Improving the ecommerce customer experience

Why customer service is especially crucial in ecommerce

Customer service is important in almost every industry for improving the customer experience. In fact, data from Microsoft shows that 95% of consumers think customer service is important for brand loyalty.

However, customer service is especially important for ecommerce businesses. In ecommerce, the customer service agents are often the first and only people at the company with whom customers interact.

It’s not like real estate or SaaS where a buyer develops a strong relationship with a salesperson before making a purchase. Ecommerce customers often buy a product without ever talking to a representative of the brand. Only when they have a question or problem do they reach out.

And when that happens, it’s a member of the customer service team who answers. So this department holds a lot of power to hurt or improve customer relationships.

Beyond this, customers in the ecommerce space have extremely high standards. They expect fast, hassle-free resolutions to their issues, along with personalized treatment. If you don’t offer this, customers can easily find a similar product at another brand.  

For these reasons, ecommerce companies need to prioritize initiatives to bolster their customer service more so than most other business types.

Six simple ways to improve the ecommerce customer experience

There are two chief indicators of ongoing success as an ecommerce company: top-notch products and exceptional customer service. Below are six effective ways to work toward the latter.

Use data and agent context to understand customer preferences

Customers have distinct and constantly evolving preferences. Some prefer phone calls, while others want to reach out over live chat. One might desire an email to resolve a billing issue but social media to ask for a refund.

It’s important to constantly monitor your customers’ preferences and adjust your communications strategy accordingly. You can figure out these changes by sending recurring surveys, tracking channel data in your customer service software, and reading industry reports.

To ensure they satisfy all customers, many companies also use contact center as a service (CCaaS) software, which allows users to communicate with customers across multiple channels, including self-service methods like chatbots or IVR.

CCaaS companies are always monitoring customer preferences and adding new channels to their platforms as customer demand for them increases. That way their users are always on the cutting-edge of customer service.

360° coverage across support channels

Seventy-one percent of consumers experience frustration when their shopping experience is impersonal. Customers dislike it when they can’t use their favorite communication channel or when they have to repeat information to a customer service agent that they’ve already shared with another agent.

The first issue can be handled with a multichannel approach, but that doesn’t resolve the second issue given that each channel’s data is siloed. A rep on a phone call with a customer can’t easily find what that customer said previously on live chat or email.

To service customers on their favorite channels and provide a seamless experience, you need an omnichannel approach where all channels are integrated and their collected customer data is accessible to agents from one dashboard regardless of which channel the customer is currently using.

Empower your customers with self-service tools

Sometimes customers don’t want to speak with a live agent. Perhaps they feel their issue is simple to resolve — 74% of internet users prefer using chatbots when looking for answers to simple questions.

Or maybe they’re just feeling especially introverted that day. Regardless of their reasons, those customers will appreciate the self-service options your team provides.

Here are some customer self-service types to offer:

• Chatbots: These are computer programs that simulate conversations with your website visitors.
• Interactive Voice Response: IVR enables users to interact with an automated phone system through voice or dial tones.
• Knowledge Center: This is a part of your website that hosts tutorials, guides, and videos that answer commonly asked questions.

When you empower your customers to handle their own issues, you improve their experience and also reduce the pressure on your agents, which leads to shorter wait times for customers who really do need an agent’s help.  

Follow the sun—24/5 customer support

If you have trouble with a customer service tool, it indirectly impacts your customers in a negative way. For example, if your live chat system crashes, customers in the middle of a conversation will have to start all over.

That’s why it’s so critical to use high-quality customer service tools that come with support 24 hours a day, 5 days a week, so that you can get answers and assistance quickly and get back to focusing on your customers instead of technical difficulties.  

Modernized support for the mobile-first era

Statista predicts that 187.5 million people will make a purchase via their smartphone in 2024, an increase of 20 million from 2020. The trend toward mobile shopping is obvious.

Therefore, it’s critical that you give your customers the ability to easily access your ecommerce store and customer service team via their mobile devices. Consider designing your website for mobile users and offering an ecommerce mobile app for your business.

Support that evolves with your customers

Improving customer experience is an iterative process. You have to try new techniques, measure your customers’ reaction to them, and then, based on the results, take another step in the right direction.

To do this, you need to collect customer data and feedback. Many companies use surveys with specific questions to measure their customer satisfaction.

They also use some sort of customer service software to track key customer service metrics like busiest hours, communication volume by channel, and average resolution time.

Collecting and analyzing this information enables customer service teams to make data-driven decisions about their strategy.    

Picking the right ecommerce customer service software

An ecommerce customer service team looking to improve their overall customer experience should look for customer service software that allows them to enact the strategies we’ve listed above.

The right platform will have 24/5 support and empower you to use an omnichannel approach, offer self-service options, go mobile-first, and track customer service data.

Conclusion

Customer experience is essential to an ecommerce business’s success, and the customer service team has a tremendous effect on this experience.

It’s crucial that you arm your agents with the tools they need to best serve your customers. Check out how PlivoCX, a cloud-based contact center software, can help.

SMS — short message service — is one of the best tools for building relationships with your customers. 81% of Americans use SMS every day, and more than three-quarters of Americans wish they could text with a business.

We could go on and on about the benefits of using SMS, but let’s say you’re convinced that SMS can be a valuable tool for your business and you’re raring to get started. Before you implement any text messaging campaigns, one of the first things you need to do is figure out what kind of phone number to use to send out messages and receive responses.

Your first thought might be to use normal 10-digit phone numbers, known as long codes. In the US, long codes should be used only for person-to-person (P2P) conversational texting.

In the United States you have a choice of three types of phone numbers for business texting.

• 10DLC (10-digit long code) is a service offered by major US carriers to explicitly allow commercial application-to-person (A2P) SMS traffic over long code phone numbers. How do you turn long codes into 10DLC numbers? You have to register them with your carrier. 10DLC is exclusively a US service; you can use long codes for sending and receiving SMS and MMS messages in Canada and other countries.
• Toll-free numbers are used by businesses that want their customers to reach them at no cost. Incoming calls are billed to the called party and are free of charge for the calling party. Most countries reserve a set of dialing prefixes to denote toll-free services. In North America, 800, 888, 877, 866, 855, 844, and 833 denote toll-free numbers. You can use toll-free numbers for two-way messaging as well as voice.
• Short codes are five- or six-digit numbers (for example, 123456) used to send and receive SMS messages. Unlike 10DLC and long code numbers, short codes are not tied to an area code, so they can be used across a country to provide a nationwide brand identity under one easy-to-remember number. Unlike long codes and toll-free numbers, you can’t use short codes for voice calls. You can order a regular short code or a vanity one, which allows you to choose the number you want instead of getting assigned a random number. Vanity short codes cost more to lease, but they can be worth the money if you can get a memorable number as your short code. 7-Eleven, for instance, has the vanity short code 711711.

We’ve created an infographic to help you decide what number types might work for your messaging use cases. Download it for reference or share it with colleagues.

Whichever number type you use, you must obtain consent from the people you want to send messages to before you begin a texting campaign.

As you can see, if you need the highest possible throughput, a short code is the way to go. 10DLC and toll-free numbers don’t offer as high a rate of messages per second, but they can be more economical — which brings us to the question of costs.

Cost comparison

A lot of factors affect the cost of a text messaging campaign. This chart shows costs for the four different number types in the US. Plivo offers SMS services in 190+ countries — check our pricing page for up-to-date costs in the countries you’re interested in.

Each number may have three general types of costs: initial setup, monthly number rental, and per-message fees, some of which are charged by your carrier and some of which are imposed as surcharges by the carrier whose customers receive your messages. Note that carrier surcharges vary by carrier — Verizon may impose a different per-message charge than T-Mobile. We chose AT&T surcharge rates to illustrate this chart.

Making the best choice

That’s a lot of numbers to juggle. How do you know which phone number type to use?

If you’re already using SMS, go over a past bill and see how many SMS and MMS messages you sent and received. Multiply those numbers by the per-message rates for each number type, add in the monthly costs, and see what the total is for each number type.

If this is a new initiative you can do the same exercise but you’ll have to estimate your messaging volume.

What is Call Routing? Types, Benefits & How it Works

From a consumer perspective, B2C companies are measured by two things:the quality of their products, and quality of customer service.

While most businesses understand the importance of providing quick support to their paying customers, modern businesses utilizing new-era omnichannel cloud contact centers like PlivoCX service have a secret weapon available to them—call routing.

What is call routing?

Call routing describes the process by which support requests are assigned to a specified customer service queue based upon the needs of the consumer.

While call routing traditionally applies to voice calls, the emergence of modern support channels like SMS messaging, chat, social media, etc. have caused the term to take on a broader meaning for the process of pairing a customer with the right agent.

Types of call routing and how does call routing work?

So, how exactly does call routing work, and how are modern contact centers pairing customer support requests with the right agent?

To answer this question, we must first understand the different types of call routing, and how you might want to employ each within your customer service operation.

Source: GetVoIP.com

A next-generation contact center like PlivoCX Service will come equipped with a robust drag-and-drop workflow builder, allowing B2C teams to establish rules that assign support requests to agents with respect to the type of call routing at play.

You can see how this works in practice with our quick 1-minute video on drag & drop queue configuration:

With a custom workflow in place, customer support voice calls will be automatically routed to an agent based on criteria provided by the customer at the time the call is placed.

What is the difference between call routing and call forwarding?

If you’ve asked yourself “what is call routing”, you may also be curious about call forwarding. While virtual call routing is a dedicated procedure by which customer support calls are directed to the best agent for the job, call forwarding is a process which forwards voice calls to multiple phone numbers for a single agent, enhancing that agent’s coverage across devices.

In practice, this means that if an agent is unable to answer their desk phone for a customer call when it rings, that call will be passed on to their mobile or home phone number automatically without any difficulty for the customer.

Call forwarding serves as a useful, complementary tool for call routing that can enhance an agent’s ability to best serve their assigned customer.

Common use cases of call routing & business impact

So now that we’ve covered the questions of “what is call routing” and “how does call routing work”, let’s talk about how a contact center with a robust call routing system can empower your customer service agents, reduce customer friction, and promote growth in your business.

Top 5 use cases of call routing

There are innumerable benefits to incorporating a virtual call routing system into your business, but here are five popular use cases to get your started, and how each can help you grow your business.

Always-on customer service operation

Customer’s feeling like nobody is listening to them is a $75 billion dollar problem. Establishing workflows designed to route voice calls to different support operations depending on agent hours ensures that your customers never feel unheard, as somebody will always be available to solve their problems.

Premium service for premium customers

Whether they earn their premium status through purchase or over a period of time, it’s important to reward customer loyalty. B2C teams can configure call routing workflows to ensure that their best customers always have a direct line to an agent.

Skills to pay the bills

Let’s say a longtime customer has a billing issue that threatens their retention—skills-based call routing can guarantee that your customer is assigned an agent equipped with the proper skill set and tools necessary for a prompt resolution.

Building a relationship

There’s nothing worse than having to explain your customer support needs five different times to five different agents—14% of customers take their business elsewhere because their complaints aren’t handled properly. Relationship-based call routing allows teams to automatically assign support requests to agents who have previously helped a given customer.

Support at light speed

Sometimes, the best thing you can do for your customers is to give them somebody to talk to as quickly as possible. With round robin call routing, you can set a workflow that immediately pairs a customer with the next available agent, cutting down on wait times and reducing abandonment rates.

How PlivoCX pairs the right agents with the right customers

PlivoCX is cloud contact center software for B2C teams built with customer and agent satisfaction in mind. With Contacto, agent teams are supported by helpful automations, a unified desktop, and an omnichannel experience to exceed consumer needs and create happy customers and agents alike.

If you’re looking to keep up with the demands of the new era of support operations, we’re here to help.

Book a demo with our sales team, and we’ll help you find the right solution for your team’s needs.

When we talk about porting a phone number, we mean the process of transferring the number from one service provider to another, which allows a business to keep a number but switch providers and services. Businesses build relationships using their phone numbers, so keeping those numbers is important for customer relationships. For a business, porting is like a consumer taking their phone number when they switch cell service providers. You want to keep your old number when switching so you don’t have to reach out to all your contacts and update all your personal information everywhere. Porting prevents a similar hassle for businesses.

Our customers have been able to port numbers in to Plivo for some time by working with Plivo’s support team. Now Plivo has streamlined the process to make it easy for customers to bring their current US or Canada numbers over via the console. (While you can port international numbers in to Plivo, they can’t be ported using the console.)

To port in a number, navigate to Phone Numbers > Port-In and click New Port-In Order.

The next screens walk you through the process, asking for your business information, phone numbers, and desired port-in date and letting you upload a Letter of Authorization (LOA).

After you submit your port-in request, Plivo will reach out by email in approximately 24 hours to let you know your request was accepted.

Plivo then submits your request to your current number provider. Within a week you should get a response stating whether your request was approved or rejected. If it’s approved, Plivo will reach out to you with a Firm Order Commitment (FOC) date when your number will be ported to Plivo. Once that date has passed, you can use your number with Plivo and close out your previous account.

If your request is rejected, you’ll need to reach out to your old provider and find out what needs to be done to move forward with the port-in process. A request may be rejected for reasons such as mismatched data, unsatisfactory business relationship, inactive number, invalid PIN, or the number does not qualify for porting, as is the case with international numbers.

Additional port-in details

The port-in process takes time — up to four weeks — so please plan accordingly. Don’t cancel or close out your old accounts until the port-in process is complete.

Bulk requests? Not a problem. You can submit up to 20 numbers on the console.

Port with confidence

Plivo continues to keep the customer experience at the forefront of everything we do. Whether it’s simplifying processes or making processes more intuitive for the customer, we strive to alleviate pain points in the voice and messaging space. The addition of the port-in process to the console is a great example of simplifying a process while adding convenience for our customers.

Migrating from Vonage to Plivo is a seamless and painless process. The two companies’ API structures, implementation mechanisms, SMS message processing, and MMS message processing are similar. We wrote this technical comparison between the Vonage and Plivo APIs so that you can scope the changes for a seamless migration.

Understanding the differences between Vonage and Plivo development

Most of the APIs and features that are available on Vonage are also available on Plivo, and the steps involved are almost identical. This table gives a side-by-side comparison of the two companies’ features and APIs. An added advantage with Plivo is that not only can you code using the old familiar API method, you can also implement your use cases using PHLO (Plivo High Level Objects), a visual workflow builder that lets you create workflows by dragging and dropping components onto a canvas — no coding required.

Plivo account creation

Start by signing up for a free trial account that you can use to experiment with and learn about our services. The free trial account comes with free credits, and you can add more as you go along. You can also add a phone number to your account to start testing the full range of our voice and SMS features. A page in our support portal walks you through the signup process.

You can also port your numbers from Vonage to Plivo, as we explain in this guide.

Migrating your SMS application

You can migrate your existing application from Vonage to Plivo by refactoring the code, or you can try our intuitive visual workflow builder PHLO. To continue working with the APIs, use one of the quickstart guides to set up a development environment for your preferred language. Plivo offers server SDKs in seven languages: PHP, Node.js, .NET, Java, Python, Ruby, and Go. For another alternative that lets you evaluate Plivo’s SMS APIs and their request and response structure, use our Postman collections.

How to send an SMS message

Let’s take a look at the process of refactoring the code to migrate your app from Vonage to Plivo to set up a simple cURL application to send an SMS message by changing just a few lines of code.

    import nexmo

client = nexmo.Client
(key='<api-key>', secret='<api-secret>')
Response =  client.send_message(
{
'from': '<sender_id>', 
'to': '<destination_number>', 
'text': 'Hello, from Python!'})
print (response)
   

    import plivo

client = plivo.RestClient
('<auth_id>','<auth_token>')
response = client.messages.create(
    src='<sender_id>',
    dst='<destination_number>',
    text='Hello, from Python!',)
print(response)

Alternatively, you can implement the same functionality using one of our PHLO templates. For example, if you want to send an SMS message, your PHLO would look like this.

Migrating your MMS application

How to send an MMS message

Let’s take a look at the process of refactoring the code to migrate another application from Vonage to Plivo — a simple cURL application to send an MMS message — by changing just a few lines of code.

    import nexmo
client = vonage.Client(
    application_id=<application_id>,
    private_key=<application_private_key_path>,
)

client.messages.send_message(
    {
        "channel": "mms",
        "message_type": "image",
        "from": "<sender_id>",
        "to": "<destination_number>",
“text”: 'Hello, from Python!'

        "image": {
            "url": "https://media.giphy.com/media/26gscSULUcfKU7dHq/source.gif",
            "caption": "Test image sent via MMS with Vonage's Messages API",
        },
    }
)
   

    import plivo
    client = plivo.RestClient('<auth_id>','<auth_token>')

    response = client.messages.create(
        src='<sender_id>',
        dst='<destination_number>',
        Text ='Hello, from Python!',
    media_urls=['https://media.giphy.com/media/26gscSULUcfKU7dHq/source.gif'],
        type_='mms')
    print(response)

Alternatively, you can implement the same functionality using one of our PHLO templates. For example, if you want to send an MMS message, your PHLO would look like this.

More use cases

You can migrate applications for other use cases too:

• Reply to incoming SMS messages
• Two-factor authentication
• Forward incoming SMS messages
• Delivery reports
• SMS alerts
• SMS marketing
• SMS notifications
• SMS survey
• SMS autoresponder
• Forward SMS to email
• Receive MMS

Porting your existing numbers from Vonage to Plivo

If you want to continue using your phone numbers from Vonage, you can port the numbers to Plivo painlessly without having any downtime on your services for your customers. Our number porting guide shows you how to initiate the process.

Simple and reliable

Those are the basics for migrating from Vonage to Plivo. Our simple APIs work in tandem with our comprehensive global network, using Plivo’s premium direct routes that guarantee the highest possible delivery rates and the shortest possible delivery times for your SMS messages, making Plivo the best Vonage alternative. See for yourself — sign up for a free trial account.

July 29, 2022 — Plivo yesterday won UC Today’s Innovation Award for Best CPaaS Platform.

The UC Awards, given by Today Digital’s UC Today site, recognize market leaders, innovators, and trendsetters in the unified communication and collaboration space. It was a thrill just to be nominated and we were even more thrilled to win.

To what do we attribute this honor? Innovation is in our blood (figuratively speaking). For more than 10 years — longer than the UC Awards have been around — we’ve helped customers navigate the complexities of the telecom industry, and earned the industry’s highest satisfaction ratings in the process.

One such complexity that the industry has been dealing with recently is the adoption of 10-digit long codes (10DLC). UC Today recognized how Plivo has simplified the 10DLC migration experience by allowing customers to register their message brands and campaigns and assign phone numbers to them directly through the Plivo console.

Getting there was a team effort on the part of the entire Plivo organization. Our product team researched 10DLC solutions offered by the industry, analyzed our customers’ use cases, and catered our solution not only to those use cases, but also to cover gaps in competitive product offerings. Our front-end developers built the necessary capabilities into our console in a way that was both easy for users to understand and consistent with the rest of Plivo’s services. At the same time, our support teams were training to help customers navigate 10DLC as smoothly as possible.

We’re pleased with this recognition. The award is virtual, and that’s just fine with us since our offices are virtual too. We’re putting our virtual trophy in our virtual awards case (if we can find the room) to commemorate the honor.

Chat

In terms of customer satisfaction, live chat is the most meaningful and effective digital channel. With nearly 1 in 3 customers attempting to self-service by visiting a company website before placing a voice call, a robust live chat capability is a low-effort high-ROI solution to reduce customer friction, expedite issue resolution, and increase revenue - in some cases at a rate of 2.4x for cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

Social

The most compelling statistic came from Facebook with a reported 100% increase in customer messages to businesses from 2019 to 2020.

Spotify begins training their agents on the email customer support channel before clearing them for the social support channel. Throughout the training agent emails are evaluated for specific quality and service metrics to ensure agent confidence before graduating them to the generally more public social channels. Word of caution: most users who reach out via social media for support expect a response within 60 minutes.

Voice

Even with post-COVID forced digital acceleration, one study reports a preference for voice as high as 71% compared to other channels. Perhaps this is a result of older customers’ preference for in-person or assisted service (whereas younger generations prefer self-service). In any case, this should be no surprise as 56% of customers surveyed reported frustration with IVRs prior to speaking with a live agent. Stay alert contact centers! The experience on your IVR/IVA is more important than you think and could make or break your voyage to a better customer experience.

Artificial Intelligence

“Roughly one third” of American companies surveyed in a study May 2021 are using some degree of AI for consumer experience initiatives. The possibilities and promises of increased self-service and customer satisfaction, reduced inquiry handle-times, trend forecasting, agent assist, next best action and many opportunities are examples of the hopes and dreams for overall customer loyalty and revenue potential. As you consider how to implement or scale an AI solution, be mindful of the differences between static analytical models, natural language understanding, robotic process automation, and true artificial intelligence.

Email

For most businesses email was a low friction, self-service channel easy to add to the multi-channel support model, but as organizations pivoted to omnichannel support models with better-integrated and more real-time digital solutions, email declined in satisfaction and popularity - and is predicted to continue to decline as mobile-first messaging adoption increases. In a survey conducted in October 2021, as few as 15% of American respondents indicated email was the preferred channel for customer support.

Messaging

With a particularly sharp uptake during the challenges of COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns businesses adapted by implementing direct messaging for support and marketing motions to stay in closer contact with their customers. One study reports an increase of 62% in companies using WhatsApp for customer service inquiries from the previous year.

Selecting The Right Customer Service Channels

Regardless of the overall channel adoption statistics above, selecting the proper customer service channel mix for your specific business to deliver the best customer experience should be the primary driver. Look for friction points, add new channels, eliminate extra steps, add touch points along the customer journey to share transparently and engage with your customers in a friendly way.

Below are just a few examples and the steps you can take to see immediate improvements in your customer experience feedback:

• How would you feel? Consider how the customer feels when attempting to reach you for various reasons. Next, go and listen to every branch of your own IVR and consider whether your automation matches the customer’s need. Should you route priority customers differently than those calling for hours and location? Can you easily automate order status inquiries in your IVR to free up staff to handle higher cognitive inquiries?
• Proper channels in place? If you are only communicating by phone and email, consider adding live chat. This channel can have a direct impact on your top-line revenue as many customers - in an e-commerce setting - use chat when they are further down the sales funnel and may have a clarifying question or two prior to checkout.
• Monitor and adjust! You can’t improve what you don’t measure. What is the traffic volume on each of your support channels? Can customers (or your agents) easily pivot from chat to voice if the interaction escalates in customer frustration? Are you receiving an overwhelming number of emails because it is too difficult to reach you on the phone, or your phone system is poorly configured to handle the volume of calls?

Conclusion

Customer service trends indicate that the leading differentiator is less about unit price or product quality and more about service level experience. From a customer loyalty or NPS perspective, the emotional intelligence, tactful questions, and benefit of the doubt offered by agents to customers arrive at a sum greater than its parts. What will you be known for? The channels you offer and the quality of service delivered via those channels will set you apart from your competition!

Migrating from Bandwidth to Plivo is a seamless and painless process. The two companies’ API structures, implementation mechanisms, SMS message processing, and MMS message processing are similar. We wrote this technical comparison between the Bandwidth and Plivo APIs so that you can scope the changes for a seamless migration.

Understanding the differences between Bandwidth and Plivo development

Most of the APIs and features that are available on Bandwidth are also available on Plivo, and the steps involved are almost identical. This table gives a side-by-side comparison of the two companies’ features and APIs. An added advantage with Plivo is that not only can you code using the old familiar API method, you can also implement your use cases using PHLO (Plivo High Level Objects), a visual workflow builder that lets you create workflows by dragging and dropping components onto a canvas — no coding required.

Plivo account creation

Start by signing up for a free trial account that you can use to experiment with and learn about our services. The free trial account comes with free credits, and you can add more as you go along. You can also add a phone number to your account to start testing the full range of our voice and SMS features. A page in our support portal walks you through the signup process.

You can also port your numbers from Bandwidth to Plivo, as we explain in this guide.

Migrating your SMS application

You can migrate your existing application from Bandwidth to Plivo by refactoring the code, or you can try our intuitive visual workflow builder PHLO. To continue working with the APIs, use one of the quickstart guides to set up a development environment for your preferred language. Plivo offers server SDKs in seven languages: PHP, Node.js, .NET, Java, Python, Ruby, and Go. For another alternative that lets you evaluate Plivo’s SMS APIs and their request and response structure, use our Postman collections.

How to send an SMS message

Let’s take a look at the process of refactoring the code to migrate your app from Bandwidth to Plivo to set up a simple cURL application to send an SMS message by changing just a few lines of code.

    from bandwidth.bandwidth_client import BandwidthClient

    bandwidth_client = BandwidthClient(
        messaging_basic_auth_user_name="<username>",
        messaging_basic_auth_password="<password>")

    messaging_client = 
    bandwidth_client.messaging_client.client
    from 
    bandwidth.messaging.models.message_request import MessageRequest

    messagingBody = MessageRequest()
    messagingBody.to = 
    ["<destination_number>"]
    messagingBody.mfrom =
     "<sender_id>"
    messagingBody.text =
     "Hello, from Python!"
    messagingBody.application_id = "<app_id>"

    messaging_client.create_message("<account_id>", body=messagingBody)
   

    import plivo

    client = plivo.RestClient
    ('<auth_id>','<auth_token>')
    response = client.messages.create(
        src='<sender_id>',
        dst='<destination_number>',
        text='Hello, from Python!',)
    print(response)

Alternatively, you can implement the same functionality using one of our PHLO templates. For example, if you want to send an SMS message, your PHLO would look like this.

Migrating your MMS application

How to send an MMS message

Let’s take a look at the process of refactoring the code to migrate another application from Bandwidth to Plivo — a simple cURL application to send an MMS message — by changing just a few lines of code.

    from bandwidth.bandwidth_client import
BandwidthClient

    bandwidth_client = BandwidthClient(
        messaging_basic_auth_user_name=
        "<username>",
        messaging_basic_auth_password=
        "<password>")

    messaging_client =
    bandwidth_client.messaging_client.client
    from
    bandwidth.messaging.models.message_request
    import MessageRequest

    messagingBody = MessageRequest()
    messagingBody.to = ["<to>"]
    messagingBody.mfrom = "<from>"
    messagingBody.text = "Hello, from
    Python!"
    messagingBody.application_id
    = "<app_id>"

    messaging_client.create_message("<account_id>", body=messagingBody)
            "from": "+12025553333",
            "text": "Hello, from Python!",
            "media": [
            "https://media.giphy.com/media/26gscSULUcfKU7dHq/source.gif"
            ],
            "tag": "custom string",
            "priority": "default"
        }'
   

    import plivo
    client = plivo.RestClient('<auth_id>','<auth_token>')

    response = client.messages.create(
        src='<sender_id>',
        dst='<destination_number>',
        Text ='Hello, from Python!',
    media_urls=['https://media.giphy.com/media/26gscSULUcfKU7dHq/source.gif'],
        type_='mms')
    print(response)

Alternatively, you can implement the same functionality using one of our PHLO templates. For example, if you want to send an MMS message, your PHLO would look like this.

More use cases

You can migrate applications for other use cases too:

• Reply to incoming SMS messages
• Two-factor authentication
• Forward incoming SMS messages
• Delivery reports
• SMS alerts
• SMS marketing
• SMS notifications
• SMS survey
• SMS autoresponder
• Forward SMS to email
• Receive MMS

Porting your existing numbers from Bandwidth to Plivo

If you want to continue using your phone numbers from Bandwidth, you can port the numbers to Plivo painlessly without having any downtime on your services for your customers. Our number porting guide shows you how to initiate the process.

Simple and reliable

Those are the basics for migrating from Bandwidth to Plivo. Our simple APIs work in tandem with our comprehensive global network, using Plivo’s premium direct routes that guarantee the highest possible delivery rates and the shortest possible delivery times for your SMS messages, making Plivo the best Bandwidth alternative. See for yourself — sign up for a free trial account.

What is contact center analytics?

A single customer service conversation can yield a seemingly infinite amount of information about both your consumers and customer service agents, and contact center analytics provide the method behind the madness to make sense of all that information.

Contact center analytics use technology to generate actionable insights from raw data—data which allows B2C teams to identify patterns in their customer service data and pinpoint potential product issues or contact center optimizations.

How to use contact center analytics to improve operations

The true power of contact center analytics lies in its ability to dramatically improve your team’s operations. This data is only as potent as it’s application, however, which begs the question: how do I put contact center analytics to work in my organization?

Get a holistic view of contact center key metrics at a glance

Just like a beautiful painting, it’s a lot easier to understand the nuance in the finer details once you’ve seen the whole picture. Sometimes, the best way to get a feel for how your agents are performing is by looking at your contact center from a bird’s eye view.

Contact center reporting and analytics offer a unique opportunity to look at the bigger picture, identifying common trends among support tickets. This could include evaluation of average handle time, first call resolution time, call / support abandonment rate, and then zooming in on individual metrics to identify outliers in each.

Monitoring performance & identifying training needs

Call center analytics can provide you the boost that you need to level up your agents and optimize agent performance by monitoring service and identifying training needs.

By analyzing your contact center data and reflecting on customer sentiments, you can keep tabs on how your customer service reps are performing and identify any areas where additional training in product or platform knowledge would benefit your service team.

Actionable customer service insights across all channels

Preferred methods of customer service can vary significantly from consumer base to consumer base. Are your customers trying to reach you via your social media channels? Is your consumer base largely made up of millennials, who on average prefer digital service channels over phone ?

From common customer demographics to volume patterns in your support requests across channels, B2C teams can leverage contact center analytics to stay ahead of the specific needs of their brand’s consumers, allowing them to better meet customers where they are.

Automate the customer feedback process

With the right tools, B2C teams are capable of automating the customer feedback process, allowing them to glean further insights into how consumers are feeling after interacting with their customer service representatives.

Frequently asking customers the right questions and analyzing their answers provides another valuable data point to include in your team’s contact center analytics. Identify common trends among customer feedback to optimize their support experience, and you just might create a lasting customer relationship.

Generate reports for customer support teams

Call center analytics and call center reports go hand-in-hand—while distinct from one another, they’re nearly inseparable in how they’re discussed by the industry at large. In the right hands, these two things work together harmoniously to provide a continuous cycle of improvement for data-driven support teams.

Essential metrics reports track relevant current and historical data, so you can identify trends over time. From customer satisfaction to agent productivity, the right contact center solution should provide reporting capabilities that enhance your ability to measure what matters most and provide a 360 degree view of a customer’s past and present needs.

Help contact center managers with resource allocation

Remember when we said it’s important to know your demographics, and how they like to be supported? Contact center reporting and analytics can act as a cheat code for your team to know where they need to be, when they need to be there, and allow you to tailor your team’s hours, channels, and skillsets to the support needs of your consumer base.

A modern contact center should provide visibility into the most demanding support needs of your organization by providing real-time data on your team’s activity and performance, allowing you to shift resources accordingly.

Using contact center analytics to improve customer experience

With more options for the consumer to choose from than ever before, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate yourself from your competition. The importance of differentiation through exceptional customer service cannot be overstated, and contact center analytics allow you to do exactly that.

Every support conversation is an opportunity to refine your customer service offering through effective customer communication, evaluation of common trends in your customer feedback, and then taking action to reduce customer friction.

Leverage built-in contact center analytics with Contacto

PlivoCX Service is a cloud contact center software for B2C teams built with customer and agent satisfaction in mind. With Contacto, agent teams are supported by powerful reporting and analytics functionality, helpful automations, a unified desktop, and an omnichannel experienceto exceed consumer needs and create happy customers and agents alike.

If you’re looking to keep up with the demands of the new era of support operations, we’re here to help.

Book a demo with our sales team, and we’ll help you find the right solution for your team’s needs.