Customer Empowerment: The Next Evolution of Customer Engagement

The concept of customer experience is top-of-mind for every company with a contact center, and the need to actualize beyond self-service and voice has become urgent. There has been a tremendous push within this space to incorporate newer technologies like omnichannel and journey orchestration. This push has been defined by a desire to develop new opportunities for ecommerce and online marketing through the use of these technologies.

Our research results reinforce key technology trends that continue to impact the future of the contact center and the overall experience it can provide to its customers and employees. These trends have transitioned from nice-to-have to essential. To adapt and outpace the competition, financial institution contact centers will need to adopt the following technology trends to offer best-in-class service to both their customers and employees.

What does it mean to do business with a one-stop shop—does it mean working with only one vendor? Does it mean working mostly with one vendor and using a few other third-party applications? Does it mean being free from the restriction of any particular vendor?

ConvergeOne’s customer had what was once considered a best-of-breed contact center solution, but faced challenges leveraging its legacy solution to satisfy the rapidly evolving needs of its business. Over the past decade, the company’s leadership team recognized that although its investments in self-service had paid off well, they’d also created a challenge. The basic transactional calls that once dominated call queues—address changes, balance inquiries, new-service activation—had all but disappeared. The queue was dominated by the complex and varied issues that customers couldn’t solve on their own.

According to our research with Avaya and CatalystMR, there are two main areas contact center challenges fall within: customer support and data/technology. Considering each of these key areas, the three biggest challenges contact centers face today in the support arena are:

In the last blog post in this series, we explored the first three steps to delivering an excellent and secure customer experience: starting with a CISO, involving senior leadership, and adopting a risk-based approach. In this blog post, we’ll pick up where we left off and explore the final three steps.

In financial services, credit union and regional bank contact centers face challenges as they adapt to changes in technology coincident with rising customer service expectations. Customer behavior is continuing to drive this change. It can be overwhelming to consider how all customer contact departments need to evolve to care for this exponential rise in expectations. ConvergeOne and Avaya partnered with CatalystMR to conduct a study to:

Everise is an award-winning experience company with over 12,000 global agents, servicing over 20 languages, delivering CX transformation to enterprises from the Fortune 500, to the world’s most beloved unicorns, to high growth tech startups.

Pandemic this, COVID that… enough already, right? The situation was supposed to be temporary, but is it really? Many organizations I’m working with now are in a planning phase, and they aren’t planning for everyone to return to the office.

As the world struggles with the fallout from COVID-19, all aspects of life are quickly changing. Millions of workers are now working from home or other remote locations outside of the normal security configurations of an office. Fraudsters are taking advantage of this disruption to actively steal information that they can monetize. In many cases, companies were not prepared to deal with a large work-from-home workforce, and when they transitioned their employees to remote environments, they mainly considered threats like phishing or cyberattacks.