Quality customer service has always been important to success in the business world, but it is absolutely imperative in the digital economy. The proliferation of mobile devices and applications has given consumers more choices and flexibility in researching and purchasing products or services. This, in turn, has made them more discerning and demanding, and less tolerant of inadequacies in customer support interactions.

For those digitally unprepared businesses, the dual tyranny of increasing consumer expectations and zero tolerance for poor service can spell disaster. But by understanding and fulfilling the support needs of today’s consumers – particularly millennials – digitally savvy enterprises can improve customer satisfaction, brand image, business agility, and long-term revenue while also lowering costs.

Engaging the next generation

What makes millennials truly di�erent from their predecessors is that they are the first generation of consumers to grow up with digital technology. The implications of this extend far beyond the ability of younger consumers to intuitively use emerging technologies; their digital birthright informs their world view, choices, and expectations.

“Millennials believe that whatever they do in their personal lives, they ought to be able to do in their commercial lives,” explains Steve Castro-Miller, vice president of Bold360 customer engagement and support platform at LogMeIn. “For example, they want to be able to switch communication mediums at will with full context preserved as they switch. They do it in their personal life all the time

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with various social media. So they can get incredibly frustrated when the vendors they buy from don’t provide this kind of connective tissue.”

In addition, Castro-Miller says, previous genera-tions tended to be much more loyal to brands or companies than today's younger digital consum-ers. “It’s all about the last transaction,” he says. “Was it pleasing? And they are less interested in whether a brand has a great reputation than in what a community of people around that brand says about their last experience.”

Millennials and other digitally fluent consumers not only are comfortable using multiple devices, social media, messaging platforms, and mobile apps, they expect their interactions to cross seamlessly – often in real time – from one device or platform to another. Many businesses, however, struggle to meet this expectation as part of their customer support, leading to frustrated consumers, lost sales, and bad word of mouth in social media and among consumers’ personal circles of influence.

While some businesses o�er multiple service channels for customers, they still deliver poor customer service because they: 1) fail to integrate these channels for either customers or support agents; and 2) use support center resources ine�ciently, resulting in long waits, dropped calls, and expired chat sessions.

The gap between customer expectations of sup-port and the ability of businesses to meet those expectations is wide and costly. A 2016 study by LogMeIn and Ovum, “Get It Right: Deliver the Omni-Channel Support Customers Want,” shows that 82% of customers “have stopped doing busi-ness with a brand following a bad experience.”

Customer Engagementand Support in aConnected World

New tools for new contact center workers

The expectations of millennials are also unfulfilled in the contact center workplace itself, according to Castro-Miller. “Younger contact center workers are demanding tools for their jobs that mirror the digital tools they use in their personal lives,” he says. “That means tools that are fast and allow them to communicate quickly.”

Businesses that are unable to meet the expecta-tions of millennial contact center employees regarding tools and work-life balance are paying the price, Castro-Miller says. “Contact centers that ignore these needs are plagued by excessive turnover. And when you’re turning over your sta� every three or four months, that’s a major cost.”

Emerging opportunities and challenges

As new consumer digital technologies become popular, they create both opportunities and challenges for marketing and customer support. The explosion of digital data from smartphones, mobile apps, wearables, geolocation services, and internet-connected devices provides businesses with valuable insights into customer needs and preferences.

Combined with mobile apps designed to run on multiple platforms, this data helps busienesses deliver more personalized o�ers and service to customers. And while millennials and older technologically familiar consumers may not be brand-loyal, they are responsive to personalized promotions. A 2015 global consumer survey by Mindtree found that 78% of consumers said personalized promotions encourage them to buy products and services they have purchased before, while 74% of respondents said personal-ized promotions would encourage them to buy relevant products they’ve never before purchased.

Clearly personalization pays o� for businesses because it influences buyer behavior. Thanks to social media, mobile devices, geolocation apps, and other digital technologies, businesses also have more channels available than ever for

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enabling superior customer engagement. This a�ords enterprises the potential to support customers using their individual preferred channels. In a world where customer expectations are higher than ever and even a single bad experience can prompt a consumer to immedi-ately and permanently abandon a brand, every interaction matters.

Unfortunately, too many businesses lack the IT tools and infrastructure necessary to e�ectively deliver superior customer support to modern consumers. Disparate customer channels that aren’t integrated can silo information in a way that hampers customer service and wastes the time of support agents. And agents who aren’t provided with the technology for omni-channel customer support can’t very well deliver it e�ectively. The inherent ine�ciencies of siloed data, inadequate customer support platforms, and archaic agent interfaces cost businesses in terms of unneces-sary costs, lost revenue opportunities, and diminished brand value.

Agents lose productivity when they must constantly toggle through system interfaces to find information for or about a customer.

As contact center employees become increasingly frustrated with inadequate support tools, their job performance declines.

Constant turnover of agents requires an ongoing investment in hiring and training.

Inexperienced agents are slower and prone to making more mistakes, and and require more supervision.

Maintaining multiple systems to support various channels results in higher telephony costs due to fewer lower-cost channels.

Unnecessary contact center costs can manifest themselves in several ways:

Elevating the experiencewith automation

One technology that enables customer support departments to deliver superior, personalized service is automation. While the notion of using automation to improve the personalization of customer support may seem counterintuitive, tools such as smart agents, virtual personal assistants, and neural networks give consumers the informa-tion and services they want using the channels they prefer – and all without waiting for a human agent to help them.

“Automation can provide the answers we as consumers need in an e�ective, rapid manner,” explains Castro-Miller. “Suppliers must figure out first how to provide answers in an intelligent and automated fashion, and second, to do so predic-tively – based on my behaviors, based on what’s in my cart, based on what I just said. That’s where money’s going to be made and lost in the next few years. Suppliers who can’t figure this out will go out of business.”

Another way automation enhances the consumer experience is by providing a seamless transition to live support should a customer need it. Businesses with inadequate support technology frequently leave customers stranded in automated limbo, unable to mitigate issues on their own and also unable to connect with a real person.

Overcoming technological barriers using automa-tion and modern protocols can also help customer support operations leapfrog into the digital era. “Contact center leaders must accept the fact that their customer base is rapidly changing,” says Castro-Miller, “and they can no longer force-fit their support agents into an old mold.”

The power of personalization

Personalized interactions drive real-time consumer behavior, allowing enterprises to up-sell and cross-sell products and services. Indeed, without the ability to personalize customer interactions across a number of channels, superior customer support in the digital economy is practically impossible.

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For businesses with the vision and commitment to provide superior customer service, the rewards are great. By personalizing product and service o�ers as well as customer support – either through automation or a live agent possessing the right tools – businesses can create value through:

Long-lasting connections with their customers

Recurring revenue from repeat business

Brand di�erentiation as competitors fail to meet consumer support needs

Research from customer experience services firm Watermark Consulting shows that businesses with reputations for providing excellent customer experiences outperformed customer experience “laggards” by 80 percentage points and the S&P 500 Index by 26 percentage points. “A great customer experience, and the internal ecosystem supporting it, can deliver tremendous strategic and economic value to a business, in a way that’s di�cult for competitors to replicate,” Watermark concludes.

Conversely, a negative experience can drive away a customer. In an Accenture study, “Digital Disconnect in Customer Engagement,” 73% of U.S. consumers responding to a survey said they expect customer service “to be easier and more convenient.” More than half of the survey respond-ents (52%) said poor customer support had prompted them to switch providers during the previous year; 68% of the consumers who aban-doned a provider said they could not be won back.

As technology continues to empower and raise the expectations of consumers, it is clear that modern digital enterprises must guarantee supe-rior service throughout the customer engagement process while keeping IT and other support-related costs under control. What is needed is a unified solution that o�ers a seamless customer experience while reducing costs associated with consolidating systems, training, and ongoing maintenance. Such a unified platform could help deliver unparalleled customer experiences no

matter from which channel a consumer chooses to obtain service.

Seamless customer engagement

A unified customer engagement and support platform should provide consumers with flexible, tailored experiences across pre-sale, post-sale, and technical support engagements.

Agents must be able to view these experiences through a single, intuitive interface; a comprehen-sive portal that pulls together all of the relevant information for a customer interaction on one screen. With immediate access to relevant customer data – such as a history of interactions across channels, purchase history, and website activity – contact center agents can deliver truly personalized service faster and more e�ectively.

The benefits to the business include more satisfied customers, higher conversion rates, and greater revenue. On the cost side, contact center agents will be happier, resulting in better job perfor-mance, lower turnover, and greatly reduced hiring and training costs.

This same engagement and support platform should be able to leverage customer data and its knowledge base to intelligently respond to routine, low-complexity inquiries in real time. Integrating automation capabilities to address routine queries helps both customers and agents by streamlining the flow of service needs, making the overall contact center operation more e�cient. Further, many customers prefer self-service and only want to engage with a live agent as a last resort.

When that time does come for a human interac-tion, however, it is essential for a unified platform to enable a seamless transition from automated self-service to a live agent with full informational and situational context intact.

For contact center professionals, a unified customer engagement and support platform should include an open, flexible, and

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scalable environment that can easily be integrated with leading ticketing and CRM solutions. Given the sensitive nature of customer data such as financial and personal information, the platform must allow IT to meet security and compliance requirements through data encryption, authoriza-tion controls, and disaster recovery.

Finally, unified customer engagement and support solutions should provide contact center managers and line-of-business decision makers with reports containing graphics and actionable data on agent performance, conversion rates, visitor tra�c trends, support feedback, and key performance indicators.

Digital consumers will become even more demanding as new technologies emerge and younger generations gain buying power. By lever-aging a unified customer engagement and support platform, businesses can deliver on the expecta-tion of superior customer experiences.

To learn more about the Bold360 customer engagement and support platform visit Bold360.com.