In the perfect scenario, there would be nothing at all between you and your customers. You’d sit directly across from one another and communicate with all your senses and emotions, experiencing no barriers or friction whatsoever.
But this is 2021, and even in a face-to-face environment like a showroom or store, we have barriers (like plexiglass dividers) and distance (hello, six-feet-please) to contend with.
Meanwhile, the conversations between brands and those who frequent them are increasingly taking place online via customer service contact centers. What brands need to focus on now is removing the impact of all those barriers to create the most authentic and natural interaction with customers.
Omnichannel contact center solutions like Edify are light-years ahead of the old-fashioned image of a ‘white-collar factory’ call center, stuffed full of tiny cubicles... a place where bored agents machine-gunned their way through a queue of inbound callers while physically plugged into their terminals, watching their throughput and idle rates with the other eye on the clock for their shift, driven by clumsy efficiency metrics rather than the customer’s needs.
Today’s customer service agent is a professional expert in orchestrating support and delivering a total brand experience, in a user-centric cloud-native software application that embraces the entire conversation wherever it flows. This creates the best possible experience for the customer, who can encounter the brand and start the dialogue from any channel of their choice but can then switch between tools and media as easily as they do when calling a friend on their smartphone.
But, to truly reduce friction to a minimum, the combination of which hardware, software, and operating system the agent is using really matters. And that’s why Edify is proud to be Google Chrome Enterprise Recommended - the mark of a perfect fit between our contact center solution and Chrome OS.
Productive Agents Are Happy Agents
Open up a Chromebook and the agent gets to work inside of Edify - engaging with and supporting customers wherever they are, with no hassle or complexity - all powered by cloud-first Chrome OS. One window, one conversation, and zero productivity drag of switching between applications or searching for information, because they’re straight into the fully contextualized conversation from the moment they log in.
Just as intelligent self-service bots abstract away the routine and predictable CX interactions of the past by empowering customers to help themselves, the combination of Edify and Chrome OS streamlines the way in which agents attend to interactions requiring their input.
This is essential because those agents are your brand’s voice and face, and your greatest asset. You want them directly engaging with your customers in a meaningful and helpful way, not completing reports, copying and pasting information from one screen to another, nor updating non-integrated secondary applications. Hands up, who loves admin work? Not the people who love helping your customers - because whenever they’re not directly on a call, they know more people are waiting and not being served.
Happy, productive agents mean satisfied and contented customers.
Protecting Your Data and IP
There are even more reasons to run your contact center as a cloud-native, SaaS solution on a cloud-first operating system via a robust and ubiquitous device… reasons your agents and customers should never have to worry about.
Distributed workforces and the remote-work revolution have changed the way we work forever, and while your agents can enjoy satisfying and engaging customer experience roles from wherever they choose, there are new vulnerabilities to consider. ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) policies and practices may sound liberating, but it puts the onus on your agents to support and secure personal devices to professional standards. It can erode their work-life boundaries when they are off-shift and want to disconnect from their job, too.
Running the Edify contact center solution on Chromebooks makes it easy to ship each agent a dedicated clean device for work use only. They’re intuitive, accessible, and boot up in mere seconds; best of all, they can be supported and secured on a completely remote basis. All the user has to do is crack it open and log on, then your in-house information security team can supervise totally from that point onwards.
And that team can focus on securing their own assets and devices, safe in the knowledge that Edify’s contact center is continually patched and updated against the latest threats and risks, with a guaranteed 100% uptime SLA. All that customer data is continually guarded against whatever emergent attacks take hold globally, from viruses to ransomware.
Even the device itself can be bricked, shut down remotely, and replaced fast without breaking the bank. All data, software, and profiles are stored in the cloud - not on the local hard drive - so they’re completely interchangeable.
Threat assessment means continual vigilance. When your agents were working from home during legal constraints, they were unlikely to lose their laptop or be robbed - but as the world unlocks and people return to commuting and near-home working, the practical risks of this nature inevitably increase. Choosing to run your contact center on centrally supplied Chromebooks means you add an essential layer of protection against a range of non-negligible security risks, from employee error or misuse to their becoming the victim of a sporadic crime in their home or out in public.
Removing Friction for Everyone
Above all, the combination of Chrome OS, Edify, and a physical Chromebook to support your contact center is simply the easiest way to reduce stress, complexity, and operational headaches.
Whether you need to drop-ship hundreds of new units overnight to spin up a new virtual branch or deploy new security policies to support a channel that just came online, simplicity is what it’s all about.
For the enterprise, this means faster time to market, higher customer satisfaction, reduced operational costs and enhanced competitive edge.
For the agents, it means they can work from anywhere, with the latest hardware and software tools, which support them in spending more time having the conversations they care about. This increases their job satisfaction and loyalty in a notoriously high-turnover industry, which hasn’t always treated its best assets with the respect they deserve.
And for the customer, it means receiving rapid and relevant attention from an engaged and empowered agent who won’t transfer them, call them back, make them wait, or leave them hanging.
Because we’re all customers, too, and this is what we deserve. The Edify contact center solution on Google Chrome OS. It really is that simple.
