SalesTechStar Interview with Renato Becker, Omnichannel Product Manager at Rocket.Chat

As online communication channels and trends evolve, it will change how sellers and brands interact and engage with each other; Renato Becker, Omnichannel Product Manager at Rocket.Chat weighs in with a few thoughts and observations:

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Hi, welcome to this SalesTechStar chat, tell us more about your journey through the years and your role at Rocket.Chat? How has Rocket.Chat evolved over the years?

Thanks for inviting me to chat with you about Rocket.Chat.  As you know I’ve recently joined the company and I’m responsible for steering the direction of our product offering.  We tend to think about four important facets of our platform that enable organizations to connect, collaborate and communicate with their team members, business partners, business systems and, of course, their customers.

As the world’s leading open-source messaging platform, Rocket.Chat has benefited over the years from working with partners on new ways to leverage our capabilities.  Our initial focus was on team collaboration but as organizations have seen the potential for improved customer experience via messaging interactions we’ve seen tremendous growth in our omnichannel customer communications.  We have continuously added support for new messaging channels, bot automations and other efficiency tools that improve the quality of customer interactions.

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We’d love to hear your thoughts on the scope of messenger platforms in customer service and sales and how better integrations across multiple channels can help brands build better customer facing experience for pre-sales and post-sales journeys? 

The nature of customer service and customer communications has fundamentally changed in recent years.  In the past organizations would decide how customers can contact their sales and service teams.  Now the equation has been flipped and organizations are expected to be available to their customers via a wide variety of messaging channels 24×7.  Successful organizations recognize that they need to be available and responsive to consumers via the channel of each customer’s choosing.

We have found that organizations who offer a variety of communication channels to customers earn higher customer satisfaction scores and higher levels of customer engagement.  To enable these types of forward-looking organizations, Rocket.Chat combines omnichannel customer communications with our team collaboration solution to ensure that customer-facing agents can easily get support from other parts of the organization when serving customers.

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Can you talk about some of the best ways in which you’ve seen leading brands from across the world use messenger/messaging to create a better engagement strategy with users/customers? 

Honestly the list is endless, we see everything from hospitality organizations using messaging to collect customer feedback to financial services firms working with customers to keep them up to date on payments that are due, account activity and alerts.   Omnichannel messaging allows you to choose the right channel for each type of communication based on your each customer’s preferences which allows for more frequent and more relevant interactions.  

Can you talk about the growing use of AI-powered chatbots and how they can help improve marketing and sales interactions? A few tips for marketing and sales teams as they plan their chatbot workflow and experience? 

We see the role of chatbot experiences as a force-multiplier rather than a replacement for personalized human interactions.  AI-powered conversational interactions can get customers to a specialist faster than waiting in a queue and often-times simple requests can be fully-resolved without human intervention.  This allows sales and service agents to allocate the time to the interactions that require nuanced evaluation and decision making.

In addition, organizations are beginning to use multiple bot frameworks and natural language understanding tools for different types of interactions.  To support this evolution, Rocket.Chat is working with customers on expanding the capabilities of our AI-services middleware for intent evaluation, response preparation, sentiment analysis or even live translation without having to worry about those services interfering with one another. 

In what ways do you feel communication channels for customers/customer service / customer support will further evolve as sellers/brands focus on building better multichannel experiences online? 

More channels, more availability and more personalization.  Brands are continuing to create innovative online buying experiences for consumers and sales and service support for those experiences need to continue to evolve as well.  We see live chat interactions becoming more nuanced to include robust conversational automation and seamless flexibility for a customer to switch to the channel of their choice.  If the customer prefers web chat that’s great but if they’d rather communicate via video call or have a more asynchronous WhatsApp call then they should be able to easily flip to the channel that they prefer.

There is also significant emphasis on improving the ability of sellers/brands to listen for feedback and support needs via social channels, forums and other public media.  Organizations are beginning to view social media mentions and other feedback as public domain conversations that should be managed and responded to with the same care as when a customer contacts a sales or service agent.

Some last thoughts and takeaways before we wrap up?

The organizations that work with Rocket.Chat are evolving their customer-facing communications faster than ever and it’s inspiring to see the focus on improving customer access to support and service across any messaging, voice or video channel.   We’re excited to be delivering a highly-secure solution for organizations who are focused on providing great customer service.

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