The Call Center Is not Good Enough Anymore!

Is your organization telling your customers how they are to interact with your company? Seems backwards doesn't it? So many organizations make customers go through long drawn out IVRs, have no mobile strategy, Facebook pages with only company updates (thinking that's a social media strategy). Worse of all though are organizations that hide their phone number on their website to try to force non-voice options because it's cheaper (so they think)! I don't understand this; your customers should be telling you how they want to interact with your company. We should want to talk to our customers if they want to talk to us, why are we pushing them away or funneling them to one or two channels when that is not what they want?

Now is the time for the Interaction Center. BPO's need to move to this model and in-house customer service centers need to start to embrace it. What is an interaction center? It's the contact centers big brother. It is the seamless joining of all the new marketing channels with your contact center. I believe this should consist of three main channels and some sub channels.

1. Contact Center- This includes your inbound and outbound along with email and chat. New technologies such as WebRTC (real time communication)/cobrowsing are now needed to be embraced. World class customer service still starts here but is rapidly changing. This is still the foundation but is not and cannot be the end all be all to your customer service strategy.


2. Social Media- Social media is so misused by organizations right now. They use it as "shout" media only to tell customers about new things going on with the company (waste). Social media is such a powerful tool when it comes to customer service and so few organizations embrace this. The ability to engage customers on many different formats, push company initiatives and maybe most importantly fix issues with disgruntled customers before they spread is so powerful. With consumers moving to more mobile strategies through tablets and smart phones, I believe that the social media aspect to customer interactions will be growing exponentially in the coming years. Having a full social media strategy that is integrated with your contact center will be a very powerful tool and a must have. There is a reason the company blog is the new whitepaper, people are moving this way.


3. Self-Service. Websites and IVRs are currently the main standby for self-service interactions, mobile APPS though are slowly making the IVR the channel of the past. I believe that getting information from an IVR will go the way of the dinosaur in the next 5-7 years. A properly designed mobile app strategy will be the new way most customers will be moving to interact. Tablets and Smart phones are growing in use. This technology needs to be embraced.

How powerful would it be if your organization has a marketing interaction center that with the help of the mastery of the three channels above you could:

1. Have a world class contact center that handles all out customer's voice needs. You have the ability to handle all voice, email, chat interaction along with being able to jump on your customer's browser to help with any site issues.


2. Have an integrated group that handles all your social media interactions. This means not only using tools like Facebook, Twitter and blog writing to engage customers but to also be proactive in viewing customers reviews and issues. You are able to stop issues before they start and show customers you are proactive in caring about them!


3. The last step would then be to create apps that allow your customers to get information on their phones and tablets for true mobile self-service. If they have any issues though you still have your integrated contact center to pick up the slack.

I believe that the contact center is now not the end all be all to customer interactions but a powerful tool that used with emerging technologies and interaction channels creates what will be the new measure of customer service... A World Class Interaction Center.

For more on this visit our YouTube video on this topic at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNa_LEMnMTs

Visit us at http://www.expivia.net or contact us at tlaird@expivia.net.
We are the future of customer interactions. This is Expivia.