How appropriate.

While here in London on business, I find myself sitting at a Starbucks staring out the window at a very old Windsor Castle as I write this blog. It’s fitting that I’m at Starbucks given that my blog is about the customer experience. Love them or not, Starbucks epitomizes a great customer experience. Why? Because they cater to their customers and their customers feel catered to.

That’s the experience we should all be giving to our customers. The good news is that, today, we have the technologies to achieve this. The challenge is selecting the right technologies and applying them in the right way.

With this in mind, on Tuesday, Jan. 27 at 11:30 a.m. EST I’m going to join Ian Jacobs, senior analyst with Forrester Research, to present a webinar during which we’ll share five key technology trends for 2015 that will help contact centers improve their customers’ experience. This has never been more important, given today’s mega-empowered consumer who can tell the world in a split second about his or her great or awful customer experience.

Here are a few details about the trends we’ll cover:

  • Big data – Think about your customer’s buying journey — every touch point, every conversation, every transaction. What do you do with this data today? What could you do with it in order to improve the customer experience? We’ll give you some ideas about how to make your customers feel catered to based on all the data you have about them.
  • Omnichannel– This is not just about interacting with your customer through the channel they expect. It’s also about providing support for those channels in a way they didn’t expect. We’ll explore contextual-based and customer-choice routing.
  • Cloud– This goes beyond simple cost models and dives head-on into risk avoidance by uncovering the following:
    1. Elasticity – Horizontally (features, departments, etc.) or vertically (scale high or low) as business needs dictate.
    2. Flexibility – Keep control or give it up.
    3. Rapid deployment – get up and running within hours or days instead of weeks or months.
    4. Continuous feature roll-out – staying ahead of your customers is crucial if you’re going to make them feel catered to and this is a way you can do it.
  • Mobile– Yes, your customers are mobile and are using mobile devices. But what are you doing to better support your customers on those devices? And what about within your contact center? How about anywhere, anytime agents using any device?
  • Workforce Optimization (WFO)– A huge category consisting of several technologies. We’ll define them, explain why you should unify them, and focus on a few that have a powerful impact on your customer’s experience.

So, if you’re responsible for your customer’s experience, or the technology behind it, you should attend. And make sure to come armed with questions! We allow ample time for live QA and involve additional panel experts to help field the toughest questions.

In the meantime, feel free to leave your remarks here in the comments and I’ll get back to you.

Tim


Tim Passios

I’ve been lucky enough to work with the great team here at Interactive Intelligence for nearly two decades, having started back in 1998 when we were just a start-up company in the heart of the Midwest. At that time, I had just spent the previous seven years working for a software company managing their contact center which paved my way to join here at Interactive. Over the years here, I’ve contributed in many ways from IT, sales support, demonstrations, and marketing. In my current role as the Vice President of Solutions Marketing, I have constant interactions with customers, prospects, the media and industry analysts, which give me keen insights into the different challenges related to the world of business communications. I graduated from Ball State University in 1990 with an advertising major and marketing minor. While at BSU, I met my beautiful bride of 20 years and we now live with our two children in Fishers, IN.