There are two types of companies in the world: those that understand how far behind they are on mastering multichannel customer support and those that remain oblivious to how far behind they are when it comes to multichannel support. (The number of companies who have actually successfully mastered multichannel support are small enough to fit in a teacup.)

One reason that the stakes are higher than ever with multichannel contact centers is due to customer expectations of service via any channel…particularly among younger customers. Another reason is that contact center work is becoming more complicated as products and services themselves become more complicated. Research from LIMRA found that 68 percent of executives from 46 financial services companies said they expect contact center agents to service complex inquiries over the next five years. The same study found that 61 percent of executives said they expect the contact center agents to cross-sell, 57 percent expect the agents to upsell and 55 percent said they expect agents to get involved in direct selling.

“Trending within the organization as a whole, contact centers are going to be at the forefront of the customer touch points,” Norah Denley, LIMRA senior research analyst, recently told InsuranceNewsNet.

INN’s Cyril Tuohy notes that contact centers will soon need to become more sophisticated in order to handle more complex transactions through more channels. But first, these same organizations need to make sure they are serious companies about improving the customer experience.

For the organizations that haven’t yet realized how much damage their lack of multichannel support will do to their prospects in the future, there isn’t much help at this time. For those trying to solve the problems of multichannel integration, agent cross-training, universal queueing and reporting, inbound/outbound blending and more, there are solutions that can help. That’s the good news. The bad news is that these companies ARE going to have to spend some money. Tying your current ageing phone system to your new social media tracking system to your home-grown e-mail server to your Web site with duct tape and a prayer simply isn’t going to work.

It will cost a company money, but thanks to cloud-based technology today, it need not cost a fortune and take an eternity to implement.  Cloud contact center solutions provider such as Five9 enable agents to move seamlessly between social media, mobile care, live chat, email, and voice calls, with no loss of knowledge between channels. The company’s Five9 (News - Alert) Connect engine automatically helps filter and categorize interactions, eliminate spam and determine customer sentiment, which means the agent can begin working to solve the customer’s issue, regardless of channel.

These cloud-based multichannel platforms are inexpensive to implement, with little to no upfront capital, automatically blend and coordinate channels and allow companies to queue, monitor and report on customer contacts regardless of channel. For a company seeking to bring its multichannel operations into the twenty-first option, a hosted contact center solution may be the fastest, easiest and cheapest way to achieve this goal.