Digital engagement and customers

Jacques Der Ohanian

August 10, 2018

Digital engagement attracts and retains customers while providing them with the best on-line services.

Has your comms solution kept up with customer demand?

Times have changed.

The number of applications for smartphones has exploded. Developed by innovative start-ups who walk in the customer’s shoes, these applications solve day-to-day pain points of customers, citizens and communities with user friendly interfaces dedicated to very specific markets.

Digital Engagement is the answer
It’s no surprise that companies must ride the innovation wave with a user-friendly consumer-centric approach to remain competitive. They must first invest in customer digital engagement to maintain or increase their top-line then ensure their best operations by focusing on optimization and cost efficiency. Plus, they must ensure maintenance for people and asset safety.

Digital engagement attracts and retains customers while providing them with the best on-line services. With many technologies expanding to the cloud it becomes easier to embed communications (such as IM, voice and video), connect natural language processing BOTs, and use additional services. These services automate and enhance digital engagement with citizens, customers and the community providing customer information, analytics and artificial intelligence.

Enhance internal operations
Providing the best customer engagement is important, however, it’s also important to provide exceptional services. This will result in solid internal operations.

It all starts with strong collaboration in-house and with external parties, such as supplier or partners, and includes multi-disciplinary collaboration and conferencing capabilities. It is also important to anticipate rather than react, share data and analytics as well as gain better analysis of analytics through artificial intelligence.

In addition, by integrating communications within business process applications, APIs can be used to prevent the staff from changing contextual interfaces and to simplify the staff’s day-to-day life.

Improve system security
Lastly, the new cloud deployment and licensing models are more cost effective and improve system security. These models take advantage of IP, desktop and server virtualization, as well as simplified IT operations.

Of course, we should talk about keeping people and assets safe from the worst that can happen, meaning major human accidents or cyberattacks. Communications need an efficient and resilient network and voice infrastructure to survive such attacks. Fortunately, these events are not common, however it is better to prevent them from occurring in the first place. The best emergency and notification solutions react to any type of alarm that human and connected objects trigger, analyzing the situation, on boarding the right operational teams and communicating easily to the right people. Connecting IoT (internet of things), monitoring, and moving from a communications-enabled business process (CEBP) to an IoT-enabled business process (IoTEBP), based on AI based on analytics helps evolve the solution from preventive maintenance to proactive maintenance.

Ensure customer satisfaction with proactive maintenance and security
Providing the best user experience depends on the industry addressed: Whether it is healthcare, education, transportation or government. Ensuring competitiveness is possible by providing the best, cost-effective services and efficient operations. This is supported through a secure environment that has proactive maintenance.

If you are looking for ways to keep up with demands from your customers for better communications, it may be time to consider new ALE Communications solutions and services such as location-based services, artificial intelligence, IoT connections or integration within business applications. Alcatel-Lucent Rainbow™ UCaaS and CPaaS have been enhanced to address most cloud and vertical market needs.

We have more to share on this topic, and offering you the “Vertical Market and Digital Revolution” paper with concrete example on how your comms solution can keep up with customer demand.