It's Not An Option Anymore: Bring Multiple Channels To Your Call Center

BY BRYANT DOWNEY

Customers are customers. Period. Whether people walk into a brick and mortar store, call a toll-free number, or visit a business online, they expect the ability to interact with knowledgeable staff to get their questions answered, their problem solved, or their purchase made.

When customers try to reach out to a business, that is the business' opportunity to grab them while they're paying attention -- which means providing access through all media channels, all of the time. Doing this right is the key to transforming your call center into a contact center that is focused on good customer service.

Why More Media?
Simply put: Customers want additional media channels. With a majority of people now using the Internet for e-mail, e-commerce, research, and interaction, businesses need to respond by offering service in the same medium: e-mail, Web chat, and Web collaboration. Some businesses are already promoting these channels by placing e-mail and Web links on business cards and advertisements. If a business is promoting these transaction and information channels, it needs to effectively and efficiently support the customers coming through them.

But analysts agree that businesses aren't meeting customer expectations, and in fact, are falling quite short. So which channels are mission critical to providing good customer service? IDC Corporation estimates that by the year 2005, the number of daily e-mail communications will be a staggering 35 billion. So clearly e-mail will be a priority for most businesses.

With traditional consumers becoming more comfortable researching and shopping online, and younger shoppers -- who are already adept at Web chat -- also shopping online, chat and collaboration are becoming increasingly important to staffing a business' customer service showroom. Businesses with an online presence should consider supporting their Web site through these channels.

Finally, voice over IP has long piqued the interest of call centers with multiple locations and work-at-home agents. VoIP technology allows these distributed call centers to unify their agents and create a single, coordinated virtual contact center that functions as if all those agents were in the same room.

Depending on the needs of the business: e-mail, Web chat, Web collaboration, and VoIP are at the top of the list of needed channels. But also keep an eye on what will be coming next: streaming content and video, and more.

Do It Right: Meet And Exceed Customer Expectations
From the customer's point of view, if you are posting an e-mail and Web address, you are inviting them to contact you and/or visit your Web showroom. But just throwing an e-mail link and chat icon on the "Contact Us" page of your Web site is not be enough. Instead, put e-mail and Web chat links on all of your product pages and other key pages on the Web site where customers are likely to be browsing and therefore need support. This will prompt interested customers to get in touch, which will mean increased business.

Once the customer has initiated contact, the business needs to be there to pick up the ball while the customer is intrigued. Good brick and mortar stores recognize the need of striking while the iron is hot -- Web stores shouldn't be any different.

There are several ways contact centers can meet and exceed customer expectations:

Automated Announcements. According to industry analysts, you only have a few hours to respond to an e-mail question before the customer goes looking in a competitor's direction, and only have a few seconds (just like voice) to reply to an initiated Web chat before a interested customer (possibly with credit card in hand) wanders away from lack of attention and frustration. Automated announcements take some of the uncertainty out of e-mail and chat contact by immediately letting the customer know their query has been received and will be answered shortly. Providing the customer with an estimated time to answer as part of the automated announcement can also go a long way in enhancing customer satisfaction.

Automated e-mail and chat responses can also be used to cross-sell and up-sell customers by providing targeted information on key services or upcoming promotions. Everyone's attention span is getting shorter and shorter these days and well-timed responses can keep a customer interested.

Routing. Get the customer to the most qualified agent the first time -- no matter how the customer contacts you -- and the customer will be thrilled. Routing allows you to organize voice calls, e-mail, and Web collaborations and send them to the best-qualified agent to handle their specific question, right away. No one likes being transferred around, so intelligent routing based on information like key words in the e-mail, the Web site address, or the customer's telephone number helps direct the customer to a knowledgeable agent from the onset. A good system will also keep an eye on contacts to make sure they get serviced and aren't left in queue for an extended period of time. If an e-mail, for example, goes unanswered, it should be able to be pulled back and redistributed to an available agent for faster service.

Web Chat. It's rare these days to walk into a store without a sales representative asking if they can help you with anything. By initiating contact, the business can often help customers locate an item or answer any questions, making the purchasing processes as smooth as possible. By proactively offering a Web chat to customers, you can help online customers in the same way. By initiating a "Can I help you with anything?" chat, contact center agents can turn curious shoppers into buying customers. Good chat systems can detect if a Web customer is a repeat customer, having problems finding information, or other criteria that might be used as a trigger to proactively offer assistance. Of course, keep in mind that pestering every Web page visitor with an offer for a chat session is likely to simply annoy visitors and drive them away.

Web Collaboration. The Web can be a great place to "show" customers what they are looking for. Even on the best-designed Web sites, customers very often have a hard time finding the specific information they need. Web collaboration allows agents to lead a customer through a Web site to specific pages. The dialogue of Web chat or a voice call combined with the visual punch of page pushing gives the agent the ability to show and tell the customer about important information. Web collaboration can also be a way for an agent to step in if a customer is having difficulty filling out a form. The agent can take over the form and fill it out for the customer at the customer's request.

The Business Benefits
Your customers will be thrilled with good response times, improved customer service, and the "show and tell" available through Web collaboration. But what about your business? What will adding these additional channels for customer service do for your company? The following items are just a few benefits:

Competitive Advantage. All those customers who are leaving your competitor's Web site because their e-mail was never responded to, or because they had no way to contact the company for real-time online communication, will turn to your business instead. If your competition already has a multichannel contact center in place, are your Web customers going to them?

Improved Bottom Line. There has been much debate over the financial cost of e-mail and chat compared to phone calls. While analysts generally put the cost of these new channels as being less than voice calls, it is also important to remember that not providing these contact options is costing a company business.

Increased Management Information: Through monitoring and tracking tools built into many contact center solutions, the management team can gain important insight into the business. Supervisor review is very important with e-mail and Web chat. It can be used as a powerful training tool for new agents and a way to monitor the progress of more established agents. Also, with e-mail, the agent's response is recorded in black and white and can automatically be saved by the customer, which means a customer has a detailed record of each interaction. With review and monitoring capabilities, supervisors can check outgoing e-mails and can then send them back to the agents for changes to avoid any problems.

With tracking, a software solution can assign a tag number to a specific e-mail so that all subsequent customer replies are then routed directly to the originating agent, so there is a consistency in customer service and so management can see how many back-and-forth e-mails are required for certain topics.

In addition, contact centers can look at the types of questions coming in from all channels to look for patterns. For example, e-mails initiated from a Web site can be followed to see which page or even which product customers are on when they initiate contact. If repeated Web chats are being initiated regarding a form customers are trying to fill out, that can be a red flag that there is a problem with the form.

A Look At The Hurdles Of Adding Media Channels
Should you add all the channels at once? Can these new software solutions communicate with each other? What about your existing data and telephony systems? These are some of the issues you will need to understand before adding media channels.

Many businesses have made significant investments in their existing data and telephony systems and aren't interested in throwing them out to start all over again. You don't have to. Adding e-mail and chat can be done without eliminating your phone solution. But integration will be a key issue.

Few things annoy customers more than forcing them to re-explain who they are, what products they use, or what problem they are having each time they contact you. Integrating all the customer contact channels with a customer database will be crucial to meeting customer expectations. Other front and back office applications will also need to be integrated to create a full CRM package, so when looking to add media channels, make sure integration is available.

Another option to keep in mind is the future growth of the contact center. Expansion is often a part of the long-term game plan for contact centers and having multichannel solutions that will grow with the contact center is important. Contact centers may want to start by only adding one channel initially, say e-mail, and then expanding later. Keeping an eye on the future will help contact centers map out how solutions will work together and whether they can add more seats to accommodate growth.

Human Resources: The People Behind The Channels
When adding additional communication channels, call centers need the new skill sets required by those channels.. The new communication channels will only work as well as the agents fueling them. Depending on your personnel, you may not want to Web-enable all existing agents. Look at your staff and determine who has the skills to become a multichannel agent.

Agents who are comfortable typing quickly and can express themselves clearly in writing will easily transition to become chat and e-mail agents. But you also may want to bring in new agents to handle these new contacts. One benefit to multiple channels such as e-mail, Web, and VoIP is that they can easily be used by distributed or work-at-home agents. Keep this option in mind when adding multiple channels to your contact center. For example, college students can be excellent e-mail or Web chat agents.

Don't Delay: Add Multiple Channels Now
In this increasingly tight marketplace, businesses are struggling to gain new customers and keep existing customers. The point of customer service has always been to provide customers with easy access to the business and to provide quality information accurately and quickly.

The key to customer satisfaction in the year 2002 and beyond is to work with the new tools customers are using to make purchases, gather information, check their bank balances, find out about warranties, and all the other day-to-day activities that now take place through additional media channels such as e-mail and Web chat. Organizations that don't offer these channels may not be around to see how exciting customer communications will become in the next few years.

Bryant Downey, CTO, Cintech Solutions, is an expert in all aspects of contact center technology. Downey co-founded Cintech in 1987. He has more than 15 years of experience leading the development of software crucial to the contact center industry. He is a widely recognized expert and has spoken at trade shows and industry seminars across the U.S. and Canada. Visit Cintech Solutions at www.cintechsolutions.com.