“Customer engagement” is one of those buzzwords that seems to be everywhere nowadays. It follows the buzzwords of the past: blended call centers, multichannel call centers and other phrases that described the means to perfect customer support harmony.

It’s a critical idea, however: disinterested or neutral customers are not loyal customers, and dissatisfied customers are a drain on your business, since they are likely to share their poor experiences with friends via social media. The engaged customer – the one you interact with on multiple channels, proactively reaching out to and anticipating his or her needs – is the kind of customer who makes your business soar.

The cost of poor customer service is high. A recent study by NewVoiceMedia (News - Alert) in the UK, highlighted in this infographic on CallCentreClinic.com, found that poor customer service costs UK businesses an estimated £12 billion a year, or approximately $19.3 billion US (yes, that’s “billion” with a “b”). Nearly all of us (95 percent) take some kind of action after a poor customer service event (tell a friend, post on social media, quit buying from that company, etc.), and 50 percent of customers in the UK take their business elsewhere as the result of a poor customer experience.

Given statistics like this, why on earth would anyone offer their customers less-than-stellar customer service? There may be human reasons: call center managers and operations personnel are aware of the data but aren’t particularly engaged themselves with the companies they work for, and therefore don’t care much. But the reasons are often technological: contact centers simply don’t have the right solutions to offer customers an engaging experience.

When contact centers were stuck using a series of poorly integrated, premise-based legacy systems, this was a pretty good excuse. The ACD didn’t talk to the customer relationship management (CRM) solution, the IVR was a joke, customer information resided in multiple databases that were stored in different places, and the workforce management and scheduling was done by hand on graph paper.

This is no longer an excuse, since all contact centers, from the largest to the smallest, have access to on-demand call center services, which can open up a wealth of timely resources that will enable companies to achieve true customer engagement. “Virtual” contact centers (as they are sometimes called) offer contact centers a platform on which to build their customer service that includes most of the functionality they need to run an efficient call center: ACD, interactive voice response (IVR), computer-telephony integration (CTI (News - Alert)), outbound dialers (power, preview and predictive), and more. A hosted solution allows companies to run either a single call center site or multiple sites as a cohesive, multichannel whole, with blended inbound and outbound capabilities. Best of all, an on-demand solution can be up and running quickly, with little to no upfront capital outlay and merely a monthly subscription fee. Companies pay for only what they use, with no wasted capacity, and turn the administration of the solution over to the provider.

So if your customers still aren’t engaged (and if you suspect they’re not, they probably aren’t), ask yourself what you could do with a contact center platform that actually works. And if it’s going to work, chances are that it’s on-demand.