Welcome back! Now you can name at least 2 of the contact center industry’s 15 top trends of 2015 that are or could be affecting the way you do business.(Hint: #1 = Mobile Customer Care and #2 = Multichannel Contact Centers.)

Don’t just sit there! Read the whole article on Trend #2, “Multichannel Contact Centers,“ and you will have one more weapon in the battle to build a more successful contact center strategy.

Trend #2 – Multichannel Contact Centers

How will your business approach buzz-worthy technologies and trends like multichannel in 2015? Do you have to get on the bandwagon? If your company wants to provide high levels of customer service, a multichannel strategy is no longer an option. It’s not a question of when, but how.

Multichannel Is the Norm

Today’s consumers are more demanding than ever, using “always-on” multiple digital channels to interact, connect, share, shop and access customer service. Organizations that can provide consumers with seamless, multichannel experiences will have an advantage in 2015 and beyond.

You may have heard the term “omnichannel,” which implies that you offer all possible channels of communication, including Social Media. Savvy contact centers are moving in that direction. But don’t panic! You can add one channel at a time.
Voice, email, and chat are must‐have capabilities. Your contact center will lose customers if you don’t have them.
Video, social engagement, and mobile extensions are areas of communication differentiation. Your customers may not expect you to have them, but they will be impressed to find you can follow each other over all channels. (Source: Nemertes Research)

Omnichannel Is the Future

Currently, we are moving toward creating an omnichannel customer experience, one that will be consistent and high-quality, regardless of how, where or for what purpose a customer chooses to interact with an organization. Omnichannel ensures that data and context from an initial contact carries over to subsequent channels, reducing customer effort, improving interaction, and enabling the business to tailor the customer’s journey through their organization.

It’s going to take work to get there. Currently, most companies have multiple platforms and applications. There is a lot of integration work to be done in order to ensure that companies can provide a seamless customer journey, and that companies have a seamless way of capturing all the data from those journeys. Once they do have the data, they can make even more changes to improve customer satisfaction.

Let’s look back at when this all started.

Adoption of Multichannel Communications

(Source: Interactive Intelligence Webinar)
In 1994, we began hearing about “the death of the call center“, and “Long live the contact center.” Not much happened until 2010 when adoption began in earnest. Now, in 2015, Multichannel is in full-swing and has become mainstream. Single-channel call centers are viewed as laggards and not focused on the customer; customers become frustrated when they can’t use multiple channels for communication.

Consumers between the ages of 25-34 are the largest group looking for these other channels. A first step is to determine the age demographic of your customers. Don’t ask yourself the wrong question – “Should we move to Omnichannel?” As we said earlier, this upgrade does not have to be all or nothing:

  • Take a phased approach, adding one channel at a time
  • Don’t deploy “Accidental Multichannel,” where:
    • New channels are added by individual departments
    • Context and history aren’t shared
    • Customers get a very inconsistent service experience
    • Reporting is inaccurate because systems are not linked

The research behind this bar graph shows that, indeed, customers expect to be able to communicate with service or customer support via phone, email and even web chat. The importance of the other channels is rapidly moving up, based largely on the age demographic of the customer.

Reasons to Add New Channels

Increased Efficiencies:

  • Self-service options reduce costs
  • Certain channels allow better optimization of agent’s time
  • Provides added internal flexibility for staffing
  • Ability to adhere to compliance and regulatory requirements

Delivery of a Better Customer Experience:

  • Give customers choices
  • Some service interactions are better suited to certain channels
  • Projection of a more “customer-friendly” company (consistent)
  • Ability to provide a consistent service level

Multichannel/Omnichannel contact centers have the ability to add social media content to the mix to enhance customer relationships, strengthen brand opinion and drive increased lead generation. Adding the capability to route social media content to the right person for tangible, identified action extends the leverage and responsiveness of your contact center. Look for a solution that provides integration with contact center software such as VITEC, so you can bring this exponentially-growing and highly valuable source of data into your workflow.

Where Does Social Media, the Newest Channel, Fit in the Multichannel Mix?

Back in 1992, we were horrified to learn that the average dissatisfied customer would tell 8 – 10 people. In 2015, the average customer has 229 Facebook friends; via the “Kevin Bacon” effect, 150,000 people (friends of friends) can learn of a customer’s dissatisfaction. This phenomenon can seriously damage your brand if you are not paying attention to social channels, capturing data both—negative and positive—and utilizing analytics to route the data to the right person.

Deploy or Not Deploy?

It depends on customer demographics and usage, B2C or B2B and brand size. The choice might not be yours! As you develop an overall business strategy that includes mobility and multichannel communication, rely on a vendor partner like VITEC who can guide you along the path to a custom solution that will keep you up-to-date with the most important trends.

Watch for Trend #3 and more of the Top 15 Trends in 2015, as they become available.