Collaboration

Analytics, Flexibility Represent the Future of Customer Engagement [#Infographic]

Customers are demanding more seamless and intuitive ways of contacting businesses, and companies need to be highly adaptable and attuned to consumers’ needs.

Phil Goldstein

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Phil Goldstein is a former web editor of the CDW family of tech magazines and a veteran technology journalist. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and their animals: a dog named Brenna, and two cats, Grady and Princess.

Consumers today are using smartphones more than ever before, and often not for calls — they’re emailing, sending text messages, using IP-based chat services and social media to communicate with their friends and colleagues. And consumers expect to be able to do the same for the business they interact with, which is forcing companies to be nimbler in how they engage with their customers.

Although telephony is still the mainstay technology for how consumers interact with businesses’ customer service call centers, companies need to engage with customers across multiple communication channels, and switch effortlessly between them. This boosts productivity, enhances the customer service experience and improves business results. Organizations can also use tools like workforce and quality management, call recording, and coaching capabilities to help to make their call centers more efficient.

However, call center analytics and artificial intelligence are where the customer engagement industry is trending. According to Dimension Data’s 2015 Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Summary Report, 53 percent of respondents highlighted analytics as the trend that will most reshape the industry in the next five years.

Take a look at the infographic below to see how businesses are approaching and thinking about the changing nature of customer interaction.

Read more about how mobile applications and analytics can enhance customer engagement in this article from BizTech. And to learn more about CDW’s collaboration solutions, visit CDW.com/collaboration.