Moving Faster with IVR Editor, Automated Greetings, and New Rules

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A roundup of the key features released last quarter to help agents and managers work fast, without sacrificing the personal touch

The last few months have seen companies having to manage consistently high support volumes, while transitioning to a completely new model of working from home (and all the distractions that come with it). That’s made it all the more important that both agents and managers alike have the right tools to navigate this new terrain, and empower them to deliver fast, efficient service, without losing out on the personal touch.

To that end, we’ve released a slew of new features in the past three months to help agents and managers work smarter and faster, instead of harder. Here are a few key highlights.

DIY Your IVR with New IVR Editing Capabilities

In the last few months,  we’ve made big changes to our IVR settings, giving managers the gift of greater control over their IVR flows.

With Gladly’s IVR Editor, you can take control of your IVR and make the changes you need in the moment, when it matters mostNow, whether you need to take your teams off the phone for an impromptu training session, or update your recordings to reflect your new holiday hours, you can do that directly through the Gladly platform without having to wait on your IT team.

Not only will this give you the ability to pivot fast and in the moment, but it’ll save you the money you’d normally have to spend on third-party help.

Lean into Automation with the Latest Expansions to Rules

We’ve also made new additions to the Rules platform to help you automate more of the manual, rote processes in your contact center; that way, your agents have room to focus on the more important task of helping your customers, rather than ensuring, for example, that all the right Topics are applied to a Conversation.

Gladly’s Rules help you automate the rote processes in your contact center so Admins and agents can focus on the big picture

Trigger Workflows with Answers

Now, you can leverage the common agent action of using an Answer to help you trigger workflows in Gladly—a capability that’s completely unique to the Gladly platform.

For example, you can create a Rule to automatically apply a Topic when an agent uses a particular Answer—like assigning the ‘Returns’ Topic whenever an agent uses the Answer titled ‘Returns Policy’.

Now you can leverage Rules to automatically apply a Topic when your agents use a particular AnswerThat way, you ensure that the right Topic is applied to a Conversation—which, in turn, ensures more accurate Reporting on the issues affecting your contact center. Best of all, your agents get to skip the step of manually applying the Topic themselves.

But the beauty of Rules lies in the flexibility you have to leverage all the other Triggers, Conditions, and Actions in the Rule platform. For example, you can also leverage an Answer to automatically close a Conversation on your agent’s behalf, or trigger that a Conversation be assigned to a specific Inbox only if the Answer is in Spanish and written for your SMS channel—or both!

That’s a boost to productivity for your agents, without expecting them to do anything outside of their usual routine. Winner winner.

Automatically Trigger Tasks

You can also now use Rules to automatically trigger Tasks to specific agents or Inboxes.

Let’s say you want to ensure that whenever a VIP Customer reaches out with an issue, that somebody from your dedicated VIP Team follows back up with them personally the next day to ensure their issue was properly resolved.

Keep your workflows flowing without a second thought with Rules that automatically create Tasks for agents when a particular Topic is used

Scale Support with Help Outside of Your Team—Without Losing the Context

Scaling support doesn’t always mean adding headcount to your team—it can come in the form of outsourced help, both human or AI. But one of the main issues with outsourcing support is the lack of visibility that your teams have into those outsourced conversations.

That means when a customer is handed back to your team—whether it’s because their issue lies outside the capabilities of your outsourced solution, or if your customer follows up after—your team has to fly blind into those conversations, and rely on that customer to fill in the gaps. And that goes against one of the core pillars of Gladly of enabling a lifetime of conversations between you and your customers.

For that reason we built out new APIs to help smooth the edges of that handoff between your team and outsourced solution.

Gladly’s latest APIs make the handoff between your onsite team and your chatbots or outsourced agents as smooth as silkNow, when a customer is handed back to your team, they’ll be able to see the conversations they had with your outsourced provider, which means your customer doesn’t have to go through the added frustration of rehashing their previous conversation, and your agent can simply pick up where they last left off—an experience that 85% of consumers today already expect should happen.

And to help make things even easier for you’ve, we’ve partnered with AI and outsourcing solutions Simplr, Netomi, and Thankful to build out-of-the-box integrations that will allow you a flexible, cost-effective way to scale your team, so be on the lookout for those announcements coming your way.

Respond to Customers Faster with Automated Greetings Over Messaging Channels

Humans are creatures of habit, and we noticed that agents were using the same messages to greet customers over and again, yet they had to manually type them out each time or leverage greetings from Answers.

To save agents those precious seconds (and keystrokes), now when an agent accepts a customer over messaging (i.e. chat, text, Whatsapp or Social), Gladly will surface the greeting that’s most frequently used by that agent which they can accept in a single keystroke.

Automating your agents’ personal greetings saves them precious seconds and keystrokes in their day they can use to help more customers insteadAnd the great thing about these automated greetings, is that they’re personalized to the agent using them. So if Audrey prefers greeting customers with a “Hi there” versus Robert who prefers a more personal “Hi (customer name)”, Gladly picks up on that nuance and will surface both agents their preferred greeting respectively.

It’s a win for agents because it reduces their overall effort and helps them help customers faster. And it’s a win for customers too, because they get a response faster than before.

Get Quick Insights into Self-Service with Four Brand New Reports

Self-service channels, like Gladly’s Sidekick and Help Center, are a great option for customers who just want to find answers on their own.

And good news for companies, they also provide a quick win for agent efficiency (and your SLAs) by letting customers take care of the easy, rote questions themselves, and freeing up agents to focus and spend more time on the more complex problems.

Gladly’s new out-of-the-box Reports give companies quick, actionable insight into what’s working—and what’s not—when it comes to self-serviceTo help your customers help themselves better, we’ve released four new out-of-the-box Reports to help you understand how your self-service channels are performing, and identify potential areas for improvement. These are the:

• Sidekick Answer Usage Report
• Sidekick Answer Search Report
• Help Center Answer Usage Report, and
• Help Center Answer Search Report

With these Reports, you can now see the terms and answers most frequently searched for or used by your customers, and identify any potential gaps in your self-service content.

So if you see, for example, that you have a really high search volume for ‘Discount Codes’ but don’t have an answer to that available to your customers, you can add content around it to your self-service channels.  On the flip side, while you may show your answer for International Shipping Costs front and center, but customers aren’t clicking on it, you might replace it with an answer to a question that customers are searching for more often.

That way, you increase the chances of your customers finding the answers they need on the channel of their choice, while decreasing the workload on your frontline agents.

Balancing the need to be efficient with the expectations from customers for personalization is a tightrope that many contact centers have to navigate. With these new features, we’re making that tightrope walk a little easier, so you don’t have to choose between the equally important objectives of getting back to your customers fast, or adding that personal touch that keeps your customers coming back time and again.