Messaging: Making The Right Choice

You’ve been chartered to deploy messaging and web chat in your contact center. You already have a CRM vendor and are hesitant to add any more complexity. You wonder if it is just easier to turn on the messaging and capabilities that your CRM provider offers.

Here are the  3 considerations to help you decide which path to take.

Treat Customers Like People, Not Cases or Incidents

1. Messaging is the new, always-on channel, so think about it differently. The reason you are considering messaging is because it is convenient for customers and offers them a better experience. So don’t just turn the messaging tool on within your existing CRM suite until you understand what you may be giving up when you just flip the switch

CRM systems, like Salesforce.com and Zendesk, were built on “cases” and “tickets.” Since when do customers want to be treated like a case or a ticket?

The only way to deliver a customer-driven messaging experience is to choose a vendor that built it that way, from the ground up. Selecting an incumbent CRM vendor that has either purchased another company to get messaging functionality or tried to build messaging on top of a case/ticket-based system will only lead to frustration and failure.

Start the Transition from Contact Center to Digital Engagement Center

2. Do you remember when all the talk was about moving from a Call Center to a Contact Center? That simply meant that it wasn’t just about letting customers contact you via the phone. It meant adding and supporting other channels like email and chat to become a “contact center” in order to help customers reach a company on their terms. We are facing the same type of shift again.

Everyone knows we all have our mobile device practically sewn to our hands. Texting and messaging happens all day, every day, by each and every one of us. Ensuring your organization is prepared to handle all the digital engagement channels is critical. Today, the Contact Center manages phone calls, emails, and web chats in a synchronous fashion.

A Digital Engagement Center takes the latest channels and manages them asynchronously. Customers never have to re-start and re-explain when they use messaging. The conversation becomes an ongoing dialog that never has to end.

How CRM & Messaging Fit Together

3. The decision to turn messaging and chat on within an existing CRM solution or to select a purpose-built solution is not easy, but it doesn’t have to be an either/or decision. A Digital Engagement Platform can be the connective tissue between the phone channel and your CRM application.

Your organization already has the tools in place to manage phone calls and you already have a repository for customer interaction history. Now you need one place to turn for all your digital interactions that can span texting, web chats, and social.

Quiq offers the Digital Engagement Platform purpose-built for asynchronous, always-on communications. It is the single application that manages SMS/text messaging, web chats, and social conversations. It is incredibly straightforward to integrate Quiq with your existing CRM system. You can also add the option to your phone channel (IVR) for customers to “press 3” if they prefer to text. See how the Digital Engagement Platform really is the connective tissue between your existing contact center systems.

Quiq makes it easy for customers to contact a business via Messaging, the preferred channel already in use with friends and family.  With Quiq, customers can engage with companies via SMS/text messaging, Facebook Messenger, Web Chat, In-App, and Kik for help with their pre-sales and post-sales questions. In return, companies get a digital engagement platform to communicate with customers. Learn more about Quiq today at quiq.com.