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What is customer service technology?
The term customer service technology typically refers to the platform and software contact centers use to provide customer support. The quality and capabilities of the technology have a significant impact on both customer and agent experience, as well as contact center performance. Businesses who want the best customer service technology should look for reliable solutions that are robust enough to meet customer demands and flexible enough to adapt to future needs.
Customer service technology commonly falls into the following broad categories:
Analytics
Contact centers are rich with data. Analytics tools help turn all that data into usable information. Customer service technology that falls into this category includes reporting, interaction analytics, and customer surveys. Information provided by these tools helps managers understand key areas like contact volume, operational performance, customer satisfaction, contact drivers, and more.
Cloud-based vs on-premises
Customer service technology isn't just about features and functionality. A very fundamental decision businesses must make is whether to go with a hosted cloud-based solution or have the software on their own premises. A cloud-based solution involves paying a vendor a monthly fee to host the software, which means they provide the servers, apply the software updates, fend off hackers, etc. Having software on-premises requires not only the software licenses, but also hardware purchases, IT staff training, and more. Both options have unique pros and cons, but for flexibility and maintenance ease, it's hard to beat the cloud.
Routing software
Routing software identifies where the incoming contact needs to go, and then gets it there. For example, an interactive voice response (IVR) system --which is the phone menu you often hear when you call customer support -- can ask the caller a series of questions that helps identify which agent team the call should go to (ex., claims or billing). The information is then passed to the automatic call distributor (ACD), which queues the call for the appropriate team. IVR systems and ACDs are two cornerstones of customer service technology.
Workforce optimization
Contact centers usually have large groups of agents, and they all need to be trained, scheduled, managed, monitored, and motivated. A good workforce optimization suite supports all these tasks. Workforce management software, which automates contact volume forecasting and agent scheduling, is the foundational software in this category. Rounding out this group are recording software, quality management systems, and performance management tools designed to develop agents and bring visibility to their performance.
NICE can meet all your customer service technology requirements.
NICE CXone is the market leading contact center software in use by thousands of customers of all sizes around the world to help them consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences. CXone is a cloud native, unified suite of applications designed to help a company holistically run its contact center operations. Learn how CXone helped Teleflora’s business blossom.
Using Technology to Build Stronger Customer Relationships
Find out how technology can help you create lasting relationships with your customers. We’ll share tips on using tech to boost engagement and loyalty.
Your customers are trying to reach you for service on digital channels – even if you’re not there yet. How many SMS text messages go to your call center phone number with no response? Who’s trying to find you on Facebook, Twitter, or WhatsApp and not finding you? Now with CXone it is easy to provide digital-first omnichannel service in all the channels your customers expect.
Personalized digital interactions: deliver native experiences in each of 30+ messaging channels, such as rich media, emojis, and other collaboration tools.
Simple to Activate: pre-integrated channels make it easy to offer to customers and agents.
Easy to Say “Yes”: simple packaging removes barriers to offering all channels to customers and agents.
Empowered agents
CXone empowers all your agents to deliver a true digital-first omnichannel customer experience by simultaneously combining all customer interactions in one intelligent inbox across multiple digital channels and voice for agents to select ("pull"), while dynamically prioritizing the most time-sensitive or real-time interactions according to service levels ("push"). All delivered in a single application – complete with full customer context, journey history, and sentiment.
Single Interface: one inbox for all digital messaging and real-time (voice/chat) channels – retaining native experience of each messaging platform.
Agents in Control: ‘pulling’ work in natural flow, while dynamic prioritization maintains SLAs – and prevents ‘cherry picking’.
Customer Card: full customer context, journey and conversation history, plus sentiment.
Holistic management
With CXone, omnichannel interactions are managed holistically, from agents to supervisors and beyond. Integrated workforce optimization, analytics, automation and artificial intelligence across digital and voice interactions ensure complete management across contact center operations.
