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Sparkcentral Changes The Way Customer Service Is Delivered Globally, By Connecting Businesses With Customers Through Messaging

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Below is our recent interview with Joe Gagnon, CEO at Sparkcentral:

 Joe Gagnon

Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Sparkcentral?

A: In a nutshell: Sparkcentral is in this world to change the way customer service is delivered globally.

When was the last time you enjoyed calling a business, or waiting 10 minutes on a website for a live chat agent to appear and then give you 3 minutes to respond or you’re out? Exactly.

The consumer wants businesses to fit into their lives, not the other way around. When it comes to communication, messaging is now the foundation of everything — that thing we do billions of times every day in our personal lives on WhatsApp, Messenger, or iMessage. WhatsApp alone sees 60 billion messages a day, sent by 1.5 billion people around the globe — that’s 20% of the population on planet Earth! Messaging has become the social fiber of society.

It is now becoming an enabler of all things customer service. It is essentially poised to become the social fiber of business, too.

So, Sparkcentral is here to connect businesses with customers through messaging.

Q: You’ve recently been recognized as one of the Top 10 Customer Experience Solution providers in 2018 by Marketing Tech Outlook; could you tell us something more?

A: We have found a way to make customer service more efficient in the contact center, increase agent productivity by anywhere between 25 – 65% (!), while dramatically improving the customer experience — through messaging on “social” channels but also what’s known as live chat (or “web chat”) on websites or embedded within mobile apps.

Accomplishing cost containment and CX improvement at the same time is the holy grail for any customer service organization, and we have brought the industry a way to accomplish just that, better than traditional solutions relying on voice, email, or chat can do it.

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Q: Can you give us insights into your features?

A: One of our biggest advantages is that we support customer service on pretty much any major social or messaging channel used by consumers: Live chat on the website, mobile or within apps, SMS, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, and Twitter DM. In addition we also support the “public” sides of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and we can transition a public complaint on Twitter or FB into a more private conversation without the consumer OR the agent losing the history or context. Some of our enterprise customers have been able to consolidate 2 – 4 (!) platforms supporting individual channels into just one platform (ours) which reduces license, support, and training costs for them.

We are essentially giving customer service representatives a Web-based agent desktop that is powered by our AMD — an automated messaging distribution platform. This is very similar to the good old ACD (automated call distribution) that is used in call centers; but if you think about the nature of messaging, you realize it’s asynchronous, and that requires a new way to do conversation routing to agents, and measuring performance indicators. Asynchronous communication means that there is no need for the agent to be there at the same time as the customer. If you look at live chat, you might think it’s the same as messaging because it’s also text-based, but it’s actually quite different: it’s session-based. With live chat, you have to wait for an agent to become available. Once they are there, you are pressured to respond within minutes, or they “hang up” on you and you can start all over — annoying for the customer, a time waster and productivity killer for the agent.

With Sparkcentral, customers can send a message and go on with their day. No time is wasted to wait for the agent to do their part. Customers can take the conversation with them to the enterprise’s mobile app and continue chatting there if they like — for the agent nothing changes. Customers can send and receive rich media — think bills, statements, pictures, videos… E.g., if you’re in an accident, messaging allows you to send the car insurance rep or claims adjuster a picture of the damage for immediate assessment. Customers can start and stop the conversation as they please. And by the way, with our BYOB (Bring Your Own Bot) Strategy, any of these interactions can be fronted with chatbots and AI using a bot platform of the enterprise’s choice. We simply make the bot conversations visible to the agents when the conversation needs to escalate to an agent.

An “eternal thread” between the consumer and the brand is established on messaging channels. Think about the power of that for establishing a hopefully life-long relationship with your customers!

Q: What are the benefits of using your product?

A: There are five big benefit areas for any company:

● Agent productivity that is 25-65% higher than a typical voice agent
● NPS (Net Promoter Scores) that are typically 20 points higher than traditional customer service channels
● Cost and operational efficiencies from having a single platform to manage all digital service channels
● No “rip and replace”; a business can get started with messaging customer service without having to worry about impact on existing investments
● super fast launch; we typically get our customers live within 2 weeks thanks to our cloud infrastructure

Then, take a channel like WhatsApp. Sparkcentral is an official early launch partner of Facebook’s WhatsApp Business API Program. WhatsApp launched an early access program on August 1, and we just went live with two customers, KBC Bank & Insurance and citizenM in Europe, and are planning to go live with 3 more brands this month. citizenM is an exciting hotel startup that is massively expanding into the US in 2019. Messaging works great in hospitality!

By the way: if you want to explore messaging for customer service, message us on WhatsApp at +1 (866) 559-6229 (wa.me/18665596229), or on Messenger at m.me/sparkcentral! Or contact us the traditional way through the Web.

What our customers are getting when partnering with us is first and foremost decades of industry insight around customer service. We have experienced individuals onboard that have consulted, sold, onboarded, and helped many brands around the world take their customer experiences up a notch or two.

Our solution helps companies stand out in the competitive market through great CX, it helps reduce cost, and increase agent productivity. Turns out that agents actually love messaging much more than talking on the phone! Just like all of us, too.

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Q: What are your plans moving forward?

A: There is so much we have planned. One of the reasons we’re in this space is because of the opportunity to truly transform customer service. We’re looking to leverage AI and machine learning in multiple ways that would make it possible to route to the best possible agent available. And that provides an agent with a Smart Answer without them having to dig through the knowledge base manually. Another big thrust is to enable enterprises to map a customer’s identities across multiple channels to a single CRM identity and then show a conversation history that is unified across all digital channels. This is a huge deal because even after decades enterprises struggle with doing this across voice, email, and chat today. These are just a few of the things we’re planning in the coming months.

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