Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Study Finds Two Out of Three Call Centers Lack Multichannel Integration
Digital communication channels, including SMS (text message), email and web chat, now play a central role in what’s called the “omnichannel customer journey.” They also help to expand customer self-service options – so customers can answer their own questions -- and enable contact centers to handle high volumes of support tickets with limited agent capacity. Today, putting these digital channels in place is easier than ever with integrated, cloud-based solutions that allow all customer support to happen on the same platform regardless of channel.
LiveVox (News - Alert), a provider of cloud-based customer service and digital engagement tools, recently commissioned analyst group Forrester Consulting to evaluate how integrated contact center solutions help organizations with their business operations, customer needs, agent performance, and business outcomes. To complete the study, which was entitled “Transform the Agent and Customer Experience Using Contact Center Solutions with Embedded CRM Capabilities,” Forrester (News - Alert) conducted an online survey in December of 2020 with 269 U.S. contact center decision-makers who held a title of director or above.
The survey found that fewer contact centers have arrived at integration than we might think. Forrester concluded that two out of every three firms surveyed still cannot orchestrate customer journeys across multiple channels. And seven out of 10 survey participants said that agents do not have all the relevant customer information and interaction history at the moment of engagement — resulting in frustrating experiences for both customers and agents. Respondents indicated that the missing element is most likely to be customer relationship management (CRM). In fact, nearly 70 percent of these firms said that they would be more likely to purchase a contact center platform with its own CRM to alleviate these issues.
“As the Forrester study found, organizations today are struggling to track and understand customers across the multitude of channels throughout the customer journey, making both the agent and customer experience (CX) frustrating and difficult,” said LiveVox CEO Louis Summe (News - Alert). “As they strive to improve agent satisfaction, and in turn improve CX as well, contact center leaders are turning to cloud-based integrated contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) with embedded CRM capabilities to better engage their customers.”
Edited by Maurice Nagle