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Customers communicate with companies in a variety of ways. So today, it is critical to have a cross-channel unified contact center that can deliver competitively superior service at a dramatically reduced cost.

Companies need to manage each of their communications channels as effectively as possible. That’s because customers are bouncing between phone, email, and the Web with greater fluidity than ever. They send you emails about problems that they’ve already discussed with you by phone. They visit your Web site to double-check information they got from you on the phone. So your company has to be able to communicate across all channels in a common manner.

To be effective, a cross-channel contact center must possess two vital capabilities: common incident tracking, reporting, and histories across all channels; and use of a common knowledge base across all channels.

The business impact of this unified approach is substantial. Unified contact centers deliver competitively superior service at dramatically reduced cost. That’s because each channel becomes more efficient and, over time, more customer interactions are driven to the least expensive and most scalable channel: the Web.

Multichannel contact centers also provide companies with clearer insights into their customers’ top concerns. These insights are enormously helpful for improving customer care, driving the development of successful products and services, and formulating high-impact marketing strategies.

Fragmented communications, on the other hand, create problems. Service reps get blindsided by calls from frustrated customers. They repeatedly answer redundant questions. They can’t easily add new knowledge items to the Web site. Worst of all, companies with “stovepipe” call centers, email, and Web self-service communications channels can’t adequately understand or address customers’ top service issues.

Fortunately, it’s not difficult to make the transition from call center to contact center. Many companies have already done so and are now enjoying the benefits. Their success offers tangible proof that multichannel contact centers deliver superior service at a substantially lower cost per interaction.

Why Stovepipe Communication Channels Are Bad for Business

Unfortunately, at most companies, these communications channels are separate stovepipes. The phone channel is managed by a call center platform. The email channel is managed with an email management system. The Web channel is managed with a content management system. Chat, if provided at all, is managed by a chat system.

Any interaction with a customer on one channel is therefore completely divorced from any other interaction with that same customer on any other channel. When customer service representatives (CSRs) are on the phone with a customer, they have no idea what that customer’s emails looked like. The information that a customer gets in an email may not exactly match the information on the company’s Web site. Each channel is isolated from the others - to the detriment of both the company and its customers.

Here are some specific problems that companies and their customers experience every day because of stovepipe communications channels:

Didn’t You See My Email?

A customer with a problem takes the time to carefully describe a problem in an email message. The next day the customer gets a helpful reply. The customer at this point is happy.

But the customer has one little follow-up question and now decides to pick up the phone to get a quick answer. Here’s where things take a turn for the worse. The CSR taking the call can’t see the original email exchange. So instead of just asking a follow-up question, the customer has to explain the situation all over again. In some cases, the information the customer gets from the CSR on the phone may contradict what was contained in the original email reply.

• Customer impact: Annoyed. Quickly goes from having a high opinion about the company to a lower one.
• Company impact: CSR spends 15 minutes on a call that should have taken only three.

That’s Not What It Said on Your Web Site!

In another scenario, the customer’s first attempt to resolve a problem takes place on the company Web site. The customer finds some apparently relevant content, but it either doesn’t work or is unclear to the customer. So the customer calls the company for clarification.

The CSR, it turns out, has more up-to-date and accurate information than the Web site, and so is able to help the customer effectively. The call just takes a little longer because the customer has already absorbed the older, less helpful information from the site. The customer probably expresses this confusion during the call.

• Customer impact: Some confusion and aggravation. Will never fully trust the accuracy of any company Web site content again.
• Company impact: Will always have to service the customer via costly phone calls rather than the substantially less expensive Web channel.

The Endless Repetitive Phone Call

Companies with conventional stovepipe call centers have great difficulty developing effective self-service content for their Web sites. When call center representatives encounter a new support issue, they have no fast and easy way to capture that issue and publish it as a knowledge item on the Web. So instead of answering questions only once on the phone and then having them answered automatically in the future with relevant online knowledge items, stovepipe call centers answer the same questions over and over.

• Customer impact: Often can’t find answers on the Web site. Gets into the habit of picking up the phone and calling every time a question arises, even in cases when the information is, in fact, on the Web site.
• Company impact: Call center inundated with constant repetitive questions that could be answered via the Web. Unnecessarily high call center overhead.

These are just a few examples of how typical stovepipe communication channels adversely impact customer service operations. There are many others. Stovepipe channels also deprive companies of insight into the issues that most concern their customers. It’s difficult if not impossible to get that insight if you can’t look at communications activity across all of your customer service communications channels.

When use of the Internet was minimal, these problems weren’t critical. But the number of customers using the Internet continues to grow, and those customers are using email, the Web, and chat with increasing frequency. Their expectations about what you can do for them via these channels is growing as well. That’s why it’s now so dangerous to allow phone, email, and the Web to remain artificially separated.

From Call Center to Contact Center

So what does a true multichannel contact center look like? Multichannel contact centers look a lot like existing call centers. The point of creating a contact center with unified communication channels is not to disrupt current operations or unnecessarily force companies to re-engineer service processes. CSRs still take phone calls. They reply to emails. They escalate calls and emails as required. They launch chats with customers who visit the company Web site. And Web managers still maintain appropriate controls over site content.

The difference is that in a multichannel contact center, these stovepipe processes are unified with each other to ensure superlative customer service and optimum operational efficiency. This unification takes place on two levels: common incident tracking, reporting, and histories; and common knowledge base authoring and access.

These cross-channel commonalities have proven to be invaluable to both the companies that have implemented them and the customers they serve.

Common Incidents

Most companies do a pretty good job of managing call center incidents using conventional trouble-ticket applications. These applications ensure that customers who call more than once about the same incident are handled correctly. They’re also useful for monitoring open incidents so that customers don’t fall through the cracks.

Email management applications are somewhat less widely deployed. Many companies therefore have no way to track the progress of a customer email through reply and resolution. This lack of accountability tends to result in slow response times and missed commitment.

Even fewer companies use a common system for call center trouble-tickets and email management. This results in problems such as those described in the previous section.

In a multichannel contact center, on the other hand, all phone, email, and chat events are handled by a common system. If customers log in to the self-service area of the company Web site, their online information searches can be tracked in this same system. So, regardless of which touch point a customer uses, every service-related interaction is logged into a single database. The result is one single view of all interactions with a customer in one place regardless of how the customer touched the company.

It sounds so simple and logical that it’s surprising more companies don’t do it. But many companies implemented their call center systems before anyone ever even heard of email ­management software. So those legacy systems have tended to remain in place while email, Web, and chat management were added as separate functions. An effective multichannel incident management system actually integrates events on three distinct levels: incident tracking, incident reporting, and customer ­incident histories.

Common Incident Tracking

In a multichannel contact center, incidents are assigned a common tracking record regardless of how they originate. Each time the customer calls or sends a message about that incident, it is logged into this common record. CSRs therefore have access to all information relating to the incident even if the customer moves between channels.

This ensures that CSRs always have all the information they need to resolve customer issues. It also ensures that a trouble ticket opened in one channel doesn’t remain open after it has been successfully closed via another channel. Customers and CSRs can thus move freely from channel to channel without jeopardizing the integrity of service processes.

Common Incident Reporting

Common service records enable companies to document and analyze activity across all channels. This integrated reporting is essential for a wide range of management decisions. For example, a CSR who is very good at resolving phone calls may be slow with emails. Cross-channel reporting quickly highlights this disparity so that it can be addressed. Or, a report may reveal that customers frequently make phone calls immediately after viewing a specific Web knowledge item. This would indicate a content problem requiring management attention.

By tracking the areas of Web content that customers most commonly visit - and tracking the frequency with which they then either launch an email or leave the site with their question answered - companies have been able to make appropriate adjustments to site content to maximize the percentage of customers who find the answers they need on the Web without any human intervention at all. This significantly reduces costs while providing customers with the information they need on an around-the-clock basis.

Cross-channel reports also provide high-value feedback for customer-driven product development, sales, marketing, and branding strategies. Data generated across all channels is far richer and more useful than any single channel by itself.

Common Customer Incident Histories

Multichannels contact centers give companies an integrated view of every customer’s service history. For example, consider a customer who has always used email to address a chronic set of difficulties over the past two years. One day, that customer picks up the phone to resolve a problem. In a stovepipe call center, the CSR would pop up the customer’s service record and see a blank slate, thus leading the CSR to falsely conclude that this is a satisfied, low-maintenance customer. That erroneous assumption could easily lead to a big problem early in the call.

In a multichannel contact center, on the other hand, the CSR would immediately see a long history of often emotional email messages. With this information, the CSR will do a much better job of handling the present situation appropriately.

Multichannel customer histories are also much more useful for up-selling and cross-selling than the incomplete histories provided by single-channel systems.

Why Every Company Should Transform Its Call Center Into a Multichannel Contact Center

As attractive as the benefits of a multichannel contact center are - and as painless as deployment can be - managers still need compelling reasons to move ahead with such an initiative. After all, there are plenty of needs competing for limited corporate resources. Fortunately, there are at least five compelling reasons why every company should make the transition to a true multichannel contact center today.

1. Significantly Improved Customer Satisfaction
   Multichannel contact centers resolve customers’ problems faster and provide them with consistent answers regardless of which communication channel they use. That makes them happier. This improved customer satisfaction has a direct impact on revenues and profitability. Superior service helps you retain customers, which is more profitable than capturing new ones. Superior service also helps you outsell the competition - especially in markets where there aren’t many other competitive differentiators. Superior customer service also means that your company doesn’t have to compete on price alone. That premium pricing can have a substantial impact on profitability.
2. Substantially Lower Operating Costs
   Multichannel contact centers are far less expensive to run than separate customer service stovepipes. Calls get resolved faster because CSRs have more complete information about each customer and each incident. At the same time, multichannel contact centers drive a larger percentage of customer interactions away from the phone toward less expensive channels. If customers can get prompt, personalized service via email, they’ll have less reason to call. And if you take advantage of the superior knowledge-authoring capabilities of the multichannel contact center, even more customers will find answers to their questions by themselves on the Web, where the cost-per-incident approaches zero.
3. Superior Insight Into Customers’ Wants and Needs
   Companies that implement multichannel customer service know more about their customers than those that don’t. They can track on a weekly or even daily basis what customers are asking about by phone, email, the Web, and chat. They can respond to that information with better products and more effective marketing campaigns. They can also use that information to further improve service quality and reduce costs. If you can immediately notice that your customers are suddenly asking about something they heard about your company in the news media, for example, you can quickly respond with relevant Web content, an email broadcast, or advertisements. The sooner you can pick up on any such trend in customer queries, the better.
4. The Market Requires It
   Even if your business strategy doesn’t necessarily call for customer service that’s competitively superior, unification of your customer service channels is still a must. That’s because multichannel contact centers will soon become the norm in just about every market. According to a recent Forrester Research study, 80 percent of companies have made multichannel contact centers a strategic priority. As more companies create such contact centers, customer expectations will rise. So you’ll need to do it just to keep up. Otherwise, your customers will take their business elsewhere.
5. It’s Very Doable
   Multichannel customer service requires some new thinking about how customer communications are managed and how knowledge bases can be most effectively leveraged. But it doesn’t require a major IT infrastructure overhaul and it doesn’t require exorbitant software licensing fees. That’s because today’s application hosting providers enable you to acquire all the functionality you need for your multichannel contact center via the Internet. Instead of deploying a complex customer service application in your own data center, you can get all the incident management and reporting capabilities you need right on your PCs using nothing more than your Web browser. Your hosting service provider manages all the software and underlying server infrastructure for you. You just customize your screens, reports, and content to meet your individual business requirements.

Giga Information Group recently declared: “It is essential that companies communicate across organizational boundaries to develop a plan for supporting their customers across channels with intelligence information that recognizes individual customers and offers consistent levels of support.” The time to develop that plan is now. And it’s time to implement that plan.