It’s 2020 and a new decade in how your customers want to engage. With their friends, they’ve grown accustomed to an easy, seamless experience using their channel of choice, particularly messaging. They expect the same from you. A slow, cumbersome and inconsistent customer experience won’t cut it.

For example, let’s say you want to make weekend plans with a friend. You phone her and ask: “Do you want to go see a movie on Saturday?”

Now imagine that your friend says, “Sounds great! But can I put you on hold for an hour while I check my calendar?“ You’d laugh because it must be a joke, right?

It happens to customers every day but they’re not laughing – they’re disconnecting and going elsewhere. If you wouldn’t put your friends on a long hold, don’t treat your customers this way either.

The New Era in Customer Experience

The growth of messaging apps is pervasive. And it’s driving the need for businesses to engage with customers on the channels of their choice. Swisscom, Switzerland’s leading telephone company, saw this shift in preferences coming and made the move to get ahead of it.

At Swisscom, customer experience has been an important part of the company’s culture for years. It pairs this with a human-centered design approach to products and services. When Apple Business Chat was announced as a service channel, Swisscom was one of the first businesses to offer it to its customers with other messaging apps, including SMS and WhatsApp.

At the same time, Swisscom recognized the importance of one seamless experience — across all channels. As part of deploying its new messaging apps, the company moved all support channels to the Genesys Multicloud CX™ solution. This was critical to breaking down the silos that had prevented true omnichannel engagement. Customers engaging via Apple Business Chat, for example, can seamlessly move to a voice interaction without losing any context.

Just six months after this launch with 10 use cases live, Swisscom covers about 16% of incoming messages in Apple Business Chat with a chatbot. Giving customers higher quality responses to interactions has reduced multiple contacts. And agent productivity is higher with rich messaging than with voice.

“It took us 10 weeks with Genesys to not only go live with Apple Business Chat, but also bring the intent recognition and our live chatbot together,” said Marcel Hischier, Product Manager at Swisscom. 

Accelerate Long-Term Innovation

The new decade is accelerating both customer demands and the artificial intelligence that makes it possible to meet them – wherever and however customers engage. Using the Genesys Multicloud CX solution for rapid innovation, along with other cutting-edge technology, companies can take advantage of new channels as they emerge. Over the next two years, Swisscom plans include shifting a substantial amount of interaction volume from traditional channels, such as voice, to messaging. It’s also looking at predictive engagement to simplify processes and more effectively route customers to the best agent.

Swisscom has narrowed the gap between how its customers engage in their private lives and how they engage with business.

Watch the Swisscom video for their take on driving innovation and improving customer experience.