Research Study Commissioned by LiveVox Reveals Path to Improved Contact Center Agent and Customer Experience

LiveVox, Inc. (“LiveVox”), a leading cloud-based provider of customer service and digital engagement tools, recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate how integrated contact center solutions help firms with their business operations, customer needs, agent performance, and business outcomes. For the study, Transform The Agent And Customer Experience Using Contact Center Solutions With Embedded CRM Capabilities, Forrester conducted an online survey with 269 US contact center decision-makers who held a title of director or above in December of 2020.

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“As the Forrester study found, organizations today are struggling to track and understand customers across the multitude of channels throughout the customer journey, making both the agent and customer experience (CX) frustrating and difficult”

Digital communication channels, including SMS, email and web chat, now play an integral role in the omnichannel customer journey, helping to expand customer self-service options and enabling contact centers to handle high volumes of support tickets with limited agent capacity. According to the aforementioned Forrester Consulting study, however, two out of every three firms surveyed still cannot orchestrate customer journeys across multiple channels. And seven out of 10 survey participants said that agents do not have all the relevant customer information and interaction history at the moment of engagement—resulting in frustrating experiences for both customers and agents. Nearly 70 percent of these firms said that they would be more likely to purchase a contact center platform with its own CRM to alleviate these issues.

“As the Forrester study found, organizations today are struggling to track and understand customers across the multitude of channels throughout the customer journey, making both the agent and customer experience (CX) frustrating and difficult,” said LiveVox CEO Louis Summe. “As they strive to improve agent satisfaction, and in turn improve CX as well, contact center leaders are turning to cloud-based integrated contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) with embedded CRM capabilities to better engage their customers. At LiveVox, we’ve made it a priority to develop best-in-class solutions that help contact centers maximize their performance – a continued focus in our recently announced version 15 of the platform.”

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Key findings from the survey include:

• Integration with other systems is the top issue in managing CRM and contact center technology. Three-quarters of surveyed decision-makers said it is challenging to manage upgrades and integrations for their CRM and contact center platform and between them. These integration challenges persist across other systems within the organization, as decision-makers ranked this as their top challenge in managing their CRMs and contact center technology.
• Contact center platforms are not given a full picture of their customers, and that frustrates agents. Integration challenges restrict agents from accessing and synthesizing all relevant customer information and interaction history. This leads to clunky workflows, and it hinders the agent’s ability to quickly resolve customer issues and provide exceptional service. Customers can become frustrated with the time an interaction takes while agents are frustrated because they can’t do their job efficiently through no fault of their own.
• Firms struggle to serve customers on their channel of choice. Only forty-four percent of respondents believe their firm can orchestrate customer journeys across all channels. Why is this? It’s because nearly 60% of firms support their channels on different systems, making it difficult to capture and utilize customer data. And a lack of real-time, channel-specific information adds to the challenge of accessing and using customer data on the channel of their choice.

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