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A Family Tale of Many Channels

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Danny Wang Director of Product Management

There is good in this world. I am out there to find it every moment of every day being a husband, dad, runner, christian, and Director of Product Management at Five9.

My mom loves bowling. She always wins every tournament she plays because there are not many 86 year olds that can bowl a 150 average. She loves her 10lb. pink bliss custom Brunswick bowling ball.

She also loves her iPhone 4S that I bought for her a few years back. She uses it primarily to take pictures of her grandkids, calling her kids (i.e. my brothers, sister, and myself), and reading emails. She doesn’t use SMS. She isn’t into downloading the latest apps, or surfing the web for cat videos. Good for me because I don’t have to worry about her incurring data overages on my plan.

She loves her local bowling pro shop even more because the shop owner and employees all know that she likes her order forms and receipts emailed to her because she can’t stand keeping paper receipts. They call her when her ball is ready for pick up. When she calls them, they always know what she last ordered and inquires if her pink bliss is improving her game.

My older sister, a retired Google executive, recently took up interior decorating, her husband wishes she would return to her less expensive and disruptive hobby of designing succulent centerpieces. I also wish she would return to her old hobby because I loved receiving succulent centerpieces as gifts.

Recently during a family lunch at her house, she was a bit distracted and I told her to get off her phone. She was in the middle of corresponding with a custom Italian furniture vendor. She started off with a few email exchanges, then she sent them a text message, and eventually excused herself to call them. She then walked pass the dining room holding the phone up pointing to the living room and showing them on a live video call where the red leather chaise sectional would end up going.

My mom and sister are representative of the modern consumers. My mom is the “goldilocks” mobile device user. She uses her smartphone just enough to happily navigate her way through a technology-driven society in order to maintain her creature comforts in life. My sister, on the other hand, uses her smartphone to search, engage, and acquire goods and services almost as a 6th sense.

Despite this wide spectrum of mobile device users, the modern consumer converges upon the singular expectation of receiving exceptional customer service through a seamless and personalized engagement experience when interacting with a business.

Both the local bowling pro shop and international customer furniture company provided exceptional customer service despite having different contact center channel deployment strategies. The local bowling pro shop has what I consider a multichannel approach to customer service. They can offer their consumers a choice to engage in different channels such as email or voice, but have two disparate and siloed systems. For the size of their business, targeted customer base, and operating and capital expenditure budget, a multichannel contact center is their goldilocks contact center strategy that allows them to maintain a consistent level of exceptional customer service.

The international furniture company has an omnichannel contact center strategy. They not only can support interactions from voice, web chat, email, social media, SMS, and video in a single system, they provide their agents a complete 360-degree view of each customer’s journey between and within each interaction and allows their agents to seamlessly channel hop to match their “always-on,” tech-savvy consumers’ touch point expectations, much like my hyper-connected sister. 

The Five9 platform and suite of omnichannel products and solutions can offer the local bowling pro shop their “goldilocks’ multichannel solution within a single system and provide them a complete 360-degree view of their customers, like my mom, while also easily scaling to support the needs of the international furniture company’s hyper-connected consumers. For small to medium size businesses that use Five9, they can simply switch on more channels, such as chat and SMS, and add more agents when they are ready to scale up. This is the benefit of a purely cloud omnichannel platform, like Five9.  

The Five9 platform, products, services, and team are always here to grow and evolve with your business. Whether you are currently ready to support only one or two channels or need to implement a full-blown omnichannel contact center solution, our focus is always on helping you deliver a seamless and exceptional customer experience at each touch point where your consumers choose to interact with your business.

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Danny Wang Director of Product Management

There is good in this world. I am out there to find it every moment of every day being a husband, dad, runner, christian, and Director of Product Management at Five9.

Call 1-800-553-8159 to learn more about Five9