Every Channel Meets a Different Need

Colin Westlake looks at why customers are choosing different channels for different conversations.

Channel choice loosely depends on how much we care about the conversation and how personal the topic is. Customers tend to use public-facing social networks such as Twitter and Facebook as a method of highlighting bad service or for brief transactional questions of a non-personal nature.

Email is a popular choice for more formal communication where a considered response is required, but if an instant response is needed then it’s not ideal. When the stakes are high and a quick response is needed then phone or perhaps webchat can work well.

At the moment video chat is too personal for most (although it has recently gained good traction in healthcare and finance in the US, and in Asia there have been some interesting pilot schemes in the insurance industry).

This constant switching creates opportunities and challenges

The range of different channels creates opportunities for companies. For example, pushing online FAQ pages and other web-based self-service options can save companies money, as well as enabling customers to get the answers they need more quickly than they otherwise might.

However, the plethora of different channels also creates a big challenge for organisations because customers don’t just stick to one channel. Companies need to think about how to keep track of customer interactions ranging across multiple channels, and how to use the information gained from one channel to inform the way in which another channel operates.

For example, because webchat is normally initiated from within the company website, it is technically fairly simple to capture web session information and pass that to the agent.

Sadly, few chat systems have this capability and instead a less comprehensive approach is taken, where the user is asked to choose a reason for the contact from a drop-down list and this is passed to the agent. The opportunity to use information from one channel to improve the customer’s experience of another is not being used.

Information from web sessions can help route the call to an appropriate team

It’s also possible to carry the context of a web interaction into a phone call with an agent by means of dynamic phone number replacement (something that our own ResponseTrack product enables). This is done in the browser and requires only a few lines of JavaScript to be added to the web page template.

When the customer loads the page, a script runs that fetches a customer services phone number which is unique to the caller and replaces the original phone number in the page. When the call is delivered to the agent, the system looks up the detail of the web session associated with the number being called and passes that information to the agent.

It is also possible to achieve the same effect by generating a unique customer service code on the web page and having the caller either read this out to the agent or enter it on IVR before connection to the agent. In either case, it’s also possible to use information from the web session to route the call to an appropriate team in the call centre.

WebRTC is the next generation of browser-based communication

The next generation of browser-based (and indeed app-based) communication is WebRTC. The system allows high quality peer-to-peer video calls (as seen in Google hangouts and Amazon Mayday), but can also be used purely for speech.

I predict that in the next 12 months we will start to see mainstream brands offering it as an extra contact centre channel in the UK. When used from a merchant’s website it will greatly simplify the transmission of call context to agents, allowing them instant access to the user’s web interaction in the minutes leading up to the call.

It also opens the way for plugin-free co-browsing with annotation and document push so we are likely to see these hitherto exotic services becoming relatively commonplace.

As more people are able to access higher broadband speeds and mobile data charges fall, two of the biggest barriers to video calling will be removed. It will be interesting to see how both consumers and call centre staff react to the new rich media interactions that are just around the corner.

With thanks to Colin Westlake at Syntec

This has been extracted from an article called ‘Managing multi-channel communication in contact centres – challenges and opportunities‘ on Syntec’s website.