Leading B2C customer service company builds Connected Customer Conversations, a unified support experience built for today’s consumers, and launches Helpshift for Phone, an integrated voice and messaging solution
June 19, 2019 – SAN FRANCISCO – Helpshift, the company revolutionizing customer service through its intelligent digital-first platform, today announced the launch of Connected Customer Conversations and Helpshift for Phone.
Connected Customer Conversations is a platform built to deliver amazing customer support experiences for today’s consumers. By connecting digital channels, phone support, self-service and bots — and by embedding these within a single messaging thread — this platform enables consumers to have one continuous conversation with brands. This means customers are able to get support instantly through self-service and bots. The platform can then route customers to an agent on their channel of choice.
By directing customers towards those channels where they get the most efficient support, Connected Customer Conversations ensures that customers don’t have to wait around on hold for help. Because the platform carries context from channel to channel, customers never have to repeat themselves or start over. The platform saves that context and conversation history, so both support teams and customers alike are able to access at any time.
“Customer service platforms today are largely built for the benefit of the brand — to streamline their support operations. Unfortunately, this has resulted in disconnected experiences and long wait times for the end customer,” said Helpshift CEO Linda Crawford. “We envisioned Connected Customer Conversations to help today’s consumers overcome this burden, and to make contacting customer service as convenient and effortless as possible. By embedding self-service, phone support, and bots into the messaging conversation, we have delivered on that promise.”
Helpshift for Phone: A New Approach to Voice in a Digital-First World
As part of Connected Customer Conversations, Helpshift has also launched an integrated voice and messaging experience. Customers who begin their conversation on messaging can be seamlessly escalated to a live phone conversation with an agent when necessary.
Those customers who begin their conversation with a phone call are offered the option to “Dial 1” and receive a text that opens up a personalized messaging conversation. This provides an alternative to waiting on hold for an agent.
Whether it’s going from messaging to a call or vice versa, a single conversation and transcript are available for the fastest path to resolution.
“Everyone has had that terrible experience of calling a brand, navigating an IVR menu, and being placed on hold for 15 minutes, only to then be transferred to a different agent,” said Crawford. “We can do better. When backed by a digital-first strategy, brands can weave phone and messaging together to offer the best personalized customer service experience possible.”
Crawford and the Helpshift team unveiled their new offerings today at an exclusive launch event in Silicon Valley. Kate Leggett, VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester, spoke at the event about how to approach phone in a digital-first world. Chad Boonsupa, VP of Customer Experience at Vivino, also joined to discuss how phone and messaging work better — together.
About Helpshift
Helpshift’s next-generation digital customer service software enables B2C brands to scale their support while offering differentiated experiences through phone, web, in-app, email and messenger app channels. Helpshift’s innovative asynchronous messaging model across these channels gives people back their time, keeps conversations in context and allows humans and automations to work together to solve problems faster. The Helpshift platform embeds knowledge and AI to let customer service organizations best utilize a mix of automated service, self-service and human-assisted service. Serving over 450 businesses worldwide, including Xfinity Home, Microsoft, Tencent and Supercell, Helpshift is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe. To learn more about Helpshift, visit helpshift.com and follow @helpshift on Twitter.
