It’s no news to anyone who has worked in the contact center or customer support industries that things have changed over the last few decades. Once the provenance of a single channel of customer service – the telephone – the contact center today has become a multimedia mix of channels, including the telephone, email and mobile apps, with some social media thrown in for good measure. Looking toward the future, we even see video conferencing (see Amazon’s bold step in creating a “Mayday” button for the Kindle Fire).

Few people who worked in those early PBX (News - Alert)-based contact centers could have foreseen a future like this. Today we have distributed and virtual contact centers, linked together by the cloud and voice over IP (VoIP) based contact center solutions, serving customers all over the world and bringing in agents who may be working from their own homes, using only a PC, a broadband Internet connection and a headset.

This doesn’t mean, however, that customer complaints have evaporated. If anything, the proliferation of channels has broadened our choices, making us more demanding than ever. Companies, once required to maintain a single silo of information that corresponded to telephone support, now have many more opportunities to lose information, create black holes of data and appear to be ignorant of previous transactions on current calls or other support sessions.

According to a recent infographic published by Parature (News - Alert) and highlighted by customer service blogger Flavio Martins, there is one thing that has held steady through the decades when it comes to customer support: hold times.

“Hold times in customer service continue to plague service provider,” writes Martins. “Interestingly enough, research shows while nearly 50 percent of customers say they initiated a purchase over the phone, 75 percent of those customers were placed on hold! Customers looking to purchase and spend don’t like to wait, and when they do, it results is a poor customer service experience.”

Another area companies have not improved since the dawn of the consumer Internet, despite broad technology improvements and opportunities to do so, is a lack of the pertinent information customers are searching for on Web sites. Experience and conventional wisdom tell us that customers who find information for themselves won’t need to pick up the telephone or contact a live customer support agent in any other way, yet companies continue to fall down in this area, according to the Parature data.

“Fifty-six percent of customers cited that they abandoned a purchase or a Web site because of a lack of information about products or services,” notes Martins. “A huge waste all of the marketing spending that was used just to get customers to your Web site.”

The major stumbling block of customer service hasn’t changed much from the past. Too little attention is being paid to the customer experience on lower-cost channels, which means that customers are finding it necessary to pick up the phone or log onto the website for a chat session.

So, has technology simply meant that customer support organizations make the same old mistakes over and over again, just this time over higher-tech channels? In many cases, it’s hard to argue otherwise. Smart companies must strive to use technology to improve their operations, not to further complicate them.