Multi-Channel Integration
by Shawn Siegel, Call Center IQ -
June 16, 2014
Multi-Channel Integration by Shawn Siegel, Call Center IQ
Sure, the 1,500+ customer-center executives who attend Call Center Week are there to network, do business and have fun. But they’re also there to learn practical lessons that can be applied to their organizations. One of the major topics at Call Center Week is the importance of taking a 360˚ view of multi-channel integration. We recorded the insights shared by some of our speakers at last year’s event, and want to share this insight with you.
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“I think the biggest transformation for call centers is just the fact that customers are interacting with us on multiple channels, and that the number of interactions is just continuing to increase. So we’re seeing more interactions, we’re seeing them across different channels, and our customers are expecting us to interact with them how they want to.
So, when you think about mobile, web, text, whether it’s your IVRs, chat, generally your human capital is the most expensive channel that you have. But how many of these channels that you have fail? And the first response you have is to go, let me go talk to a person. So what we’re trying to do is understand what are all those failure areas across the channels, so that we can keep the conversation consistent with our customers and allow them to self-serve, keeping the costs low. But it actually reduces their effort and jumps up their satisfaction.”
- Troy Mills, VP Customer Care, Walgreens
“What we found in our study was that only forty-five percent of consumers went to their preferred channel of choice. Is this bad, that they go away from their preference to try to get an answer? No. In fact it’s great, I think we all know that. Because we’ve trained them, to a certain extent, to go to the channel that they think they’re going to get the best answer with.
It’s about first contact resolution. Regardless of what channel they go to, we need to take care of that issue. We have to take care of that issue. Because one in four people have to use multiple channels to get to their answer, and you can see what happens to their overall customer satisfaction. Whenever they have to go to a different channel, customer satisfaction decreases by eleven points.”
- Mike Wooden, SVP, Convergys
“You can have all these channels, but what would also be good would be to have a marketing method that sways people to your preferred channel. You have to think, what’s the biggest opportunity for you? For us, it was phone, email, internal chat. So this internal chat thing has actually done really well for us. A team member can just run over to the point of sale, double-click an icon, and within eight seconds they’re getting a help desk, a tech line, or a customer care employee that can provide them an answer so that we can service you. It’s very seamless. And then, you know, you have a great experience.
You know, thirteen years ago, or even probably five years ago, we hired people that could answer the phone. Well today, you have to hire people that can, in our world, answer the phone, be able to respond to a tweet, respond to a Facebook post, answer a chat, and do that with some degree of proficiency. And even snail mail, I mean we still get snail mail. It’s so weird to go back and educate them on the right voice that we wanted and the right branding that we wanted.”
- Shawn Castle, Support Center Manager, Valvoline
“We initially did a survey of businesses and consumers, to find out which way they like to be contacted the most, the customers, and then which way businesses think that the customers want to be contacted the most. Number one: voice. Voice is still king. Voice is the ultimate channel that people want to use when they’re communicating with your centers. Number two: email.
Meaning, all of the app activity that your customers are doing, is being wrapped up and pushed on to your contact center. So that when I call your contact center, the first thing I hear is, ‘Oh, hi Mr. Passios. I see that you were working in our app today and you were getting ready to purchase this particular product, and I see that you were having trouble. Now based off your coordinates, I see that you’re right by one of your stores. Would you like me to push you directions to get there?’ That’s the kind of experience that your customers are looking for.”
- Todd Passios, Senior Director, Solutions Marketing, Interactive Intelligence
“I think sometimes we look at multi-channel, we think it’s our opportunity to market to the customer what we want to. But I think a true multi-channel approach has to be incorporating social, twitter, chat, call center automated calls, all of those things, and of course email, in a way that’s two-way. The client needs to be able to come to us that way, as well as we go out to them.”
- Tara Kelly, President & CEO, Splice
“From an agent perspective, you need to have a holistic view of all the interactions that you’ve had with the customer. And this is a disconnect that we once had, a severe disconnect. A customer could send us an email, a customer could call us, and we had nothing to tie those connections together. We couldn’t see that, ‘Oh hey this is the same customer that sent us an email, and then they also called us. We actually had two interactions with this customer.’”
- Erica Tyler, IT Applications Manager, Garmin
Join Us in Las Vegas!
Last year’s Call Center Week was the biggest in the event’s history. The speakers who shared these insights were just a few of the 1,500+ customer-centric executives who were on hand for 5 days of workshops, site tours, networking sessions, panel discussions and case studies. This year’s conference + expo will be held in Las Vegas, June 9-13 at Mandalay Bay Hotel & Casino.
For more information, please visit www.CallCenterWeek.com and download the brochure. This is the year to seize the opportunity to compete on service!
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