At the risk of putting a tune in reader’s heads, there is a significant and growing relevance to the Carly Rae Jepson hit song of 2012, Call Me Maybe, for those looking to enhance the customer experience.  Realities are that “call me maybe” in an always-on and all ways connected world is not an option for organizations of any size or location. 

Customer engagement is literally and figuratively a contact sport.  If you can’t delight customers quickly and to their satisfaction regardless of how, when or why they have initiated the need to speak with a customer care agent, the consequences can be both swift and harsh.

It is for precisely this reason that callback capability has become truly mission critical.  Customers are becoming less and less tolerant of waiting on hold. They are not only quick to hang up, but are also adept at expressing their displeasure on social media.  However, surveys do show that when customers are giving the option of talking to a customer care representative via callback, assuming the time of said callback is either stipulated or in a perceived zone of reasonableness, they are satisfied.  In short, callback has gone from business nicety to business necessity in our era where customer service is becoming a major component of what constitutes differentiated value.

The contact center is ground zero for customer engagement. As the frontline of interactions in real-time with your brand, this puts a premium on making those interactions as frictionless and satisfying as possible. The trick is to do so in an omnichannel manner to assure all aspects of the customer journey, particularly the time it takes to resolve an issue, are carefully understood, implemented and leveraged.

The challenge has been for many enterprises to transform the contact center to one that has omnichannel is itself a journey. It is a journey with some speed bumps. This means that there is a disconnect in many cases between the contact center experience and the overall customer digital experience, which typically starts on the Internet before being escalated into a call.  After all, the death of real-time verbal interaction, now with video in many cases, is certainly premature. We all still need the satisfaction of speaking in real-time to someone who can resolve our really pressing issues.

What this needs to translate into is giving those frontline agents in the contact center, and their administrators, the visibility and tools they need into the entire customer journey so those experiences are optimized.  And, this is where the customer callback tool has become important. Many organizations are using customer callback capabilities, specifically now cloud-based solutions, as the glue for assuring all channel interactions are tracked. This means shorter queuing times and better responsiveness to customer needs.  

With this as context you are invited to join me and Jeremy Starcher, VP of Business Development, Virtual Hold Technology (News - Alert) (VHT) for the insightful webinar, CALLBACK CLOUD: How looking up helps you in reaching out,” to be held Tuesday, December 15, 2015 01:00 PM EST / 10:00 AM PST.    

What Jeremy will discuss in depth includes: 

• Current trends in customer experiences
• Blinders to the customer’s experience: How what we don't know about the customer’s entire experience hinders us from delivering on great experiences.
• How to conduct a reality check on the customer’s actual experience
• How callback connects emerging channels with the contact center to create a WOW experience for your customers, your employees and your business.

With enhancing the customer experience now a, if not the, top priority of C-levels around the world, having the ability to keep the customer engaged right from the start by limiting the time it takes for them to speak with an agent can make a significant difference in customer satisfaction scores.  It might be a bit of a stretch to characterize callback as a game changer.  However, it has already proven to make a measurable and major difference, and the great thing about it being cloud-based is that any company of any size or location can benefit. As noted at the top, call me maybe is not an option. It's a necessity.