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September 2023 Releases
While legacy Contact Center Software (CCaaS) solutions like Genesys, Five9 and Talkdesk focus on deflecting customer interactions to help companies lower their cost to serve – even at the expense of the customer experience and revenue – Regal helps B2C companies drive more revenue from every interaction by using personalization to treat millions of customers like one in a million. The underlying tech stack required to deliver on personalization is fundamentally different from traditional CCaaS infrastructure, starting with how the systems access, process, store, and activate customer data.
Over the last 10 years, we’ve watched as B2C companies made large investments in collecting customer behavior data – from CDPs like Segment to Data Warehouses like Snowflake – to personalize one-way digital marketing, including advertising, email and push, but they were not being used to modernize Contact Centers.
Why? Because legacy CCaaS were not built for processing and storing large amounts of unstructured, customer behavior data. So they’re blissfully unaware of that form you filled out online, that email you opened or that transaction that errored out. There’s 2 Cs in CCaaS but neither stands for “Customer.” Instead, CCaaS were built simply to route inbound support calls based on a caller’s key press of 1, 2, or 3 in an IVR. (Not to mention 0000000 please lord give me a human). And for outbound sales use cases, they were built to let agents iterate through a static list of leads and dial out using a one-size-fits-all approach, such as “call all leads 3x/day 3 days straight.”
As more businesses moved online and troves of customer data became available, personalization became the phrase du jour, and even CCaaS providers started to give lip service to the idea. But when they talk about using customer data to personalize the Contact Center experience, the functionality they are actually referring to is their CRM integrations with e.g., Salesforce using what are called “data dips.”
A “data dip” is a database lookup that is performed when an inbound call enters an IVR. CCaaS solutions use data dips to pull customer information associated with the phone number of the caller to provide a piece of information to the IVR to relay to the caller or determine how to route the call. Some use cases include:
Talkdesk’s data dip functionality looks like this:
A data dip can also be used for outbound calls to pull in a list of leads from a CRM to dial out to. This is also known as polling or syncing – where periodically (e.g., every hour) one system queries another system for the current state of the data.
Data dips or periodic syncing are commonly used in State-Based Systems – where low latency is less important and the path someone took to get to where they are is not as important as where they are at the current point in time. They’re reactive instead of proactive and rely on pre-defined, structured data.
The problems with data dips are:
Effectively, data dips are – as the name implies – a very surface level way of integrating customer data into the contact center software, and they therefore don’t deliver any meaningful personalization.
Regal was built with a different vision for the future and, therefore, a different underlying technology. Our vision is that in an increasingly digital world – where your competitors are just a click away – brands will need to differentiate on service to win customers and increase LTV. Delivering great customer service at internet scale, requires you to know each of your customers’ prior behaviors, conversations and preferences, and to have the tools in place for both your automated systems (including AI) and your agents to turn that data into uniquely personalized experiences for each customer.
The tech stack matters. In contrast to a State-Based System, Regal’s serverless, Event-Driven Architecture enables brands to stream real-time, unstructured customer behavior data into Regal as it happens, and build Unified Customer Profiles in Regal that merge the complete activity history of each customer across all their digital touch points (e.g., mobile, web, email) and human interactions (e.g., call and text conversation data, agent-inputted CRM data) into a single, identity-resolved profile.
As events come in, not only is that data available on customer profiles for agents to leverage in conversations, but admins can also build journeys (automated workflows) that trigger off of those events in real-time or reference the complete history of those events (including properties of the events) to determine the next best path or action for that particular customer. Remember Goosebumps – the interactive, choose your own adventure book series by R. L. Stine? It’s like that, and when done right, goosebumps are what your customers will feel when treated with this level of personalization and intimacy. Below is a simple example of how Regal’s Journey Builder allows you to achieve this.
According to McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions and 76% say they get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. When asked to define personalization, consumers associate it with positive experiences of being made to feel special e.g., “Meeting me where I am”, “Knowing my interests”, “Offering something just for me”, and “Checking in with me.”
To bring it to life, here are three Contact Center scenarios that demonstrate the difference in the customer experience you can now deliver with Regal.
Traditional CCaaS:
Beyond CCaaS (The Regal Way):
By triggering calls at the right moments based on their unique behaviors and intents, rather than on an arbitrary cadence, prospects are much more likely to answer your calls and convert before you lose them to the competition.
Traditional CCaaS:
Beyond CCaaS (The Regal Way):
With a Unified Customer Profile as part of the CCaaS, anonymous callers desperately pressing 0s and #s on their phones are transformed into welcomed guests. A single, continuous conversation can be carried out between inbound and outbound interactions, and across multiple channels.
Traditional CCaaS:
Beyond CCaaS (The Regal Way):
Armed with a history of the customer’s activity in one place – when they canceled, the delivery data, and the customer cancelation reason – the agent was able to reach out to a customer with a relevant solution and reason to resubscribe. They even avoided having to give a coupon, further increasing the LTV.
According to McKinsey’s research, personalization that relies on first-party data (e.g., clicks on your emails, form-fills on your website, agent interactions) can drive 25% more revenue and reduce customer acquisition costs by as much as 50%.
The mechanisms for why are simple:
Yet just 5% of Contact Center and Sales leaders in a Forrester survey say they believe their organization’s teams can provide high levels of personalization across all stages of their customers’ purchase journeys.
It’s time for these leaders to move beyond CCaaS. A new revenue playbook is needed that puts the customer first and relies on a modern event-driven tech stack that can turn large amounts of real-time customer data into more personalized experiences across your entire customer journey including sales, retention and support interactions.
If you’re ready to move #BeyondCCaaS and start treating millions of customers like one in a million contact us.
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