Call Center Management Featured Article
The Most Important Issues Facing Your Contact Center
It’s still early in the year, and many companies are still allocating their budgets for 2017 technology investments. If you’ve got money to spend on the contact center and customer support (and let’s hope that you do), you may be wondering how to spend it. Rather than flirting with new capabilities the company may or may not need, call center management should be evaluating their organization’s existing capabilities to see how they measure up on four important fronts.
How’s your mobile app? While financial services are ahead of most other companies in deployment of an app, this will be the year other companies need to catch up. A recent survey by Salesforce predicted that the number of inbound customer service requests that will come into the contact center via mobile app will increase by 38 percent over the next year. Resist the temptation to let an amateur build yours; it’s too important to get it wrong. Deliver a disjointed, frustrating, illogical mobile app experience, and your customers will pack up and leave for an organization that can meet their needs.
Can customers switch channels? According to a recent blog post by Monet Software (News - Alert) CEO Chuck Ciarlo, this is an area where nearly all companies can stand to improve their capabilities.
“According to the Harvard Business Review, more than half of all call center customers will at some point attempt to get something done online, but will have to switch to a phone call to make it happen,” wrote Ciarlo. “That transition should not only be possible, but also be actionable in a way that all information provided online is transferred to the agent so it does not have to be repeated.”
Has your self-service been updated? If you’re still using a static IVR and haven’t changed the menu choices in three years, you’ve probably got room for vast improvement. Today’s self-service technologies go far beyond pressing buttons: they’re intelligent, analytical and customized (think chatbots or interactive IVR).
Speed up the process. According to Ciarlo, customers today are less patient because they have become accustomed to the instant responses technology provides online. While improved self-service and mobile apps may reduce the number of customers calling in for routine inquiries, they will mean that the customers who do call will have more complex needs.
“Call centers cannot always provide that same instant response, but that won’t prevent customers from expecting it,” wrote Ciarlo. “Keep people on hold too long and they won’t be customers anymore. The forecasting and scheduling tools in a workforce management solution make this goal much easier to accomplish.”
Edited by Alicia Young