Underutilized Multichannel Capabilities In Contact Centers
‘Multichannel’ in contact centers refers to the different communication medium used by the companies to reach out to their customer and providing customers with multiple options to interact with the companies.
The list of channels that commonly feature in a multichannel scenario are mail, voice, email, IM/chat, fax, web self service, survey etc. The voice channel is still currently the most widely used channel which includes land lines, cell phones and interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Although most contact centers have email and a few have chat channel, a few advanced centers also have co-browsing, page-push and VOIP functionalities yet majority of inbound calls are handled by full time agents despite having IVR and voice self service channels. This clearly indicates that in spite of having multiple channels and advanced technology, today’s contact centers limit their focus mostly to the voice and email channels.
There are many newer channels like SMS, desktop sharing (collaboration in chat), community bulletin board, social media and video that are getting added to the existing list of channels. So, are we ready for these channels considering that the industry is still stuck with traditional channels as voice and email?
Consider the self service channels like IIVR (Intelligent IVR), web integration, speech self service etc. In spite of companies knowing that if they don’t invest in self service channels, their operational cost will be on the higher side, yet they are not considering moving towards these channels.
In my opinion, organizations are not considering a higher utilization of the multichannel options in contact centers because:
• Adding new channels increases the level of complexity.
• It requires many latest technologies to be implemented, such as Universal queuing and other
multi-channel applications (WFM, reporting etc.).
On the other hand, multichannel can be worth considering for the following reasons:
• Improves customer satisfaction and retention by giving customer more options to use channel
as per their convenience.
• Simplifies the job of an agent in serving the customer with a single application supporting
multiple channels instead of using separate applications for different channels. This increases
agent productivity, utilization and retention.
So, in my opinion, utilizing or adopting multiple channels apart from traditional voice and email in the contact center can increase business revenues and reduce operation costs. Still, I see many companies are not ready to implement multichannel capabilities. It seems to me that technology is advancing much faster than its adoption in this sphere.
What are your thoughts on this?
