Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Catching Up with Contact Center Trends to Support Omnichannel and Social Media
There are very few business functions that ever stand still. Business IT, for example, moves at dizzying speeds, and for most companies, requires a team of professionals just to keep up. The contact center is another fast-moving department. Customers’ preferences change regularly, and the quick pace of telecommunications technology advances means that the customer support function needs to be ready to adapt, and quickly.
Customer support should be built from the customer’s perspective and not that of the contact center. This is important when determining which trends to prepare for. The term “customer journey” gets used a lot nowadays, and for good reason. With each new channel, new social media app, new real-time communications standard, customers have an almost limitless way to approach a company when they need help. For this reason, it’s important to build an omnichannel customer support experience that begins and ends with the customer. It’s also absolutely vital that the customer be able to switch channels within the same transaction, according to a recent blog post by Monet Software (News - Alert) CEO Chuck Ciarlo.
“Web, online chat, email and texting are just some of the methods your customers would like to use – and sometimes an issue can be best resolved by switching from one channel to another, without having to close the first engagement,” wrote Ciarlo. “Make it easier for customers to transition from web to voice, and make sure you are tracking that customer journey for quality management purposes.”
If you drill deep into the capabilities of most contact centers today, you’ll find they’re not there yet. The increasing popularity of customer support by mobile app, however, will force them to run to catch up. Mobility means voice and Web at the same time, and contact centers that can’t cope will be left behind by customers.
Luckily, the trend toward putting most contact centers into the cloud will help immensely in creating flexible cross-channel scenarios for customers. It will also help bring social media further into the contact center mix. Once reserved for amusing consumer time-wasting, the ungoverned behemoth that is social media is pivoting toward more serious functionality. It’s important to monitor, of course, but it can’t be a one-way experience anymore, according to Ciarlo.
“Social media is still under-utilized as a business communication tool – but chances are your customers are already using it to discuss your business,” he wrote. “It’s important to be represented there so you can respond to comments, positive or negative, as well as promote new offers and generate the types of discussions that will help you serve your customers better.”
Social media has an informal nature, so it’s a great opportunity to begin personalized, content-rich conversations with your customers. Managing social media communications, however, will be a challenge for the contact center in the near future. While there’s no doubt that social media needs to be treated like just “any other channel,” few customer support departments are equipped – either with personnel or software solutions – that can bring social media into the customer support mix.
2016 will be a year that contact centers need to stop dragging their feet when it comes to updating their support solutions for an omnichannel customer journey. Successful organizations need to break down walls between channels, between customer-facing departments and between e-commerce and in-store retail sales.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi