Philip is a customer services director who is determined to make sure that he represents the customer’s point of view. Philip feels he knows what is going on. Through his three grown up children and his wife who holds a senior management position with another company, he is very aware of consumer and IT issues. In fact, his wife is a constant source of ideas gained from her retailing expertise.

Philip sees his role as ensuring all customers are delighted with the service they receive irrespective of how or when they have made contact. Philip spends much of his time analysing the root cause of customer issues and ensuring the business prioritises the delivery of solutions which provide immediate improvements.

To raise awareness of customer challenges, Philip recently persuaded the CEO to give away £50 to all employees to spend through the Company’s online shopping site. Even the directors took part. The results and feedback were revealing.

At the moment, Philip sees his top priority is to extend the range of communication channels available to customers because he recognises the different preferences of Jenny, Mike, Barry, Anne, Gary and others. Through the family, Philip understands these preferences better than most and he constantly seeks customer feedback – good and bad – to provide inspiration for further improvement.

Enabling ways to interact with customers is not Philip’s holly grail. He does not simply want disparate communication channels; Philip wants to make sure his business is cohesive so that no matter how or when a customer contacts them, they receive the same personalised service irrespective of whether by day or night; phone or web.

Philip is keen to innovate to keep pace with his customers expectations. However, he faces significant challenges as the business has traditionally focused only around the phone. It is only recently that has his CEO fully accepted the emergence of the brave new world of the web, web chat, online collaboration, text (SMS) and the host of other developing communication platforms in today’s 24×7 society. Philip is determined to make the changes as he knows only too well that the business would not be able to cope if all customers choose to call at once. As his wife constantly preaches, the operational dexterity that comes with multi-channel communication is a prize worth pursuing.

One of the emerging challenges in the business is information reporting across these channels. Whilst it was always a simple matter for Colin (in IT) to report on telephone calls, the new world of multi channel communication seems to be a whole new ball game. Especially as the business starts to recognise that new KPI’s may be needed to reflect consumer behaviour. With Angela (his contact centre manger), Philip is looking at new ways of viewing his customers (Philip no longer simply wants to close all the calls quickly) and this new view on life in the contact centre requires interesting changes to systems and reporting.

How numero can help Philip

The key to supporting Philip is to enable multi-channel communication with his customers along with a single view of the customer and their behaviour. This needs to be achieved without creating significant operational workloads or delays.  Once in place, Philip needs the ability to keep pace with his customers through constant and instant access to information.

Some of the ways numero solutions help Philip include:

• Helping introduce new ways the customer can communicate effectively with the business like web chat, web self service, web collaboration and text (SMS)
• Introduce new customer services like customer feedback, text and reserve , proactive communications, in-store queue busting or dynamic messaging to keep customers fully abreast of the status of their transactions
• Provide a single view of the customers irrespective of which channel or channels the consumer has used
• Linking a customer’s transactions together into a “case” so that the contact centre agent has an instant view of customer across all channels and transactions
• Highlight customer behaviour trends across the different channels in real time
• Support dynamic exception based messages to customers: be they sales, marketing or service related
• Deliver a single agent desktop to allow the agent to focus on the customer and their service call (rather than retrieving the data to complete the call).