So now you have a multichannel contact center. Your customers can call one day and then text some additional information, and the entire transaction will be unified. You’re pretty impressed by yourself for pulling this off.
Don’t be too proud. As it turns out, this is the bare minimum of what customers expect you to be able to do nowadays.
"Allowing customers to use their channel of choice is now considered the minimal acceptable level of service in contact centers," said Sarah Stealey Reed, Content Director for the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI). "But it can be tricky for companies to know how to prepare their agents for multichannel interactions.”
Essentially, even if you have the technology in place to offer a multichannel experience, your agents may not be ready for it. This is according to new ICMI report, “The Multichannel Agent: A 2014 Contact Center Roadmap, Research Report and Best Practices Guide,” which evaluated the role of contact center agents in a multichannel environment.
Among the findings of the report, the most notable include the following:
- Two-thirds of companies (66 percent) reported that they see a link between operational efficiency, agent engagement and agent satisfaction.
- Nearly two thirds of respondents (64 percent) reported that a multichannel strategy necessitates that agents learn new technologies or new processes.
- Although multichannel agents do not demand higher wages, 46 percent of respondents recognize that multichannel agents have more extensive training needs
- Finally, 85 percent of contact centers believe that happy agents make happy customers.
As companies move to call center on demand solutions, they are achieving the kind of multichannel capability that they need to keep customers happy. This doesn’t automatically guarantee that agents will have the skill necessary to engage in the multichannel process. Some agents may be strong on the telephone but weak in e-mail, Web chat or SMS. Others may be great in written channels but weaker on the telephone. Still more agents may be completely clueless about social media. Robust skills-based routing, together with a call center on demand solution, can help ensure that the right agents are taking the right contacts. But in the end, it may require more robust training to make sure that everyone can work out of universal queue of contacts.
According to the ICMI report, some of the ways companies can build a better multichannel workforce include understand the driving forces behind productivity and efficiency decreases; eliminating channel and department silos to create efficiencies and boost customer care, turning data into actionable data through the use of desktop analytics; involving agents in the development and implementation of new tools and experimenting with non-voice channels and a cloud infrastructure.
Edited by Cassandra Tucker