So far, most organisations have addressed the issue of telephony interaction with their customers and many have installed sophisticated ACD and IVR platforms to support their contact centre operations. With the correct investment, it is relatively straightforward to provide high levels of service to the telephony channel.Interestingly, many companies fail to service non-voice channels especially email, despite numerous independent studies highlighting that most organisations respond to email or other electronic text based channels several days late or not at all. For example, on-line shoppers' most frequent complaint about customer services is that their emails are often not answered at all!
Yet of all the non-voice contact options, e-mail is the leading form of internet usage, way ahead of web surfing and shopping, and it should be obvious that to succeed in the new economy created by the internet world, it is imperative to streamline processes to control, route and manage email efficiently - even if you don't run a full-scale e-commerce operation.
But why is email becoming as prolific as a way of conducting business? It will be clear to us all, that despite the technology availability, many organisations have failed to deliver even the quality of the telephony service which is acceptable to the consumer. Increasingly, consumers will not wait in a long telephony queue, accept being bounced from agent to agent or be asked to utilise a poorly designed IVR.
Customers have choice and it is the valuable ones who happen to be the most savvy. This group of consumers tend to use technology and they exercise their freedom of choice. As a mobile group, they represent an increasing number of high value customers who are often constrained by time pressures and availability; and who wish to transact their lives through their mobile world (like the new generation mobile phones, mobile enabled PDA's, GPRS enabled laptops, SMS or email). These low cost devices and the ease of connection to the remote world are transforming the contact centre service paradigm by enabling consumers to act immediately and throughout their working day.
The behaviour of this valuable group of customers is driven by their personal time and the ease by which they can invoke a transaction. These people wish to act smartly and easily in their time. They do not wish to be dictated to by the open hours of a contact centre or their ability to reach that elusive agent. Instead they wish to issue direct instructions (for which they now have a record) and enjoy the new world which allows 24x7x365 contact with their favourite suppliers. This world is agnostic to contact channel and time but highly sensitive to quality and service.
These buyers seek organisations that can react swiftly and action first time and these high value customers lead the charge towards responsive customer orientated service organisations. For today's valuable customer, read tomorrow's majority.
For those organisations that rise to this daunting challenge, competitive advantages can be gained and significant incremental business performance achieved. But if many organisations can not meet the new world expectations for telephony service let alone the newer communication styles, why bother? Because, it is that this group of consumers who are spending and when serviced well represent high quality, loyal consumers.
So the obvious question is why organisations have failed to rise to this challenge? Some organisations have continued to focus on ensuring they deliver a quality telephony service and have deliberately ignored this brave new world. However, others have tried to embrace the channel and have usually failed.
Many who have attempted to deliver an email service have often adopted one of two techniques: deflect the email consumer to their telephony or web service or encourage the consumer to help themselves ("self service") either by delivering an interactive web site solution or by providing systems that handle frequently asked questions. Both approaches have failed to meet the consumer's expectations. Consumers wish to issue a "fire and forget" instruction which they expect to be handled quickly and effectively. The consumer resists being forced to delve into website systems and action their own requests (this is the same issue as waiting in a telephony queue or being bounced around an IVR system). The reason for the contact in the first place is to seek action by the organisation itself!
So with expectations of a rapid, first time resolution with quality complementary added value services many valued customers abandon traditional organisations and migrate to organisation who can deliver these world class services.