Balancing customer choice, customer service and cost

The contact centre’s purpose has changed from transactional activity to one where your customers can contact you for a wide range of reasons and through a variety of communication channels – you can talk to your clients on the phone, by email, text message, chat, social media... the list goes on.

Your customers are demanding choice but your contact centre needs to balance meeting their wishes, satisfying service needs and optimising costs.

Let’s take an example: your customer sends you an enquiry by email; how do you respond? If you focus on the channel then it would seem obvious to reply by email. Whilst this may be an effective response channel for a simple enquiry, when you are dealing with customer- and case-specific enquiries an email response may open the door to a time-expensive series of emails. Answering email with email is costly [typing takes longer than talking] and email is a poor medium when you measure your operation’s first contact resolution and customer satisfaction.

Text based conversations with your customers pose other problems: If your client tweets about your business how do you respond professionally and effectively in 140 characters in a public environment? How do you verify the identity of a web chat caller? How do you link text messages to clients in your Customer Relationship Management System?

The answer is often to shift the channel back to the telephone. If your client writes to you with a complex question then the most effective customer service response is to pick up the phone and talk Responding quickly is important as today’s smart-phone users have email in their pockets and expect fast responses – otherwise they will use their phone to call you and compound your service level challenges.

Why all multichannel contact centres need a dialler

Even in call centres that regard themselves as primarily inbound, 40% of all contacts are actually outbound - such as when returning calls and responding to emails. Is your operation equipped to handle these contacts? A sure sign that it isn’t is if vital customer service promises, such as the agreement to call back, aren’t kept or are taking too long to be done or customers are calling you to follow up their recent email.

Phone first! You need to talk to your customers

It’s more efficient to call than to employ any other method of communication. Phone calls are certainly the most effective way to deal with complaints.
Did you know?

• Answering an email takes at least three times as long as calling someone. The contact resolution rate – such as satisfying a complaint - is much lower with written communications than with telephone conversations. Think about it next time you email – will this email get to the heart of the matter as quickly as talking to the person?
• Text ‘conversations’ take 3x as long as a phone call and ‘first-contact’ resolution rates can be poor. Remember too that the written word does not have the same nuances as speech and can be misinterpreted – dangerous if you’re dealing with customer issues!
• Web chat takes 5x as long as ringing!

We’re not saying abandon all other media! There are times when a text message or email might meet the customer’s need more satisfactorily - customers may like to receive a text message to confirm a completed activity, for example, or to establish a delivery time, or be notified early of a debt – or to announce a special offer that might be particularly suitable for them. Social media is also important in the right business sectors, particularly for dealing with customer service issues but don’t neglect speaking to your contacts if you want to keep them!

How a dialler helps manage multichannel contact

Diallers in contact centres used to be about mass contact – for example using a predictive dialler to support debt collection.
Today’s precision dialling technology means that request for contact such as emails, tweets and chats can be fed into the dialler to deliver a fast, personal response to customers whilst managing and monitoring your most important resource – your agents.

rostrvm OutBound lets you blend SMS (text message, web, social and email contact with your OutBound dialling campaigns. SMS and email blending is deployed as an integral component of rostrvm OutBound’s workflow, driven by call outcomes.

Rostrvm Solutions

Read the full white paper below