15 April 2014
By Paul
Fick, CTO at the Jasco Group
The world of multichannel contact centres
that incorporate social media, instant messaging and video chats as methods of
communication to mention a few, is becoming extremely complicated. But behind
the countless, often confusing new technologies, lie some fundamental benefits
to evolving one’s contact centre beyond traditional voice and email only.
These benefits include: increased agent
productivity, better customer service, increased relevance to all customer
segments, new cross-sell and upsell opportunities, and staying ahead of
competitors.
Organisations are increasingly looking to
customer service as a key competitive differentiator, and are treating customer
relationships as a prized corporate asset. In this new era, the importance of a
strong multichannel strategy becomes clear.
So what is multichannel? Most broadly, it
describes an organisation that is available to customers via whatever channel
of communication they prefer. Traditional
voice and email channels are augmented with things like web-based
instant messaging, video chat, SMS, ‘call me back’ buttons, and social media
interactions.
Ensuring all of the channels are fully
joined-together allows customers to move fluidly between any of them at any
point in an interaction. Customers are able to use the communication platform
with which they are most comfortable which is most convenient for them at that
time.
For this to happen, new channels need to be
opened up as part of a long-term, strategic roadmap strongly connected to the
organisation’s core business operations. Building out a contact centre in an ad
hoc manner, not underpinned by a singular workflow system can cause disunity
between the channels – and an inconsistent, frustrating customer experience.
In South Africa, there has been limited
adoption of true multichannel contact centres – many local companies have
successfully added one or two new channels, but few are seeing the benefits of
a fully integrated multichannel customer proposition.
Aside from the obvious problems of costly
bandwidth, it is also often difficult to properly articulate business value
(particularly in today’s business environment where most firms are looking to
cut costs). In order to ‘sell’ the
concept of multichannel to business execs, contact centre managers have to deftly
forecast the benefits in the areas of:
- Negating revenue threats and market share
losses to competitors with a better level of customer interaction
- Saving on payroll costs by increasing agent
productivity and automating certain customer interactions
- Increased opportunities for upselling and
cross-selling to customers
- The ability to appeal to a broader base of
consumers across all demographics, geographies, age groups, and communication
preferences
- The tools to create richer customer profiles
to personalise interactions and target special offers and promotions
While these are usually the fundamental areas
on which multichannel business case is built, added to this list is the fact
that an organisation embracing multichannel (in the right way) is now able to
capitalise on new technological innovations in future.
Voice biometrics, for example, is emerging as
a new disruptive technology that may forever change the way customers are
authenticated into conversations with their bank, insurance provider, mobile
operator, credit card issuer, or any other customer interaction dealing with
sensitive data.
This technology holds the potential to
replace the laborious process of answering a set of questions or confirming
certain personal details – it simply recognises the customer’s voice as they
repeat a pre-determined sentence, and validates the caller’s identity.
But perhaps the
most critical technology advancements in the contact centre space will be on
the back-end – the new systems that will scan the vast swathes of phone calls,
emails, web chats, messaging interactions, tweets and Instagram photos – to
create detailed customer profiles.
Where this
information starts to become very powerful is when it is used to present
customers with a tailored shopping experience the next time they interact with
an organisation. Imagine a sales clerk armed with roaming tablet or smartphone
devices, drawing on a central database of customer information.
This is a
fundamental shift where data gathered for ‘reactive’ reasons (during a customer
service issue at the contact centre, for instance) is used to create more
informed, more personalised, ‘proactive’ interactions that are more likely to
result in a sale.
Essentially, developing a first-rate
multichannel contact centre strategy is the first step towards becoming a
multichannel company in general – one which leverages every possible touch
point as a sales channel. This could well be the strongest business case for
multichannel.
So as an organisation begins on this
transformative journey, it is essential that the technology partner selected is
able to provide the higher-value consultancy required to design a long-term,
integrated multichannel solution. This partnership approach not only opens
doors to more fruitful customer interactions, but sets the organisation on
course to become a truly multichannel business.