Multichannel Report Preview

Technology Is In Place; Channel Management and Support Is Lagging

Phone contacts. IVR contacts. Emails. Chat sessions. Web calls. Web-self service interactions. Faxes. Most of today’s call centers handle at least three or four of these customer contact types, with many centers handling five, six or even all seven. Thus, calling a call center “multichannel” is, in essence, an exercise in redundancy; just as calling a call center a call center — and not a contact center — is an exercise in controversy.

But these are just terms. Terms do not make a multichannel contact center better. What does is learning about key practices, tactics, tools and challenges carried out by and faced by other centers striving for success in the highly competitive and increasingly complex customer contact arena.

Contact centers are perennially asked to do more with less — a significant challenge, especially considering the fact that customer demands and contact options keep expanding. So how are contact centers responding, and how have they improved over the past several years in this regard? That’s just what we at ICMI aimed to uncover when we conducted our third comprehensive study on multichannel contact center management a few months ago. More than 600 contact center professionals working in centers of all sizes and shapes around the globe participated in the study, sharing critical information about how cleanly their centers are clearing the multichannel hurdles that lie in their path.

Following are some of the major findings from the study. More…

Offshoring: Risks and Benefits

Written by Joe Fleischer

Key factors to consider as you make decisions about offshoring. Customer care is a global undertaking. If your customers are located throughout the world, it makes sense, in theory, to tap into labor forces that are also located throughout the world. But given the economic, political and social complexities that site selection entails, a theory isn’t enough to inform decisions about offshoring. In this article, we outline factors to consider as you choose new or additional locations from where you serve customers. One question to ask is whether wages are accurate indicators of labor costs for prospective offshore call center sites.

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Performance Management Tools: Beyond the Baseline

Written by Joe Fleischer

We reveal how the latest software enables you to discover what it takes to exceed your company’s and customers’ service expectations.In the late 1990s and during the start of this decade, many developers of software for call centers described their products as fulfilling broad goals. Chief among them were enabling companies to improve customers’ experiences and relationships with them. These aims sound appealing in theory, but they are difficult for software products to achieve in practice. Why? Customers’ perceptions are difficult to quantify. Compared to evaluating how customers feel about doing business with a call center, it’s far easier for software to gauge a call center’s ability to assist customers as quickly and as inexpensively as possible.

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Mastering Email Management

Email in the call center is not going away; however, your customers might be, depending on how well you manage it.Many companies have become so focused on steering customers to robust and potentially cost-effective self-service channels like interactive Web pages and IVRs equipped with advanced speech recognition, they’ve placed email management on the back-burner. Some have even unplugged the stove. Study after study cites organizations’ poor (or even nonexistent) email response times and quality — and the negative impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty that results.

Companies that are lucky enough not to lose customers due to poor email handling still must contend with the repeat emails and phone calls from these frustrated folks checking on the status of their original query — an issue that can cost the center dearly in terms of both dollars and agent burnout and attrition. More