Like everyone else, ContactEngine defers to Gartner’s view of the world: their 3rd party and unbiased perspective provides a useful touchstone.
Gartner have indicated 'proactive outbound' communications as the #1 way to deliver both productivity savings and improved customer experience (CX)[1]:
Many organizations think they’re doing proactive communications because they send outbound messages. Or make outbound calls. Or send emails. But all too often this messaging is disjointed and fragmented. Each message is “fire and forget”. Each message is a separate event. There's no ongoing dialogue. No ability to transact. Often the messages come from many different sources: multiple shortcodes, multiple phone numbers, 'noreply@' email addresses. The result? Done this way, messaging can actually drive up inbound calls and increase customer frustration.
Proactive communications as provided by ContactEngine – for Verizon, amongst others – are delivered as part of a seamless and elegant single conversation across the whole customer journey – a conversation that allows customers to take transactions – say to upgrade, or to get help with an appointment – with each conversation done with individual context – both of all the proceeding conversations, as well as real-time knowledge of the customer status.
What’s more, because ContactEngine conversations utilize AI – which means that customers can respond with natural language just as they would to another person “sure I’d love to increase my bandwidth”, or “yeah, that’s working fine now”, or “can I get some help please” – and ContactEngine understands the intents within that natural language (respectively Upgrade, Everything is OK, Get Help) – the whole experience of engaging via ContactEngine is just like having a conversation with a human.
All of these factors about ContactEngine proactive conversations (a single conversation across the whole journey / the ability to transact / human-like dialogue), means that the customers really enjoy the conversations because it’s easy for them, because we’ve taken out the effort.
ContactEngine recently sponsored a piece of research conducted by Delineate that surveyed 10,000 customers of over 100 brands in the US and UK on effort. They found that 30% of brand loyalty relates to effort, and a startling 90% of customer engagement with brands are initiated by the customer, not the brand[2]!
The result is high CX metrics across the board: engagement (80%+ is common), containment (90%+), and low Average Handling Time (~2 mins) in the few occasions where agents are engaged for added-value activities. I’m pleased to say we’ve even maintained these metrics for our clients during this Covid-19 crisis, and because of the combination of journey automation and agent augmentation, Time To Close has been maintained at around 2 minutes.
Finally, because ContactEngine natively incorporates Case Management, leverages existing Knowledge Management, and then links to Virtual Agents – all of which are also in Gartner’s top quadrant for CX & productivity optimization along with proactive communications – the benefits are multiplied, and the existing investments made by our clients deliver even more effectively.
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[1] https://www.gartner.com/en/webinars/3982362/virtual-briefing-identify-and-prioritize-the-most-effective-self
[2] https://www.contactengine.com/insights/delineate-customer-effort-index-whitepaper/
