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C3 Communications Blog


Category Archives: Multichannel

Making integrated communication a reality in Higher Education

13th March 2014Company News, Higher Education, MultichannelC3katie

With the cost of tuition fees at an all-time high, education has become a commodity. As a result, the relationship that students have with their respective institutions is changing and there is a demand from students for higher levels of “customer service”.

This new generation of students, who has grown up with SMS, email and social media, is used to interacting in real time with their friends and family, as well as the brands that they choose to buy products and services from. The HE institutions that will excel in this competitive environment are the ones who rapidly evolve their infrastructure to reflect the multichannel reality of communications.

C3 specialises in customer engagement platforms for the HE market. The C3 platform enables institutions to engage with customers across multiple channels, and deployments typically incorporate C3’s multichannel contact centre and IVR software. Complementary applications can easily be added to the platform e.g. speech recognition, call recording, secure billing.

The platform offers advanced contact centre interaction management functionality, including sophisticated voice control, advanced self-service, proactive outbound communications, speech recognition and, importantly, multichannel functionality to support the routing, queuing, tracking and reporting of all enquiries regardless of channel.

“Contact Centres within Higher Education are usually run on an informal basis,” said John Wood, Sales and Marketing Manager. “But there are still huge opportunities within departments at every institution where contact centre technology can be used to improve the student experience in terms of streamlining administration, enhancing revenue-generating services and providing ‘burstable capacity’ during seasonal peaks and fundraising efforts.”

C3 is attending UCISA 2014 (27-28 March, the Brighton Centre) – drop by Stand 45 for a demonstration of our Customer Engagement applications or email john@c3.co.uk to arrange a demo.

Migration in a multichannel communication era

7th November 2013Best Practice, Multichannelkatie

The generation of switches acquired in the early 2000s is now reaching end of life (and, in many cases, end of support from vendors). So, those responsible for voice infrastructure should be considering their options, within the context of a rapidly evolving communication environment.

The switching landscape has changed significantly within the last decade. Multichannel communication is the norm and, as a result, customer interactions are already becoming a lot more complex. The focus now is on integrating multiple channels, such as SMS, web chat, email social media and, of course, voice; streamlining inbound and outbound communication for a single “360 degree” customer view.

Having the ability to support diverse communication channels as well as burstable capacity (for peak flows e.g. Clearing) are just two pressure points that universities really need to consider, as they weigh up the options for IP migration.

Managing the pace of change

With legacy platforms reaching end-of-life deadlines, it has become much harder for organisations to change to these constantly adapting market conditions. The teams responsible for these systems are understandably reluctant to add new multimedia applications to the legacy switch but, given the pace of change and customer expectations, this is an untenable position to maintain.

However, the ‘rip and replace’ IP migration path often recommended by infrastructure vendors also makes it difficult for universities to move forward. This “one stop shop” approach can be appealing: the promise of simplified deployment, single accountability, centralised management and lower costs. But it automatically cuts off any forward flexibility by locking universities in with one supplier.

C3 support clients taking a phased approach to migration, making it possible for them to sweat out their existing switch investments with new applications that are relevant to their user-base and can simply be migrated across to IP.Taking this granular approach encourages pick-and-mix application deployment.

Not only is this more cost effective, it also gives buyers the flexibility to adopt a wide range of applications from specialised ‘best of breed’ suppliers who can offer strong technological leadership and more advanced solutions to satisfy changes in legislation e.g. such as PCI DSS Compliance for credit card payments.

Related posts:

News: C3 to attend UCISA 2014

Blog: Why is a multichannel approach necessary?

Multichannel Management: more than a buzzphrase?

18th October 2013Best Practice, Multichannel, Telephony, Tips, Unified Communicationskatie

The Forrester Research report ‘Ending the multichannel frustration’ demonstrates how increasingly complex it has become to provide customer service.

According to the report, only 39% of companies earned an “excellent” or “good” customer experience index rating, whilst almost two thirds of brands were rated as delivering an “ok” to “very poor” customer experience.

The report outlines three key areas where customer service departments are struggling:

  1. Supporting the breadth of media types
  2. Empowering agents with a full view of customer interactions
  3. Communicating contextual answers to customers 

These issues stem from the lack of integration between communication channels, both technically and functionally. This might have been acceptable five years ago. But we live in a multichannel age where we expect to email, call and Tweet an organisation, and for them to have a common-thread view of all those interactions.

Without an integrated contact centre solution agents are unable to track customer enquiries across channels, which is frustrating for them and the customer.

Contact is our multichannel contact centre. This browser-based solution gives organisations the ability to stream all their enquiries into one unified interface. We also support outbound campaigns across the various channels, for a complete “360 degree” view of your communications, and PCI Compliant billing across channels.

Why is a “multichannel” approach necessary?

27th August 2013Best Practice, Infographic, Multichannel, Tipskatie

As customers we expect to reach businesses using the communication channel most convenient to us and, if we’re very unhappy with the service we receive, we’re likely to broadcast that to everyone via social media. This infographic demonstrates how customers are using various communication channels and their expectations from them.

multichannel graphic3_infographic

Where does outbound marketing fit into the multichannel mix?

15th August 2013Best Practice, Multichannel, Tips, Unified Communicationskatie

Companies are finally getting on board with “multichannel” and investing in contact centre software that is able to unify their fragmented communication channels.

There are now a number of solutions available that simplify the management of your multichannel operation. They are designed to capture disparate inbound enquiries and send them, in a unified queue, to your agents.

However, where some of these systems struggle is with outbound capabilities. Many don’t support outbound communication at all, which obviously creates another frustrating interaction silo where valuable customer data can fall between the cracks.

The ideal situation is for your multichannel contact centre to provide inbound/outbound functionality – where outbound campaigns and subsequent inbound enquiries correlate for a substantial impact on the consistent experience. This ensures you can monitor the impact of your marketing campaigns and make any necessary changes in response to live results.

Our multichannel contact centre software, Contact, offers this fused inbound/outbound functionality giving you a 360-degree view of your channels and customers. We also support centralised (and PCI Compliant) billing so customers can easily transact between channels.

Everything can be launched and managed via one browser based interface for a comprehensive and holistic view of your customer.

Managing communication with the ‘always on’ student consumer

15th July 2013Best Practice, Higher Education, Multichannel, Tips, Unified Communicationskatie

It is generally accepted that students have become more demanding as consumers since fees were raised to up to £9,000 per year.

The fact that complaints by students in England and Wales against universities rose by a quarter in 2012 to “record levels”, according to The Office of the Independent Adjudicator, goes some way support this theory.

As the higher education market becomes ever more competitive, universities are under pressure to act more like commercial entities and carve out a distinctive niche for themselves as individual institutions. Part of this involves a rethink around customer service delivery and reconfiguring communication channels so they reflect the preferences of users, e.g. by making support staff and tutors available over social media to engage with students.

Beyond transactional messaging

This new generation of consumers demand personalised interactions and tailored experiences when dealing with any organisation. And when individuals want direct interaction with an institution, they demand an almost immediate reply. But this is where the gap lies: between how current communication channels are being operated against students’ expectations of service delivery.

As it stands, most higher education institutions still treat email, SMS, social media and web chat as separate entities, run by different groups with individual objectives. There is no single view of the customer and no record of their cross-channel interactions with the institution. Frustratingly, this means your customers have to repeat information as they switch between channels because support staff have no centralised CRM record for them.

Getting the right technology in place that provides this single view of the customer is critical to fostering long term customer engagement.

Contact is a powerful multichannel contact centre solution that enables organisations to keep pace with the new ‘always on’ consumer.

This unique solution streamlines all your media channels (voice, email, SMS, social media, web chat) into a single, fully integrated multi-channel contact centre. The browser-based system provides queuing, routing and monitoring across these multiple channels, as well as extensive reporting capabilities.

Every enquiry is logged, irrespective of channel, in the integrated CRM. Preserving the history of these interactions makes it possible for your staff to follow students as they move between communication channels and manage interactions as they move from, say, social to email.

By monitoring cross-channel interactions and consolidating this valuable customer information, your support staff can assess the strengths and weaknesses of your customer-facing channels and make any necessary improvements, whilst your marketing team is able to analyse the cross-channel data for any themes or emerging trends that can be capitalised on. Ultimately, your organisation is better placed to deliver relevant and personalised services to customers.

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