Connect With Customers Using Flexible Communications

Build Better Customer Relationships

Customer Engagement – Communication Channels

While the concept of convenience is not new, it has become an increasingly important factor for consumers. Leading retailers continue to find new ways to simplify customer interactions, especially post-purchase inquiries. Enabling shoppers to interact with a retailer on their terms – using their preferred communication method – can significantly enhance convenience and customer satisfaction.

Manhattan’s customer engagement capabilities support flexible ways for communication and interaction beyond voice calls. In addition to visiting a store, calling the contact center or using self-service capabilities, customers can connect via emails, texts (SMS) and live chat. Manhattan’s customer-facing applications – point of sale and contact center – incorporate these channels to facilitate seamless communication.

Unified Inbox

Through Manhattan’s unified inbox, customer service representatives (CSRs) can email, text or chat with shoppers while seamlessly viewing and editing orders. Unifying these channels into a single view helps improve CSR efficiency and task management. CSRs even can work with multiple customers at a time, accepting as many chats or text messages as they can manage. The unified inbox includes tools to boost responsiveness to customer inquiries, such as personalized, shareable, product recommendations, quick-order actions to reduce clicks required, and templates for faster responses.

The unified inbox is natively linked with data from Manhattan Active® Order Management, presenting customer interactions side-by-side with his or her order history. This unification allows CSRs to engage with personal insights, significantly improving both efficiency and customer service.

Furthermore, CSRs can respond to customers using templates – such as a return text – which automatically populates essential order information, including customer name, order ID, item ID and more. This automated communication eliminates much of the representatives’ manual work, reducing errors and saving time.

Routing and Queues

Manhattan’s unified inbox automatically routes interactions to the appropriate CSR based on user status, available capacity and channel assignment. This process is managed through the inbox interface, where CSRs can set their status and channel assignments. Managers can also view or edit user status and channel assignments in the manager dashboard, ensuring that customers are always directed to the most suitable representative.

Transferring and Bouncing Interactions

With the unified inbox, CSRs can transfer chats, emails or SMS interactions to another team. Customers can also be automatically bounced to another representative if they are not answered within a certain time. For example, a retailer can set a service level agreement for Level 1 representatives to reply to within a specific timeframe. If that chat is not responded to within those parameters, it will automatically be reassigned to Level 2 CSRs.

Monitoring Interaction Performance

Manhattan provides contact center managers with a performance dashboard to monitor communications interactions. This tool provides visibility into critical communications metrics like total chats, missed chats, number of customers waiting and percentage of responses within the SLA. It also empowers managers to make more informed decisions to improve customer service productivity and quality.  

• Provide flexible customer communication methods beyond voice calls to improve customer convenience.
• Receive inbound emails, texts and live chat, and respond in the native channel.
• Unify communications in a single view to expedite interaction handling and improve customer service.
• Increase customer service efficiency through automated, contextual communication enabled by communication templates.
• Leverage the manager dashboard to make informed decisions that improve customer interaction performance, such as response times.