Is your Chat Messaging System Fit for Purpose?

January, 2019

Chat Messaging | Chatbot
In the days of push campaigns agents were trained and well briefed. Nowadays it seems little attempt is made to connect with corporate CRM systems to get a profile of who is messaging you.
In an earlier blog (June 2018) we looked at the move from “push to pull” contact management. Instead of contact centers pushing their wares out to consumers, consumers are increasingly responsible for making contact, using a variety of messaging systems, such as Facebook and Whatsapp.

So the aim in this new world is to pull customers and prospects in and deliver them a great service.

But something seems to be missing!

In the push days if you ran an outbound campaign and were calling your customers, you would make darned sure that the agent was well-briefed, so that the call was as productive as possible and you may also have used skills-based routing to connect the call to the most appropriate agent.

Step forward to the way contact centers are managing messaging systems.  Unlike the world of push marketing, where the agent was well briefed, there is often little attempt to connect with corporate CRM systems and get a profile of who is messaging you.  So at best, systems are front-ended with chatbots who will seek to identify who is messaging and then simply hand the call off to a live agent.  And at the end of the shift transcripts of all messaging sessions are made available for analysis, whatever that means!

One giant step back for mankind.

Here’s what should happen.

  • Whoever owns the corporate CRM database is persuaded or coerced into creating an image on a regular basis so that it can provide real-time input on all customers
  • An incoming message gets picked up by a chatbot which quickly figures out who it is.
  • Then, if the message is from an existing customer, the chatbot may also use customer history and profile information to deliver appropriate responses, in many cases obviating the need to speak to a live agent.
  • But if it is clear that a live agent should get involved, then two things can happen.
    • First, the messaging system should be able to deploy skills-based routing techniques to get the call to the best agent
    • And, the agent can then, with all customer information available to him, have a meaningful dialogue to provide the best customer experience possible.

We don’t normally comment directly on our own capabilities in these blogs, but if your messaging systems don’t function like this, for whatever reason, then feel free to ask how we can help.  And if it means, for example, that your corporate people need help in understanding how to create a clone of your customer database, for real-time access, then we can help with that too.