Customers are increasingly dissatisfied with their contact center experiences, especially those individuals who are part of Generations X and Y. These customers want to interact with companies not only via voice, but also using web chat, smartphone applications and social media. That’s the word from Dimension Data (News - Alert), who this month revealed new survey data on this topic.

“The pace of technology adoption by end users is driving contact centers to evolve and gather speed, which means the complexity of transactions has increased. Organizations haven’t kept pace with technology and are operating outdated systems,” explains Andrew McNair, Dimension Data’s Head of Global Benchmarking. “There’s no doubt that if management does not plan for increased contact center agent competency, and develop skills across multiple channels and disciplines, these organizations will fail.”

Dimension Data surveyed 817 people in 79 countries across 11 business sectors for the report, which also indicated growing contact center employee dissatisfaction (agent absenteeism is three times higher than contact center management) and churn (agent attrition is up 26 percent from 2012). Worse yet, it says customer satisfaction in 2013 was down for the fourth straight year, which may in part be attributed to the fact that contact resolution rates have dropped for four years in a row as well.

The good news is that the report also notes that contact centers are evolving to become more responsive, cross-channel multimedia hubs. It notes that 31.8 percent of contact center advisers now handle transactions across a variety of emerging channels, such as smartphone applications; 50.6 percent of contact centers currently offer, or have plans to implement, a web chat solution; and the number of planned deployments increased 27.2 percent over the past 12 months.

“Organizations don’t need one strategy for the contact center, one for the web, another for mobile, and one for social media. They need a single, unified strategy for customer contact across all channels, for all purposes. If contact center leaders can raise their game, they can be the ones to drive it. The big danger for now is non-action,” says McNair.

To learn more about solutions that can empower agents to deliver a better customer experience and enable customers to interact with companies via the channels of their choice, TMC (News - Alert) welcomes you to attend the webinar “Multichannel Customer Service – An all-in-one solution at your fingertips”. This event, featuring George Seroukas, Executive Vice President, North America at Vocalcom, takes place Thursday, December 5, 2013 2:00 PM EST / 11:00 AM PST. Click here for more information.