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To Many Contact Centers, 'Multichannel' Means a Series of Poorly Integrated Channels

By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor

The term “multichannel contact center” means different things to different companies. Too many contact centers believe that simply answering a few e-mails in addition to phone work makes them a multichannel contact center.

This isn’t the case.

A true multichannel contact center is an integrated creature, with telephone, e-mail, Web channels, brick and mortar stores and more – up to and including social media and mobile apps – operating as a cohesive whole. So if a customer hangs up the phone and re-contacts a company in another channel, the two events can operate as a single contact, and agents of the company are aware of all a customers’ activities in one glance, regardless of which channel they choose.

Too few companies are there. A recent report from research group ContactBabel (News - Alert) titled, “The US Contact Center Decision-Makers’ Guide 2013,” (registration required) found that, on average, 25 percent of customer contacts today are through channels other than telephone. While this might seem like a great step for multichannel contact center operations, the truth of the matter is fairly dismal: less than 20 percent of contact centers interviewed for the report scored multichannel contact center or application integration as a “very important” result, according to a recent article on Business2Community.

“Although multichannel is the current buzz, the reality is that most ‘multichannel’ contact centers are a series of siloed interactions where customer information is not shared across channels,” writes Pekka Porkka for Business2Community. “There are even more interesting numbers in the ContactBabel report: 77 percent of consumers use more than one channel when seeking customer service.”

So why is there such a disconnect between what customers want in a multichannel experience and what contact centers want to give? The answers can likely be found in the money companies are willing to spend to replace aging legacy systems and put into place a truly unified, multichannel contact center infrastructure to support operations. Companies may still be trying to justify and depreciate past equipment purchases, so they replace equipment piecemeal and then find later that it simply doesn’t integrate. Many more companies are offering those siloed communication channels and thinking, “We have multichannel service.” (If they asked customers if they were happy with it, however, they’d get a different story.) Furthermore, too many organizations still consider the contact center as a cost center: a necessary evil they want to put as few resources as possible into.

It’s impossible to look around with eyes open, however, and not notice that the most successful companies are those with true multichannel strategies in place. As a company, you will never be able to lie, bluff or “make do” your way past the need for truly multichannel customer support.