ICMI Announces Contact Center Customer Self-Service and Multi-channel Best Practices

By Rajani Baburajan, TMCnet Contributor

The International Customer Management Institute (ICMI) announced the release of its 2010 research report titled “Self-Service and the Multichannel Contact Center.”

The report is based on the 2010 Self-Service Contact Center survey conducted via e-mail and online on over 400 contact center professionals from various industries and across the world.

The study revealed that both contact centers and customers are getting an overall lackluster performance from self-service strategies, with more than half (64 percent) of respondents indicating they don't know if or when a customer has tried to self-serve but then opted for a live representative.

Almost half of respondents (43.6 percent) said they don't measure customer feedback on their centers' self-service channels.

However, more than three quarters (79.5 percent) of respondents said their customer care operations provide customers self-service opportunities.

“Taking into account the respondent data on the success of self-service in reducing operating costs and increasing customer satisfaction, we can confidently infer that at least some of the trouble in meeting service level goals can be attributed to the failure of self-service strategies to truly address and meet customer needs,” according to researchers at ICMI.

According to the respondents, the key drivers for implementing a self-service strategy for customers were operating cost reductions (83.4 percent) and meeting customer demand for service options (74.3 percent).

Some of the important tools contact centers use to support Web self-service channels included issue tracking (53 percent), knowledge management (44.6 percent) and service management tools (42.3 percent).

The survey found several survey participants follow some good practices in agent recruitment and hiring for the multi-channel environment, with more than half (64.4 percent) of respondents using the Web (online career sites, company Web site, and the like) more for recruitment and screening applicants early for the skills needed for multiple contact channels.

“It has been an eye-opening study,” said Layne Holley, ICMI's director of Community Services, in a statement. “When you consider the investment that companies have made or plan to make in self-service strategies against how they execute these strategies, we see that there's much room for improvement when it comes to ROI and customer satisfaction.”

Funding for the survey was provided by contact center solutions software provider, inContact.

ICMI recently announced it has started accepting nominations for its annual Global Call Center of the Year Award that identifies the “best of the best contact center teams who, through their commitment to superior service, have done the most to deliver a quality customer experience and enhance both the center's strategic value to the organization and the contact center profession's image.”

The nomination will close on Friday, February 18, 2011.

(source: http://call-center-performance.tmcnet.com/topics/call-center-performance/articles/136549-icmi-announces-contact-center-customer-self-service-multi.htm)