Imagine walking into a store to ask about a product. Instead of simply speaking with an employee, you’re directed to a back room. There, you have to write your question on a piece of paper and drop it into a box, leaving you wondering what happens next. Frustrating, isn’t it?

This article was written by Alex Wiercinski, the Founder of TrueEngage, a Genesys AppFoundry Partner.

Imagine walking into a store to ask about a product. Instead of simply speaking with an employee, you’re directed to a back room. There, you have to write your question on a piece of paper and drop it into a box, leaving you wondering what happens next. Frustrating, isn’t it?

This is how most company websites operate today. Let’s explore why — and how to change it.

Don’t Contact Us, We Might Contact You

A company website serves as the flagship store for any business. The user experience on that site is paramount. It’s where current and future customers learn about who you are, what you offer and how reliable you are. Simplified contact options — either used now or credibly promised for the future — can significantly influence customer loyalty.

If you think your company has all this figured out, think again.

TrueEngage recently analyzed 188 websites of Genesys customers in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. Out of these 188 companies, only 51 displayed what we categorize as active forms of contact engagement. This usually manifests as a prominently displayed icon or feature that enables different forms of customer contact, such as chat, callback, web call or meeting scheduling.

Chat was the most popular channel, featured on 37 websites. A multichannel approach, usually combining live chat and callback options, was available on just 11 websites — less than 7% of the total.

Over 70% of the surveyed websites offered no distinct guidance for visitors seeking to make contact. Typically, users must navigate to a “menu,” find the “contact” option and then usually find a phone number to call or a contact form to fill out.

We observed extreme fragmentation in the widget market serving these sites. Of 30 widgets that were either custom-made or hard to identify by brand, the remaining 21 were distributed across 15 different companies. Our analysis indicates a considerable opportunity for standardization and consolidation in this fragmented widget market — to the benefit of both businesses and website visitors.

When Websites Won’t Work Well

The reason why so many websites fail to truly engage visitors is complex, but here are two contributing factors.

First, there’s often a disconnect between marketing departments and the contact center. The contact center focuses on operations, treating more interactions as a cost that negatively affects standard KPIs. Meanwhile, sales and marketing departments often lack the tools and processes to handle large volumes of interactions.

Second, contact center solutions typically aren’t built for this type of interaction. While contact centers are excellent at managing large volumes of multichannel interactions, they often lack user-friendly, out-of-the-box website contact engagement solutions.

Both factors contribute to suboptimal outcomes, as evidenced by our study. Poor website contact engagement exists. Or companies resort to separate, standalone tools — usually chat only. The latter leads to inefficiencies, inconsistent service and fragmented reporting.

How to Fix Website Contact Engagement

The solution to poor contact engagement boils down to five “simple” principles.

  1. The widget is king. A contact engagement widget that’s widely accepted can provide a consistent experience across various websites and is most resistant to frequent site changes.
  2. Leverage omnichannel where possible. The widget should offer different contact channels because visitors have varied preferences and will choose a channel based on the nature of their inquiry.
  3. It’s crucial to integrate the contact center. Interactions should be flexibly routed and efficiently managed through your company’s contact center solution. Having agents work on separate solutions leads to inefficiency and inconsistency.
  4. Ensure the solution is sales and marketing-ready. This entails no-code simplicity and the ability for business users to deploy widgets without becoming contact center experts. Outcomes should be trackable in Google Analytics or similar marketing tools.
  5. Use artificial intelligence (AI) to increase volumes. AI can mitigate the cost impact of high interaction volumes, or the widget can appear based on real-time interaction data.

Remember, these technology-focused solutions require close cooperation between the contact center and sales and marketing teams for optimal results.

Discover a Truly Better Way to Engage

Many customers lack a well-defined website contact engagement strategy, leading to wasted marketing resources. Without a user-friendly, multichannel widget, they miss out on potential leads, fail to build visitor trust and experience increased customer churn.

Now is the time to implement a multichannel contact engagement widget, leveraging the Genesys Cloud™ platform and TrueEngage to manage these interactions efficiently and use AI to reduce costs. Learn how you can bridge the data gap between your contact center and marketing tools.