What are Interactions?

In the context of customer experience, interactions are all the direct touchpoints a customer has with a business. This might be, for example, in a store front, at a sponsored event or with customer service. Every interaction represents an opportunity for an organization to strengthen their relationships with customers, which means each touchpoint should be planned and managed for consistency and quality.

Looking closer at customer service, there are multiple methods that facilitate interactions for customers, both in self-service as well as agent-assisted channels. The company website is probably the most visible vehicle for self-service, and so businesses need to make sure theirs have great usability and clear content. Aside from websites, customers can also self-serve through interactions with mobile apps, interactive voice response (IVR) systems, and more. For higher touch interactions, customers can choose agent-assisted channels such as phone, chat, and email.

Customer service organizations need to keep in mind that phone interactions are only one type of customer contact. Digital channels such as email, web chat, Text/SMS, Social Media and others are becoming more important for consumers, and customer service must be able to handle those digital interactions in addition to the traditional phone calls.

With so many customer service interaction choices, businesses need to make sure customers can move seamlessly across them. An omnichannel approach ensures this. With omnichannel customer service, a consumer can, for example, initiate their interaction in a chat session, switch to phone support, and have the information from the chat session appear to the phone agent so they don't have to start from scratch. Ideally, the phone agent is the same agent they were chatting with.

Our research shows that consumers expect this type of omnichannel scenario. Businesses that are capable of delivering these seamless omnichannel interactions are well positioned to thrive in the experience economy.

How NICE can help

NICE CXone is the market leading contact center software in use by thousands of customers of all sizes around the world to help them consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences and high quality interactions. CXone is a cloud native, unified suite of applications designed to help a company holistically run its contact (or call) center operations. CXone includes:

Omnichannel Routing – routing and interaction management that empowers agents to positively and productively interact with customers in digital and voice channels. These solutions include an automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), interaction channel support and proactive outbound dialer.

Workforce Optimization – unlocks the potential of your team by inspiring employees' self-improvement, amplifying quality management efforts to enhance customer experience and reducing labor waste. These solutions include workforce management (WFM), quality management (QM), recording and performance management (PM).

Analytics – turns insights into results by making data relevant, easy to consume and actionable to drive measurable improvements and understand the omnichannel experience customers receive. These solutions include interaction analytics, customer surveys, reporting and performance management.

CXone also includes pre-defined CRM integrations and UCaaS integrations with most leading solutions on the market. These integrations provide a holistic contact center software solution capable of elevating customer experiences for companies of all sizes.