Customer engagement is important to your business strategy. It has been proven to boost employee productivity, improve customer loyalty, and have a positive effect on the bottom line. Today’s most progressive companies are espousing a customer-first mentality to surpass consumer expectations: at its center is a lively call center which leverages customer engagement technologies and processes that are pioneering, agile, smart, and practical.

Nowadays, customers expect companies to engage with them on their terms—at any time, and on any channel. More importantly, when interacting with businesses, customers expect conversations to shift flawlessly between channels, whether via web chats, social media, voice, social, text, and they request a fundamental understanding of their intent.

Does Your Call Center Have What It Takes?

In this day and age, many call centers require a major overhaul to meet the ever-increasing demands of digital customers and to win their loyalty. To know if it’s time to put your money on an ai call center software that allows your staff to create, modify, and handle communications in a more natural and customer-centric way, these four questions should come to mind:

#1 Is your staff connected and empowered?

If your business is struggling with how to give a single view of the consumer, get rid of departmental silos, or perform more resourcefully, your staff is perhaps also struggling. Employees may feel disconnected and unempowered by too much process or slow technology. Break it down by department and ask:

• Is your marketing department powerless to contextualize personal interactions?
• Are your sales teams not receiving the hottest liveleads first?
• Do personnel go through various platforms to answer a single customer question?
• Does your IT department take forever to adjust to the latest digital demands?

If you answer ‘yes’ to any of these questions, your call center is undoubtedly old-fashioned and your employees are desperate for advanced tools to perform their tasks. Get digital solutions that have a call center that empowers your employees with the suppleness they require to engage with consumers in a more appealing and fruitful way.

#2 Are you able to effortlessly connect on your consumer’s favored engagements channels?

According to Accenture, nearly half of today’s consumers are happy switching back and forth between digital and physical engagements with businesses. If you’re among the numerous companies who are not ready for this, consider the following:

• Almost two thirds of organizations think they’re successfully interacting with their customers, but only 2 out of 10 customers agree.
• Almost 60% of customers are distraught when they can’t access the information they desire via their favorite channel.
• 90% of global customers prefer texting as a mode of communication with businesses, but less than half of businesses support SMS.

If you’re making it hard for consumers to interact with your organization, they will most likely not give you a second look. Actually, over 50% of people abandon a brand after just one bad experience! To avoid this, contemplate an omnichannel call center solution that enables your staff to easily interact with consumers in any channel they desire, be it WhatsApp, SMS, Facebook Messenger, and several others. Additional points if you select a platform that can scale and adapt to future digital channels as quickly as your customers adopt them.

#3 Do you have the necessary vision into your customer’s journey to really boost engagement?

It’s difficult for a consumer to love (or trust) a brand that doesn’t remember their most recent interaction, their past purchase, or their preferred way of communicating. To enable better engagements, create a single view of the consumer and employ analytics to give more correct and instinctive responses. Does your current call center:

• Give your agents—and marketers— access to a real-time source of all customer information?
• Employ the latest analytic tools to scrutinize and comprehend the data trail for an friendly customer journey?
• Integrate ai conversation bot into self-help tools to improve customer engagements?
• Leverage natural language processing to automatically interpret meaning and deliver context into every dialog?

By using real-time data analytics within your call center—leveraging the most advanced call center artificial intelligence technologies—each person that interacts with your customer will have the history and personal data required to have well-informed engagements to better serve, foster, and develop these relationships.

#4 Are your systems enabling you to adjust to changing times as fast as your consumer?

According to a recent study, 40% of call centers employed by top businesses admitted that their systems are outdated and can’t cater for more digital driven customers of today. Moreover, more than half feel their systems won’t be able to handle future needs. If your contact center ai technology isn’t up to standard, how can you expect to interact with your consumer? To maintain relevancy and avoid being called old-fashioned, contemporary businesses are turning to cloud communication providers to:

• Remove drawn-out configuration processes innate with legacy call center systems.
• Enable developers employ easy-to-use APIs that make it easy to add real-time communications features into apps without having to develop backend setup and interfaces.
• Eliminate expense of licensing, handling, and professional services by suspending old-fashioned systems.
• Simply increase telecom usage needs on-demand, without added expense or time for hardware update, via a secure, global infrastructure.

Numerous reports show that the demand for artificial intelligence call center solutions is outdoing the demand for on-premise solutions, and with decent reason. By moving your communications from legacy, on-premise systems to cloud-based software, you can experience superior consistency, robust security, and global carrier connectivity. With the right platform, you can develop the right solution necessary to best communicate with, and service, your clients.

If your business is still using on-premise systems, it is not too late to change to cloud-based software to transform your call center. Numerous businesses have swiftly and flawlessly converted call centers into customer engagement contact centers by employing the most advanced call center ai technology.