Why We Need True MultiChannel Contact Centers
Why We Need True MultiChannel Contact Centers by Blair Pleasant
As an industry analyst, I write many articles and give lots of presentations about the contact center market, and I know about the great technologies that are available for businesses to use in their customer care efforts. That’s why it’s even more frustrating for me as a consumer when I come across bad customer service and the poor use of the tools and technologies available.
As I was preparing to leave a conference in Las Vegas the other day, I received two voice messages notifying me that my flight would be delayed by 30 minutes. I only had a 30-minute layover, so I immediately went online to try to change my flights. No luck – the airline’s website informed me that I had to call customer service, which I promptly did. Ten minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes later, I’m still on hold. As I was using my cell phone on the 29th floor of a hotel, I didn’t dare leave my room for fear of losing my connection in the elevator and losing my place in queue, so I was trapped in my room.
While waiting for an agent come on the line, I sent several tweets to the airline, asking them to contact me about changing my flight, but to no avail. Not a peep to my tweet.
After 35 minutes, an agent finally came on the line, and I explained that I received two voicemails letting me know that my flight was going to be delayed so I needed to change my flights. She looked up my flight information and saw that the flight was actually on time and not delayed. She went to find out if the flight was actually delayed or not, and after another 10 minutes, informed me that the flight was on time and I didn’t need to rebook the flight.
55 minutes after my initial attempt to contact the company, what did I learn from this experience? Having a true unified multichannel platform is essential for providing the kind of customer service that customers expect. The airline did several things wrong that could have easily been avoided:
- My wait in queue was unreasonably long. By offering call back capabilities, I could have hung up, gone about my business, and received a call once an agent became available.
- If the supervisor or managers noticed that the average wait time for phone agents was too long, they could have shifted agents handling non-real time interactions, such as email, to the voice queue.
- I received absolutely no response or acknowledgement from my tweets. The airline needs to develop a social customer care strategy that monitors and responds to social media posts. The airline is active on twitter and social media solely for marketing and branding purposes, but not as a customer care channel.
- Offer web self service options. Using the web would have enabled me to change my flight and saved me a lot of time, if I actually needed to change my flight.
- Align the various channels. There was clearly no coordination between the groups that sent out outbound notification and the phone agents. I should have received another call notifying me that my flight was on time and to disregard the previous message.
There are probably several other ways in which the airline could have provided a better customer experience for me and my fellow passengers.
Ironically, I had presented a webinar with Carousel Industries the previous day, entitled, “Enhanced Customer Service From Unified Multichannel Delivery.” Clearly, this airline needs to be educated about enhancing customer service.
Terence Fogarty, Contact Center Specialist, Carousel Industries, and I provided information on how businesses can get closer to their customers by embracing the full spectrum of interaction channels. While I discussed the importance of having a unified multichannel platform with universal queuing, routing, and reporting, Terence dove down into how companies can develop their strategies, what they should be considering when they get started, and how Carousel can help them.
I discussed several issues that would have been useful to the airline. For example, I mentioned that, “Too many organizations use different, non-integrated platforms or applications for each channel, so agents can’t see the big picture of the customer’s interaction. This can result in miscommunications, additional work for the agent, and frustrated customers.”
Here are some other key points made during the webinar:
- By deploying a multichannel contact center platform, providing a single queuing and routing engine for all channels, a single integrated view of the customer, and a single reporting system, businesses can reduce costs while enhancing customer service and support.
- The days of just offering one or two ways or interacting with a company for customer care are over. It’s important to meet your customers where they are – whether that’s on Facebook, in a mobile app, or on the web.
- The key to the success of multichannel is the ability to integrate all channels and provide a single view of the customer, including any past and ongoing interactions that they may have had with the business across channels. But, today only 10-15% of contact centers have a tightly integrated view of the customer.
- Too many companies have made it too difficult for customers to reach out and connect in the way that’s most convenient for them for that particular situation. We need to make it easy for the customer, while making it more cost effective and efficient for the organization.
- It’s important for companies to track and understand the customer journey from end to end, and to have the same general business rules, FAQs, and knowledge bases, and use them across all channels. This helps provide consistency for the user experience.
- An integrated multichannel platform provides what I call “Interaction continuity,” which makes sure that when a customer contacts the company about an issue, even if they use three different channels at three different times, it’s seen as a single interaction. The agents working with the customer know what happened in the previous interactions and what, if any, action was taken by the other agent, and the customer doesn’t have to explain what they’re contacting you about each time.
- Multichannel contact centers lets organizations better utilize remote agents who can respond to emails or web chats, without having to worry about background noise. This enables companies to hire more qualified staff no matter where they’re located.
- When developing a multichannel strategy, it’s important to consider which channels to support and for which customers. For example, you may not want to push your high value customers to web self service, and you don’t want to waste specialized phone agents on customers that always shop but never buy. An investment firm for high net-worth clients may want to offer voice and video, while a video game company may want to offer web chat and social media.
Terence provided information on where to begin, and suggested asking yourself some questions, such as:
- Do I understand my business and the growth strategies of my employer?
- Who are our current and future customers?
- Are all customers treated equal or do we have/need a segmentation strategy?
- What channels do we want to offer clients and why?
- Do we offer Email to some and Chat to others or do we offer all channels and let the customer choose?
- Is there value in incorporating mobile applications into our strategy?
- What skills are going to be required to support a multichannel solution?
You can access the webinar recording here and get insights about how a multichannel contact center can help you deliver a better customer experience, while making your contact center agents more efficient and effective.