Top 8 benefits of contact centers:
Customers want it all – they want personalized attention from a customer service executive, as well as the convenience of anytime access to information at their fingertips. Customer demands are always unquenched and it is up to the companies to open all channels of communication with the customers to understand their demands, learn what motivates them, and be actively present wherever the customer needs them. This requires unified multi-channel efforts from customer service centers.
If we study a multi-channel contact center vs traditional contact center, we see that in a traditional contact center, voice or email support used to be the only options; but today customers are expecting more from the same organization and hence businesses are leveraging multi-channel contact centers that offer support through voice, email, live-chat, video-chat, social media, mobile apps, SMS, self-help solutions, and so on. In this article, we will discuss some of the advantages of multi-channel contact centers.
The Case of Multi-channel Contact Centers
According to a recent study, customers clearly understand the utility of different channels and have set expectations for the support using those channels. For instance, 66% customers want immediate resolution when they contact via phone, while they expect an email to be responded to within 12 hours, or a social media statement to be responded to within 2 hours. Although telephone is still the channel of choice, its popularity is slowly declining as customers are warming-up to various other means of customer service as well as self-service. Perhaps, the most important finding of this study is that “89% of respondents agree that brands need to offer a consistent customer service experience across all channels in order to retain customers.”
As more and more companies are moving towards multi-channel contact centers for their businesses, it is important to understand why they are doing so. Some of the key benefits of using multi-channel customer service centers are listed here:
1 Multiple Channels but a Single View of the Customer
Perhaps one of the most important multi-channel call center business benefits is that although your company is offering support across channels, you stream-in all the information to a single place. So, when your customer jumps from, let’s say, self-help FAQs, to social media sites, to live-chat on your site, and then to voice support, you would still have a single record of that customer and know the process that the customer went through. All the information would be accessible to the support agent at any channel and the customer would get the best support at each touch-point. This single view of the customer makes support more efficient and provides better customer analytics results by understanding customer preferences and behavior in an in-depth manner.
2 Enhanced Brand Image
Contact centers are not just for answering inbound calls made by the customers anymore. In order to truly create a brand image of a customer-friendly organization that is genuinely interested in what the customers have to say, is available on all the channels frequently accessed by your customers, is a necessity. Proactively answering customer comments at all the touch-points, and being aware of the changes in customer sentiment, can go a long way in creating a brand image that you would like for your business.
3 Superior Customer Engagement
According to a recent study, “Weak mobile customer service is harming customer engagement. No rallying principle in the enterprise matters more than the creation of superior customer engagement and IT leaders will need to innovate in engaging customers on all channels.” Effective customer engagement is the number one priority of all the organizations. Opening up all the channels of communication with your customers and proactively being a part of the dialogue is the first step towards customer engagement, customer satisfaction, and loyalty. This can be done only through a multi-channel customer care contact center.
