Don’t Miss the Multi-Channel Mark: Deliver Positive Customer Experiences Across Every Channel, Every Time
By Jonathan Gale, CEO of NewVoiceMedia
It’s well known that happy customers equate to success. So to succeed, businesses must learn to understand what customers want and deliver on it. Yet, they’re failing to follow through on this guiding principle as they struggle to keep up with rapidly evolving customer demands like changing channel preferences. Only seven percent of customers believe that customer service experiences exceed expectations, according to a recent American Express survey. So what’s missing?
Today’s customers want what they want when they want it. Even more, they expect a consistent experience. To deliver on this expectation, organizations must embrace multi-channel customer support and be prepared to solve problems quickly and effectively through any channel even predicting which channel customers are most likely to use. If organizations can't provide the highest levels of service to customers across multiple platforms, they won't hesitate to find someone who can.
Today, customers expect more from every business interaction. For many, the interaction with businesses starts and ends with their contact center experience. They expect personalized and unique service each and every time through every channel. It is no longer acceptable to offer a phone or email process that requires the customer to repeatedly enter the same information, navigate many layers of menus or resolve a case in days versus minutes. Your customers want an effective interaction that predicts their needs and resolves their issues via their preferred communication channels.
So how can service teams live up to these expectations? By implementing strategies and technologies that guide customers to the right channel and the right agent, businesses can win over customers and boost satisfaction. Here are a few guiding principles customer service teams should keep in mind when deploying multichannel support strategies.
Understand what customers want
Knowing customers’ likes, dislikes and habits is the first step to delivering multichannel customer service. To keep up with the pace of change, organizations must embrace platforms their customers are using rather than the ones they are most comfortable with.
Research firm IDG found that most companies struggle to keep up with the proliferation of channels and the resources and technological requirements they require. These companies went on to state that their biggest challenge was in understanding the evolving customer journey. Sixty-two percent of companies surveyed had only partially mapped the customer journey, meaning that a vast majority of businesses have limited knowledge about their customers’ behavior.
So which channels are the most popular?
NewVoiceMedia’s recent research report ‘A Nation of Serial Switchers’ found that while voice continues to be the primary communication channel used by all demographics, channel usage rates are quickly changing as consumers look to engage with brands on email, chat and social media. Multiple factors played a role in which channel customers preferred to use with 60 percent stating that they continually change their preferred contact channel depending on where they are and what they’re doing.
Organizations must also have the foresight to be prepared the next new channel. The same report highlighted the generational importance of social media. While not significant in volume today, it’s likely to explode in relevance as Gen Y consumers’ spending power increases. This expected upsurge is not based on the reputation legacy customer service channels have, but rather it reflects the momentum created from the adoption of smartphone and tablet ownership combined with the ongoing deployment of faster and cheaper wireless access. While social media may seem like a scary prospect for engagement with no defined rules for interaction, it’s an important channel to master. Leading edge businesses much change social media posts, like Facebook comments and tweets, into actionable items for agents to address.
Obtain a single view of the customer across all channels
Customers expect the same level of service regardless of the channel they choose so having a contact center platform that allows you to integrate and manage multiple touch points is vital.
Unfortunately, a holistic view is hard to obtain given the siloed approach used by most organizations. Dimension Data found that just 47 percent of contact centers have a single system for tracking customer data and less than 33 percent share their data with the rest of the organization. This lack of integration and collaboration makes it difficult to deliver a consistent experience across every channel.
Organizations need the ability to tie all channel interactions to a rep so that regardless of who handles the individual case the agent is fully aware of what has happened before. Cloud services offer a low cost and low risk route for many organizations to manage multiple channels while maintaining a single view of the customer. By doing so they give customers a sense of continuity and increase the speed of case resolution.
Guide customers to the right channel
Be where your customers are. Give customers the freedom to contact you in a way that suits them; and when things are made easy for customers they are far less likely to go looking to the competition for answers.
For existing customers you can set up a customer portal where customers can access valuable resources such as solution guides, FAQs and send messages directly to the support teams. Agents can then respond to these messages directly, with full access to the customer’s history.
For inbound requests, consider what the most effective channel is. Can the issue be solved quickly via chat? Did a customer opt out of email communications in the past? Implementing a strategy that can quickly sort incoming requests based on preferences, past history and the complexity of interactions will go far in setting up each customer interaction for success.
Once organizations master the art of effectively routing customer queries and prioritizing them based on the incoming channel and customer history, they’ll set a strong foundation for multichannel success.
Match customers with the right agent
Customers have different expectations when it comes to the variety of contact channels. Callers need to be managed in real-time, whereas emails can be dealt with in one working day without complaint. To best manage this, reps need to be able to prioritize and route requests across channels. For example, if a rep is working on an email response to a customer they will automatically be made available for voice calls if the queue gets too long.
Additionally, customer service centers need to play the game of matchmaker ensuring that they’re playing to the strengths of their agents. The skills needed to effectively handle a web chat differ from those needed for an email, or even a voice call. Have an agent that excels at phone communication? Assign them with the inbound calls. To do this, businesses must invest in technologies that can quickly and effectively route calls.
Today’s customers are more informed and tech-savvy than ever before and they want to work with companies that optimize these channels and deliver superior levels of service through each channel. By optimizing multi-channel strategies, organizations can further differentiate their customer service experience. In return, if a company delivers that they will reward them with their loyalty, advocacy and repeat business, which, in turn, will drive sales and profits.