What happened in Vegas — Customer Contact Week 2018 Roundup

Delivering “wow” moments for improving customer experience has always been the mantra for businesses focusing on customer support and customer engagement. Many businesses that provide the technology to power customer support attend Customer Contact Week (CCW) in Las Vegas — and Plivo was among them.

CCW visitors learn from their peers, participate in workshops, and attend seminars. Here’s a quick look at three trending topics we heard covered at the event.

B2B customer service in a multichannel environment

Having a customer-first mentality is the single biggest reason why businesses and technology providers come together. Several discussions were focused on how businesses can find more than one way to engage with customers — through voice, messaging, in-app notifications, social listening, or other ways. Some businesses take time to educate agents on best practices — how they can free an agent’s routine tasks so they focus on building better conversations and educating customers. For a company like Plivo, this was a huge takeaway, since our voice and messaging products ensure businesses are proactive, create a customer-centric culture, and pave the way for seamless interaction irrespective of channel.

Automation to revamp your phone system

Automation is critical when businesses have multiple touch points for customers to interact. We heard discussions around how to build call flows that focus on self-service while ensuring that a caller gets everything they need without having to interact with an agent. Having APIs in place ensures tighter integrations with other applications and vendors, and can provide ways to intelligently route your customers to their destination with greater personalization. Providing contextual awareness is key — it improves response times and increases customer satisfaction rates.

Bots in a messaging-driven world

A lot of attendees spoke about finding a balance between bots and agents and what the ideal hand-off is. We think there’s no right or wrong answer here. Several alternatives can provide a similar experience — messaging automation, IVR extensions, and workflow automation tools. Soon, ML- and AI-powered bots could change the way support teams function.

Conversations at the Plivo booth

There was never a dull moment at Plivo’s booth on the expo floor. We talked with hundreds of visitors. Here are the top three topics we heard from them:

Uncomplicating IVR is a complex business

The beauty of the cloud is that it can help you uncomplicate everything from a simple app like email to running complex businesses. Visitors told us about using legacy systems that put a strain on the entire stack — and the people who build the stack. An IVR system is a critical piece of running a call center or having customers call in for support. The flexibility you get my moving to the cloud helps you route callers to the right agents and provide better personalization for businesses of any size.

Having a well-rounded communication experience is essential

“We aren’t using SMS yet but we know we should” was a common refrain among the visitors to our booth. Adding SMS flows to existing contact center technology used to be a daunting task, so visitors were “wowed” by Plivo’s innovative solution to this challenge.

Building call centers is an expensive affair

As a communication platform service provider for voice and SMS, our goal is to simplify the lives of our customers and users and make communication easy and affordable. Several visitors still spend hours figuring out what technology to use to build a call center, what skill sets should they look for in application developers, or how should they prioritize the development effort. Development time is precious, so it’s important to spend that time where it adds the most business value. We demonstrated in real time a cool new way to build a call center, create custom IVR flows, and set up a messaging platform without any coding or requiring any technical expertise, all in a matter of minutes. We like to call it “having your very own engineer in your pocket!”