OPINION
How organisations will communicate with their customers in the future and deliver customer service excellence, by James L Tanner
Today’s primarily phone-centric contact centre will become a thing of the past in the next ten years with ever changing communication devices and always connected communications habits of today’s younger generation of consumers who will become the dominant customer base of many organisations.
Increasing use of social media including social networks like facebook and micro blogs such as twitter is likely to bring about a decline in the volume of calls to agents by at least 20 percent but possibly as much as 50 percent. I can imagine walking through a contact centre in ten years and seeing only a handful of phones and call headsets.
Contact centre agents will be interacting with a new generation of customers. Their location or the device they are using to make contact will not necessarily be known. These customers will be adept at communicating using social media, Instant Messaging (IM), blogs and other collaborative communications tools that haven't even been invented yet. In the last six months 5 billion tweets were sent by people using twitter. As this trend for one to many communication continues contact centres will need to invest in the latest technology to monitor and manage customer communication.
In the first instance, encouraging some element of self-service (usually online) will
be key to cutting the drain on contact centre resources. The good news is that more people prefer to contact organisations online or by email today and this is likely to increase in the future since up to 30 percent of all calls are either simple queries or progress chasing.
But contact centres should also prepare for full on multi-contact engagement and integrate their management software with social media and IM platforms. They should prepare for an integrated environment that would enable them to use two or more channels simultaneously when interacting with a customer.
And regardless the method the customer uses to interact, it will also be important to ensure that users have option of accessing them all from any mobile device. Recent
focus groups conducted with teenagers about their communication habits revealed that mobile phones are the primary communication device. They use them to contact their friends via SMS, to access social media applications and also to make voice calls, which they still, surprisingly, favour over SMS, social media and online forms of interaction. All access points into the contact centre need to consider mobile devices. The web site should be accessible from a multitude of mobile devices and the contact centre agent needs to consider that response and request differences if people are not stationary.
Contact centres will not be confined to reacting to inbound customer calls/contact either. They will be proactively monitoring consumer discussion on social networking and microblogging sites. Today 15 percent of consumers are posting comments on negative customer experience on social networking sites and of this group 14 percent had done this without trying any other way to complain. They expect the company to see their response and respond. With few companies listening to consumer discussion online it’s hardly surprising that less than a quarter of online complainers received a response from the company. This will change as companies recognise that they need to respond to a customer-driven service world.
Making a call centre perform well is often challenging but making a multi-channel contact centre perform well can be extremely difficult. Ultimately, a cultural transformation is required, where customer service teams are driven and motivated to achieve or exceed performance targets and to ensure that irrespective of the communication channel customers get a consistent quality of service. They also need to measure performance and response times across all contact channels, not just call performance alone.
We may see more agents working remotely, not confined by the need to be in a central office facility. Customer service levels should improve as customers are able to interact with organisations 24 x 7 for simple queries, payments and chasing up orders.
In this new multi-contact environment, contact centres will need to plan for less calls,
fax and post received, but also skill up for a more 'on-demand' and interactive contact, perhaps over a longer time period.
Author:
James Tanner, Communications Department Ltd. ©
Tel: +44 (0)20 8127 8302. Email: jtanner@communications-department.co.uk,
Web: www.communications-department.co.uk
James Tanner is the Managing Director of Communications Department Ltd, a telecom & contact centre consultancy based in the UK. Communications Department helps organisations maximise the efficiency of call handling teams across Europe to become leaders in their industry. For more information on improving call centre performance call 020 8127 8302 or email jtanner@communications-department.co.uk
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