During the pre-pandemic time, the theme of customer engagement was to delight the customers. However, post-pandemic, service agents have been inundated with customer calls seeking ways to adjust their debts and balance their budgets urgently. These financially and emotionally stressed customers have narrated the new form of customer engagement. To align with the new narration, service agents have focused on enabling more and more remote transactions while not losing out on the interactions’ quality.

To manage the challenges of supervising private transactions, various new digital channels have opened up. Banks have grown to have different systems for each channel of communication. This approach leads to chaos at the service agent’s end, where they try to make sense of each of the interactions across channels, increasing the service time.

The solution to this is a unified customer engagement platform.

What is a Unified Customer Engagement Platform?

It is a platform that provides an agent one place to view all customer communications using different mediums like emails, live chat, social media, and so on as per the sequence of their journey. This keeps the conversation flowing between an agent and customer despite multiple digital channels providing a unified customer experience.

A unified customer engagement platform thus enhances the customer experience by letting agents seamlessly switch channels without losing track of the historical context.

Time Saving Capabilities of a Unified Customer Engagement Platform

Using the top 5 interaction channels, we have briefly highlighted a unified customer engagement platform’s time-saving capabilities.

Email

A unified customer engagement platform offers a shared inbox that allows agents to access previous interactions. This way, an agent is fully aware of the context and history of the conversation. Along with this, an agent can also send canned emails to prospects. She can also send automated email responses to common queries. This saves a considerable amount of service time per interaction and enhances the customer experience.

Live chat

Live chat is conversational and intended towards helping customers with self-service. Automation using chatbots, the ability to connect with video, voice, and co-browse, targeted assistance by offering the ability to segment and refer to all these capabilities of a unified engagement platform will help maintain the quality of the interaction.

Along with this, multimedia-enabled chat service (facilitating file exchange) and co-browsing (mentioned below) ensure a better customer experience. If need be, a unified customer engagement platform allows for escalation from chat to call. All these capabilities reduce service time by a considerable margin.

Calls, SMS, WhatsApp, and social media engagements

A unified customer engagement platform offers a single platform to manage Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Text message, and digital communications platform. VoIP-enabled call handling unleashes a plethora of capabilities for agents. It has been widely used for its IVR, Conversation notes, Call routing, Call queuing, Call forwarding Voicemails, and other powers. All these capabilities and the ability to sequentially manage interaction through different channels (SMS, Social Media) can reduce the service time.

Video call

Video calls have been widely used as the best replacement for the in-person banking experience. Eye contact during video chats enables agents to read subtle non-verbal cues. This leads to a very high-quality, engaging interaction. The real value addition on a unified platform is that all other communication channels can be referred to simultaneously. Agents may book another meeting with the customer during the video call or switch to co-browsing to demonstrate a product or service

Co-browsing

One of the critical capabilities of the unified customer engagement platform is its ability to co-browse. Agents can hand-hold customers, along with giving them full control of the information they want to share. An agent can walk a customer through bank portals, company websites, mobile applications, highlight, and document, video chat, or text chat simultaneously. It serves as an excellent tool for troubleshooting, reducing service time, and keeping trust intact.

Virtual agents

Chatbots are a great way to improve First Call Resolution (FCR). They are also excellent tools for answering Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). Chats that go beyond the scope of the bots can be routed to agents. Agents can take up only those chats that need their intervention. This leads to a considerable reduction in service time.

To summarise, service agents have access to all communication channels on a single platform in a unified customer engagement setup. During a conversation, they can choose to switch between the channels or plugin another specialist in conversation. During any of the above processes, there can be exchange notes between agents.

Interactions across all channels are recorded on the cloud and can also be segmented. These records can be used for quality, training, and auditing later, saving much time and building a seamless experience. Omnichannel, which is the industry term for seamless customer experience, results from the Unified Customer Engagement Platform.