This article was originally published on the FCR blog on July 5, 2018. Click here to read the original and to see a video version.
It’s been an interesting quarter in the contact center technology space. Before jumping into some of the cool tools I’ve seen recently, let’s first run through four updates from technologies I’ve mentioned in the past.
- Zendesk just announced their new omnichannel platform. I’m particularly excited about their Guide and Explore products.
- Salesforce announced that Desk.com is going away in March 2020 and they’re moving customers to Service Cloud Lightning.
- Nanorep, a platform that we’ve mentioned for AI-driven self-help was acquired by LogMeIn.
- Wise.io, a machine learning tool to help agents with macro selection was acquired by GE and then spun out AnswerIQ to continue their work with contact centers.
Now, here are four technologies I’ve seen in the past few months that are worth your attention.
Kustomer
This is a customer engagement platform that gives us a fresh look at omnichannel customer service. Where in traditional platforms customer interactions might live in their own individual tickets on various support channels, Kustomer puts the interaction into a timeline regardless of the channel. Information about orders, shipping, etc can also be displayed in the same timeline, making it a snap for agents to have complete context about customers without having to open a bunch of windows.
Median
The ability to see a customer’s screen is an incredibly powerful tool for support agents. Median has developed their CoBrowse tool that integrates with chat platforms like LiveChat, Olark, Intercom, Zendesk Chat, Kustomer, and several others. Not only can you see the customer’s screen but you can see where they are on the screen and highlight key information for them.
BrightReps
Great customer service is often fueled by the ability of support agents to follow processes accurately and consistently. To better facilitate this, BrightReps has developed an app called Sidekick that can be used with Salesforce, Zendesk, or as a Chrome plugin to create workflows for agents to follow while supporting customers. They also have integrations with EasyPower, ShipStation, Shopify, and others to be able to quickly see the order status information that customers frequently contact support about. One of my favorite features of BrightReps is the heat map functionality in each process flow that gives understanding of where agents are spending the most time in each process.
AnswerDash
We’ve discussed other self-help tools in the past that put knowledge in the right places for customers to be able to self-solve their issues and AnswerDash has a great approach to this. Knowledge base content can be added to any web page so customers don’t have to hunt for it. With robust searchability, customers quickly locate the information they’re looking for and can indicate whether or not the content solved their problem. Furthermore, AnswerDash integrates with Zendesk, Salesforce, and others which means there’s no need to migrate knowledge from another platform.
That’s four updates and four cool technologies. Check these out for yourself, let me know if you have any questions, and certainly send me a note if you have any other must see tools for me to check out.
