Calling may still be the most popular way for customers to connect with a business, but it sure isn’t the only way.
A generation is growing up with calling as but one way to reach their friends and business associates, and businesses are finally catching on to this fact and offering multichannel contact center support. The move from “call center” to “contact center” highlights the point.
Nowadays, businesses that are serious about delivering good customer service know to deliver multi-channel support through not only telephone, but also through SMS, chat, e-mail and even the social networks.
This is more than just a cosmetic change and an attempt at incorporating the latest buzzwords; support has genuinely moved from the call center to the contact center, a place where customers may make first contact with a company via a smartphone app, connect with a rep by phone, and get back the information they need through SMS and e-mail.
A recent Aberdeen (News - Alert) Group study found that 55 percent of retail respondents said customers expect a similar experience regardless of channel, according to a blog post by Vocalcom. Retail respondents identified the top five channels of engagement as online (87 percent), brick and mortar (70 percent), mobile (56 percent), call center (56 percent) and social media (52 percent).
Delivering on the idea of multi-channel support is easier said than done for many firms, however. Roughly 40 percent of organizations say that complexity prevents them from improving their multi-channel service or from considering more advanced call center applications, solutions and software, according to Econsultancy’s Multi-Channel Customer Experience Report.
Integration is the driving force behind the complexity cited by those surveyed.
“Simply put, integration becomes increasingly difficult to house in one single system while being available on multiple touchpoints,” noted another blog post by Vocalcom. “Our research has found legacy technology systems to be the culprit. Legacy infrastructure – which oftentimes doesn’t support these advanced, cloud-based methods of service – can significantly hold companies back from realizing their true potential.”
Vocalcom has a solution for this, however. Its cloud-based contact center software not only ends the reign of legacy infrastructure by moving the hardware and software to the cloud, it also delivers multi-channel support out of the box.
This can instantly enable businesses to deliver support to their customers, however their customers need to connect.
“Vocalcom's Cloud-based Call Center Software lets you Manage all customer interactions via a single user interface & delivers greater agent productivity and flexible call center management,” noted the company. “Automatically capture, route, manage, integrate, orchestrate, and report on inbound and outbound customer interactions regardless of the channel.”
So while many businesses struggle with the new modes of communication, some are leveraging it to driver even greater customer satisfaction and pull away from their competition.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson