Creating Delighted Customers with Multi-Channel Contact

0
81

Share on LinkedIn

Building a successful multi-channel contact center often isn’t as simple as opening new lines of communication. Best-in-class businesses, those performing at the top of industry, are building customer contact channels from the ground up with integrated technologies, analytics, and employee training at the core of their deployment strategies.

While utilizing up to six communication channels is the norm for most contact centers, best-in-class companies achieve more than twice greater year-over-year improvement in customer satisfaction.

What lessons can best-in-class companies provide for organizations that may not be creating the same delight for their own customers? Aberdeen Group in its white paper, “Multi-Channel Contact Center: Delight Customers Where They Live,” distilled the behaviors of these best-in-class companies into three key recommendations for multi-channel contact centers:

1. Provide employees with the tools and training needed to effectively manage multi-channel customer interactions.

Best-in-class companies are 44% more likely than other companies to provide their employees with the relevant training needed to effectively manage and work with multiple systems, from phone to IVR to social media. Companies that empower employees with unified agent desktop tools that allow them to move seamlessly between these different channels are 56% more likely to decrease their customer care costs.

2. Marry multi-channel customer data with your internal data to establish a cross-channel 360-degree customer.

We’ve all heard that you can’t make improvements until you create a system for measuring those indicators of success. In multi-channel settings, we create delight for customers by understanding their specific needs and addressing them in a relevant and timely manner. Best-in-class companies are 69% more likely than companies in the “laggard” category to support employees with multi-channel customer interaction data.

3. Leverage technology tools to optimize channel selection and usage.

Creating delight with customers is often due to technology that optimizes activities in the back-office, enables seamless communication across multiple departments and channels, and surveys customers to identify the best channels for interactions. Aberdeen recommends a number of technology enablers such as automated customer contact distribution tools, VOIP, and contact center and text analytics for creating successful multi-channel contact centers.

Based on survey results, the adoption of technology tools is not based on company size, but rather an organization’s focus on improving their multi-channel contact center initiatives.

We invite you to read the full report from Aberdeen to explore ways you can improve your company’s multi-channel efforts.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Christine O'Brien
Chris O'Brien, Marketing Communications Writer, develops and designs content for a wide range of Aspect communications and social media applications. She continually monitors consumer trends to ensure that marketing messaging aligns with industry best practices and meets customer expectations.

ADD YOUR COMMENT

Please use comments to add value to the discussion. Maximum one link to an educational blog post or article. We will NOT PUBLISH brief comments like "good post," comments that mainly promote links, or comments with links to companies, products, or services.

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here