BY Susan Hash, Contact Center Pipeline
There is no question that skilled agents offer the best opportunity to save unhappy customers who are at risk of leaving. But how do you help customers, and retain them, if you never hear from them?
Today’s tech-savvy customers prefer self-service over phone calls, and they’re more likely to seek answers to their questions within the social and digital communities where they spend their time, regardless of whether or not the business has a presence there. While companies have been expanding their service operations to include more digital channels, many are handling only basic transactions and lack the omnichannel capabilities to ensure a seamless experience for customers.
As products and services grow increasingly complex, siloed channels are adding multiple steps into a customer journey that often ends in frustration. In the past, customers demonstrated their dissatisfaction by taking their business elsewhere. Today, the impact is twofold—lost business and potential damage to the brand from the negative buzz on social media.
Care About the Process, Not the Channel
YOEL KNOLL agrees that offering a convenient service option is key. “Users today want to choose the channel in which they do business. They also want to choose the time of day.
We have to give them the ability to stop and continue later and pickup where they stopped.” Knoll is VP of marketing for CallVU, which provides a mobile digital engagement platform that blends rich digital and interactive media with the voice channel.
“Companies are investing millions in e-commerce websites, applications and in digitizing their point of sales, but they’re not tying all of these channels together,” he adds. “If you start the journey on an app and then you call an agent, you want to continue the same journey, but you cannot. You have to start all over again.”
