Every now and then an idea comes along that makes you wonder why somebody didn’t think of it sooner.
Have you ever been in the middle of an online interaction and were interrupted or had to leave the self-service session to look up information? This happened to me when I was trying to renew my auto registration online.
The form asked for the vehicle information number. Who keeps that handy? When I finally found it and jotted down all 17 digits, the session had timed out. Argh—my customer journey came to an abrupt and unexpected end.
Contact Solutions, recently acquired by Verint Systems, is a leading provider of real-time, contextual customer care solutions. They have a simple yet elegant solution to the problem I just outlined. Their product, My:Time, is a patented cloud-based digital engagement platform.
The product does many things to smooth the customer journey, but perhaps the benefit with the broadest appeal is the ability to capture an in-process conversation, store it in the cloud, and enable users to complete the interaction at any time from any internet-enabled device. This substantially reduces customer effort, because users do not have to start over again from scratch.
My:Time is smart. It can be configured to sense when users are having trouble and send proactive help messages (such as “Your VIN is the 17-digit number in top left corner of your registration”). My:Time supports omnichannel communications. Users can send and receive images or easily transition to a real-time messaging interaction.
Applications for contextual support are many. Think of the times you get stymied in a do-it-yourself project and need an illustration or video to bail you out, the struggles your aspiring college student deals with filling out complicated college applications, or even interruptions while trying to file your taxes online.
We live in a world that demands multitasking. We don’t always have the opportunity to sit uninterrupted in front of a computer. Verint Systems, with its acquisition of Contact Solutions, neatly addresses these everyday problems and continues to round out its industry-leading customer engagement optimization portfolio.