Preparing Your Contact Center for the Mobile Onslaught

While call centers today have largely achieved multimedia capabilities – they have had to, in order to survive – “telephone” is often considered a single channel. The truth, as many organizations are discovering, is that it's not. While the static home-based telephone is still a favorite media channel with which to communicate with a company, the truth is that with each month that passes, more and more consumers are choosing their mobile phones – smart phones in particular – with which to connect with customer support.

It's just a phone, right? Nothing changes?

Wrong. Customers accessing call centers via their mobile phones have a set of dedicated needs that many organizations just aren't prepared to meet yet. Consider how the ubiquitous interactive voice response (IVR) phone menu is supposed to connect callers with the right agent, but frequently it results in callers “zeroing out” for an operator. As customers' adoption of smartphones escalates, so too will this problem. No one wants to muck around with pressing more than a few buttons to interact with an IVR menu when he or she is on the move, walking down a city street, for instance, or while driving in the car.

While a poorly designed IVR has long been a source of frustration for customers, the agony is about to get more acute and the traditional IVRs flaws are about to show a lot more. Customers today are Web-savvy and used to fast turnaround in communications, and they're not afraid to air their grievances on social networks like Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter, allowing thousands of people to hear their complaints instantly. As a result, the pressure is on for companies to improve.

Luckily, there are new ways for companies to upgrade their call centers and improve their interaction with customers – particularly mobile customers – without making any changes to their existing infrastructure. The key is to use the ubiquity of the Web and smartphone to make the call center smarter about how agents and customers interact.

Easier said than done, of course.

To this end, on Wednesday, March 7, TMC (News - Alert) will be sponsoring a new Webinar entitled, “How Call Centers are Being Reshaped by Smartphones, Social Media and Fed-Up Consumers.” The event, which will be led by Shai Berger, CEO and co-founder of cloud-based visual dialing solutions

provider Fonolo (News - Alert) (www.fonolo.com), will further the concept of preparing for mobility in the contact center, and will share case studies of companies that have already enhanced their call centers.   

To see more information or register, click here.