The white paper lays out the empirical evidence and expert industry comment which proves that customers’ communications behaviour have changed radically in the last 10 years but most contact centres have remained resolutely focused on handling voice calls efficiently.
Faraz Khan, managing director, ProtoCall One, summarises the problem: “The fact that most of us now send many more emails in a day than we make phone calls and are more likely to IM (Instant Messenger) or text our friends and business colleagues than pick up the phone to them has not yet been fully absorbed in contact centres. If we pick up the phone to a contact centre we normally get through to an agent within one minute but it still takes most companies more than two weeks to respond to an email. Some of our customers such as Betfair which are making the change share the benefit of their experiences in this document.”
Many contact centres still have no facility at all for handling other communications channels despite the fact that the technology is now there for handling multi-channel communications. Yet communicating with customers in the way which they find most convenient is increasingly being seen as the key to delivering more effective and profitable relationships with customers.
ProtoCall One plans to launch a ‘multi channel usability’ service later this month to help test companies’ websites and contact centre systems for multi-channel usability. This team will also advise firms on how to build front-end operations which offer customers an appropriate range of communications options and then assist them to integrate the resulting data feeds with contact centre solutions to support service level agreements across all channels.