The contact center has traditionally been solely focused on the service aspect of a business, working to address and remedy comments, complaints, inquiries, and other requests over the phone. However, with the ever advancing trend of mobile, Web, and social media communication, contact center agents are finding themselves caught in the middle of a whirlwind of diverse multichannel interactions.

Multichannel refers to anything outside of traditional voice. This includes things like web chat, text messaging, SMS, e-mail, and social media (e.g. Facebook and Twitter).

Marty Beard, CEO of LiveOps (News - Alert), a provider of contact center software and services, told TMCnet that over the last 24 months, voice interactions have gone from constituting just over 90 percent of all contact center interactions, to only around 50 percent. The sheer volume of calls has not decreased, however. Instead, the number of multichannel interactions has exploded.

As Beard put it, “The overall pie just got bigger.”

Contact center agents are thus at the forefront of a tremendous number of customer interactions, and therein lies a unique opportunity for retailers.

“The contact center has suddenly been discovered as the place where the most interactions with actual customers take place.   Contact center agents are spending more time interacting with customers than folks in inside sales or other parts of an organization,” said Beard.

By ignoring the contact center as a sales channel, businesses, particularly those in the retail sector, have been missing out on prime opportunities to monetize those interactions. The ability of a live agent, a real person, to upsell a customer on something has gone way up in recent years. LiveOps has seen conversion rates upwards of 25 percent from customer service agent led sales pitches.

“The upselling component of these interactions is really powerful. Because retailers have always been focused on the customer service part of the equation, they’ve been unaware that the contact center is really becoming a sales channel, and retailers just traditionally have not thought about that,” Beard said. 

Retailers have been so preoccupied with moving from in-store sales, to online, and now to mobile commerce platforms, that they seem to have missed a powerful complement to the upfront sale. Some companies are beginning to come around, however, Beard explained, as both Pizza Hut and BeachBody have shown excellent upsell figures from the use of the contact center. These companies have proven that customer service can be just a powerful as upfront selling.

Of course, success in this area requires technology that can handle the multichannel world. If your agents are only capable of handling voice, then you’ve squandered the opportunity. An integrated multichannel platform delivered across a single unified desktop is the only way to ensure agents have all the necessary information and means of communication needed to promptly and accurately make a sale. 

Customers live in a multichannel world, and they expect the same from their favorite brands. Multichannel integration provides agents with the agility needed to easily access account information and quickly interact across other channels (like e-mail or social media) while on the phone with a customer. There is no handing off to other agents, delays in correspondence, or rehashing of old information. Customers feel like the agent knows them and are pleased by the common personalized experience across all channels, making them far more receptive to sales efforts. 

“The brand loyalty generated by a good customer experience is significant,” Beard said, adding “Looking at customer service and the contact center as a channel to sell is a new concept, and we believe it’s something retailers should seriously start looking at.”