What does 360-Degree Customer Engagement look like?

Customers expect to be able to email an organization, follow up on webchat, call a month later, and interact on social media in between. The expectation in today’s omni-channel world is that the conversation will be maintained – regardless of time elapsed, choice of channel, or change of agent.

Relevant to achieving this is Gartner’s Critical Capabilities for Contact Center as a Service Report 2019.[1] Our view is that there are three things you should be providing to deliver excellent customer engagement: high-volume handling, a single view of the customer, and the agility to rapidly change the setup of the customer service environment.

Gartner® has identified ‘Customer Engagement Center’ (CEC) as one of their Use Cases. Gartner defines Customer Engagement Use Case as “addressing the need for deeper integration with business application software platforms and support for digital channels to provide a single view of the customer, which is essential for the organization’s success.”

72% of customers say connected processes – such as seamless handoffs or contextualized engagement based on earlier interactions is very important to winning their business.[2] As well as the connection between personalized engagement and increased brand loyalty and revenue, a 360 degree view of the customer can have life-changing implications in the public and utilities sectors.

A 360 degree view of the customer is created from input from many different technologies and sources. Organizations want as much data on customers as possible, especially when trying to deliver the best customer service. But the last thing an organization wants is to drown under the weight of a 360 degree view.

A single workstream gathers all customer interactions into one place, allowing agents to collaborate and ensuring a seamless handover between agents and across channels. storm® combines all integrations into a single service creation environment, so even when the sources of information are diverse, everything is available and visible in one place.

What’s more, in a single service creation environment, the possibility for future integrations are endless. AI capabilities, for example, can connect organically and quickly to the environment. End-to-end reporting that surveys everything and deep integration between all business applications is the key to the Customer Engagement Center.

We believe that Gartner has identified a trend: contact centers are evolving from a focus on discrete, one-off customer interactions to a more integrated and holistic view of customer activities and workflows. By streamlining multi-channel interactions into a single workflow, employees are more engaged to deliver the better and different experiences customers look for.