Is your contact center ready for parallel conversations?

How does the type of communication between user and companies change? With smartphones and social networks people got used to handling several parallel conversations and through multiple applications that can stop and resume after several minutes or hours. And it is evident that, more and more, people expect to use this style of communication with companies.

Added to this are the notification services with interactive capabilities of social platforms. Without notifications, the user should navigate each time to his Instagram app. Instead, with notifications, his contacts (and any of the brands with presence in the social network) approach him proactively at all times, through his inbox.

Transactional messages were created to run in a single communication channel. The user who buys something in an e-commerce site, for example, receives an email confirming the operation and although that message probably includes a link to a support site in case there is any doubt, the interaction usually ends there.

But notifications are a completely different specimen. The user can respond, leave a comment or click to see the whole conversation. In this case, email is the starting point for a two-way interaction.

This characteristic feature of social networks is reconfiguring the type of communication between companies and customers. Especially in verticals such as banking, telecommunications and retail, to mention the most obvious, and especially in areas such as customer service and marketing.

It is essential to have an intelligent messaging strategy that allows managing incoming and outgoing messages in multiple formats. Something that is not so common in organizations. The usual is that different areas have different tools or providers to interact in different relationship channels and this, of course, makes it very difficult to maintain what is said a coherent dialogue.

There are already companies that are creating complex communication circuits, including some of these capabilities to automate processes that usually depend on an operator or using the web site of the company. What’s the situation in your company? Have you already wondered what to do about it?