Challenges of a Contact Center handling multi-channel customer interactions

1. Challenges of a Contact Center handling multi-channel customer interactions

2. Introduction There was a time when firms knew their customers by their first names and handling customer interactions was as routine as checking inventory. There was one-to-one customer service and that was the only known way of interacting with a customer. Today, the situation has evolved with the emergence of multiple channels of interaction. While multiple channels might seem great for delivering powerful customer experiences, they also pose certain challenges for a contact center.

3. 01 Omnichannel Efficiency Contrary to what one might think, using a multi-channel approach does not guarantee success with customer interactions. Many companies invest in setting up an omnichannel contact center but the ability to use these channels for consistent and superior customer service is what drives ultimate success. In fact, it is predicted that by 2020 customer experience will surpass price and product as key brand differentiator. Since a contact center is the hub of major customer interactions as well as transactions, having visibility over multiple channels can put your contact center at the receiving end of customer grievance. While this can be a wonderful opportunity to deliver optimized service, it also poses a challenge of aggregating customer information from all channels.

4. 02 Infrastructure Infrastructure is another major challenge that contact centers face while implementing a multichannel strategy for customer interaction. There are many contact centers that have incongruous channels. For instance, Voice, Email and Chat are a few examples that fail to work in tandem as companies struggle to manage multiple channels. Outdated products and programs do not completely work in sync which adds to the confusion. Central contact solutions like IVR address specific customer queries but fail to support interactions that require detailed analysis. Moreover, the problem of disconnected customer information uploads across channels like voice, chats and email makes it difficult to address customer issues efficiently.

5. 03 Data Integration We often see that companies encourage customers to reach out and resolve certain queries by themselves via IVR and web chat. But the growing numbers of channels handling customer interactions bring out the main challenge of integrating and collating data from all interactions at one place. While voice is the main channel for a contact center, others like email, social media and even text messages makes the role of data management complex. Apart from using better technology and tools to manage the growing volume of customer interaction data, contact centers need to recruit the right people to manage the channels and organizing the information relayed from all of them. In fact, over 85% of senior marketers concur that it is critical to create a cohesive customer journey through all touchpoints.

6. 04 Getting Customer Feedback Without a proper customer feedback mechanism, one can never assess customer behavior and preferences. Necessary insights are required to understand why customers maybe dissatisfied. Taking cues from information collected throughout multi channel interactions can be a challenging task. Moreover, gathering quality metrics and quality evaluations is important and so is the unification of customer information across channels – calls, emails, social media, chats etc.

7. Conclusion The modern contact center faces the challenge of not just communication channels that are used by customers but also multiple channels that record customer information yet are not connected to one another. A sporadic process like this makes it clunky for contact center agents who are facing the dilemma of resolving a customer query with patchy information. Hence, it is important to integrate your contact center with rest of the business so that all communication channels can be integrated into one and it becomes easy to manage and speed up the call resolution process. All these challenges can be met by the modern contact center by investing in a Call Center Software which can collate all features in one. InterDialog Unified Contact Center Suite, distinctively design to adhere to the necessity of customizations & integrations. InterDialog has the proficiency of catering voice along with the other channel like email, chat or social media e.g. Facebook, twitter. Visit our page to know more: InterDialog UCCS by Teckinfo Solutions Pvt Ltd

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