are receiving. Parsing this customer data lets you make changes that will help to improve customer satisfaction along with employee productivity.
Analytics will always be valuable, even after you’ve implemented certain changes in your customer engagement strategy. You will continue to gather all the needed data and will then continue making changes and improvements to your business. By analyzing each of the customer interactions, you will get a more complete view of what needs to be done to better their experience.
As you start to implement these changes, you’ll see that your customers are happier. This leads to more positive engagements, which leads to more brand loyalty, more sales, and word-of-mouth marketing.
Dangers of Not Considering Customer Engagement Management
The experience of the customer needs to be taken seriously. The way they engage with your company and the experience of each of those engagements is essential. If there are issues with how the customer engagements are handled, even if they might be minor, they will erode the customer’s trust and customer loyalty in your business. Grievous problems will do so far more quickly.
When this happens, you’ll find that your retention of the customer is in jeopardy. They will leave and go to one of your competitors when they don’t feel that they’ve been treated properly by your company and agents. There are plenty of competitors willing to do what it takes to bring your customers into their fold.
Some customers won’t just stop working with your business. They will actively tell others about the bad experiences they’ve had, which could cause you to lose more customers. It could make potential customers steer clear of your business entirely. Damage to your reputation caused by customers can be difficult to repair. This is why it’s so important to consider customer engagement management from the start.
Your engagements should focus on providing value to the customer, while also valuing their time. The tools from NICE CXone make managing customer engagement easier for you when it comes to the contact center. The aim should always be to have the customers leaving their contact with your agents happier and more informed than when they started. Great customer service can turn what would have been a negative encounter into a positive customer experience.
Failure to understand the value of customer engagement management will put your business in peril. You don’t want to make this mistake. Instead, you want to be sure you’re working with a company that can help you get your contact center on the right track now and for the future.
Choose NICE CXone for Your Customer Engagement Management Tools
If you want your customers to have better engagements with your business, and you want the power to properly manage these engagements, choose NICE CXone. It provides you with all the tools you could need, and integrating the software into your business is fast and simple.
To get a better understanding of which tools and products will work best for your company’s needs, be sure to get in touch. We can help you learn more about all the options and features available, so you can take your customer engagement to the next level. The systems have intuitive interfaces and will be easy to add to your business.