InTheChat Communications Inc
Harbinger of the Digital Customer Service Era

When John Huehn started his career in the contact centre space, customer service was mostly phone-based. “It’s a totally different world now, with consumers looking to connect with companies via messaging apps, text, social media, chat and email,” says Huehn, Founder, and CEO, InTheChat Communications (ITC). Increasingly, companies are expected to provide customer service over an array of digital communication channels. It is a challenge to stay current and even more, to maintain high quality, efficient service. Addressing this issue is InTheChat’s Enterprise Digital Customer Service Platform. “We make digital customer service easy,” smiles Huehn.

When text-based channels emerged as the ubiquitous way to communicate with customer service, sales and marketing, they proved to be more cost-effective and convenient than phone calls. With the view to integrate the scattered communication channels in one platform, ITC’s unified digital customer service platform enables clients to chat or exchange text-based messages to their customers using any messaging application. ITC has employed the phenomenon of artificial intelligence in its customer service platform, which has the capability to read and categorize each query that enters their platform through social media, text, chat and other channels. That categorization engine can eliminate irrelevant messages and sort inquiries for delivery to the best-skilled contact center agent to assist.

Consolidating multiple channels in ITC’s single platform enables companies to increase efficiency in their contact center vs. maintaining smaller teams on different platforms dedicated to individual channels. It also makes customer service far more convenient for customers. “Customers can seamlessly move between channels, say from a chat discussion to text messaging when they need to continue a conversation on the go,” says Huehn. The continuity of the discussion across channels, even with the same agent, is a big win for customers and their relationship with the company they are engaging with.

ITC’s customer service platform is utilized by enterprise-scale clients to enable their customers to connect via their preferred channels of communication, leveraging all the familiar processes developed to scale phone support over the past 50 years.

Customers can seamlessly move between channels, say from a chat discussion to text messaging when they need to continue a conversation on the go

Skills-based routing, integrated CRM and contact center-grade reporting are all part of ITC’s platform that helps increase revenue and decrease costs. Huehn tells the story of a client who was using a social media platform provider that was inefficient for the contact center, resulting in massive amounts of non-actionable content reaching their front line. “Our platform had helped the client to save significant costs while dramatically improving their response rates,” explains Huehn.

The platform is proven to quickly bring in new communication channels and help companies manage otherwise significant volumes of data. “Our innovation lies in the preparedness for the future. Our clients want to deliver world-class service across any channels their customers are using today or might use in the future. We make it easy for them to do that by staying one step ahead in emerging media and seamlessly integrating new channels into our single, unified platform,” says Huehn.

Looking ahead, Huehn comments on bots and the use of artificial intelligence to enable digitally assisted self-service, saying “the best customer experiences with bots in the near-term will be highly directed interactive experiences with clearly defined use cases, which can easily transition to assisted support as required.” Huehn concludes by saying, “we have to remember, regardless of channel or medium, the objective of customer service is always to take care of the customer first.”