Tag Archives: multichannel

Amid Messaging Channel Jungle, SMS Stands Alone

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Amid Messaging Channel Jungles SMS Stands Alone

Text-based communication plays a growing role in customer service. There are several big questions around how it will evolve. The most important one, in my mind, is how text should work alongside voice. What is the ideal arrangement between typing and talking?

The second big question is: What channel will carry the messages? We have four broad categories: Web-based chat, SMS, social media (e.g. Twitter DMs), and proprietary networks (e.g. Facebook Messenger, Apple Chat). I know that other people divide things differently, but this structure makes sense to me. On that second question, there’s been quite a bit of news in recent months. Let’s go through it.

 

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How Social Media is Affecting Brand Perception in the Contact Center

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How Social Media is Affecting Brand Perception in the Contact CenterThe traditional call center is used a central hub for consumers to call agents regarding support issues or service questions. In this case, brand perception would typically be altered by the level of support they received, how quickly their answers were resolved and how long they waited on hold.

Although the caller experience via phone support is still effecting brand perception today, other mediums are also coming in to play. Social media presents both a challenge and an opportunity for contact centers. The challenge: monitoring, maintaining and providing a consistent support experience through social platforms. The opportunity: surpassing customer expectations and creating evangelist of your brand.

However, not all brands are utilizing social media and as a result  56% of customer tweets to companies are being ignored. The stats also show that in 2010, 19% of consumers were sharing unsatisfactory experiences via social channels, a 50% increase over 2009. Investigating this further and using data from onholdwith.com, we can see that many of these tweets are from people waiting on hold.

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Client Spotlight: 1st United Services Credit Union Improves the Customer Experience

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1st United Services Credit Union logoIn October 2012, 1st United Services Credit Union started using Fonolo. By adding Fonolo to its website, 1st USCU empowered their members to connect to call center agents with just one click – no phone menus and no waiting on hold. Fonolo’s visual interface simplifies reaching 1st USCU for callers while its secure, cloud-based services make the process seamless for call center agents.

After a few months of getting acquainted with the Fonolo web widget, Mark shares with us some insight to the process, deployment and the reaction from his members.

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How a Call Center Can Eliminate Hold Time

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How Can a Call Center Eliminate Hold Time

The best way for a call center to stand out as a leader is through the customer experience. It’s no surprise that an exceptional experience leads to more satisfied consumers, who will continue to spend money. Most callers will start to rate their level of satisfaction at the beginning of the interaction, regardless of the channel – phone, web or mobile app.

Multi-channel customer service isn’t just about having multiple support options; it’s about delivering exceptional service on a channel that YOUR customers find most convenient.

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These 7 Charts Show Why Customer Service Needs to Get Smart about the Smartphone

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With the end of the year approaching, the predictions are rolling out! Last week, we were treated to two massive slide decks from respected analysts, Mary Meeker and Henry Blodget. Meeker of Kleiner Perkins released the Internet Trends Year End Update report and Blodget of Business Insider released The Future of Digital. With 250 slides combined, these decks covered every angle of the digital and internet economy, but one area that stood out from both was the momentum of the smartphone revolution.

This past year we also saw powerful studies on the direction of the call center (e.g. the American Express Customer Service study which I wrote about here). When you combine that data with the data from Meeker and Blodget, the picture is clearer than ever: The smartphone is the biggest thing to happen to the call center since the dial tone.

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3 Charts That Show the Voice Channel is Still King

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Given the “multi-channel” future of customer service, you might think that the voice channel is losing its prominence. After all, if consumers are using email, chat, Twitter and Facebook, they must be less interested in calling, right?

Wrong.

Although the new channels have a big impact, the phone call is still the most important channel when it comes to customer satisfaction. The following 3 charts each look at this issue from a different perspective.

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The multi-channel challenge

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Multi-channel call centers are getting more and more common.

Today’s customer wants to reach you through multiple channels: phone, web, email are the minimum. Mobile applications are becoming a “must-have” in some segments (airlines, banks). Twitter, Facebook and some form of real-time chat are gaining popularity. If your job is running a call center, things are not going to get any easier. (See “Getting Multichannel right is hard”.)

The hand-off challenge

A key challenge is transferring people between channels at the right moments to make the most of each channel’s ability. Online self-serve interactions are by far the lowest cost to your company, but you certainly don’t want to lose a sale by locking someone into that channel or not providing an alternative when there is a hiccup. The “hiccup scenario” is one of the major drivers of click-to-call and click-to-chat implementations. For example, they allow you to rescue purchases from becoming abandoned shopping carts. But only if the implementation is done right.

Fonolo’s approach to providing a mobile- and web-friendly interface for your call center is the easiest and most flexible way to achieve that smooth hand-off. We can handle hand-off between email and calls, and even between live chat and calls. (Contact me if you want to learn more.)

Live agent chat and its escalation-to-voice problem

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As the multi-channel call center gets more and more common, implementations of click-to-chat get more common. Like click-to-call, the goal with chat is that you can raise the conversion rate of browsers into buyers and/or lower the abandonment rate.

Hand-off problems

Advantages over click-to-call is that (in theory at least) an agent can handle multiple chat conversations at the same time, thus making a chat cheaper than a phone call. The problem with the theory is that chat session often have to escalate to a phone call, either by user choice or because of policy reasons. This is a recurring challenge for multi-channel client care – hand-off between channels. For more, see the post “The Multi-channel challenge”.

Let’s talk

If your company has installed click-to-chat or is planning to, we’d love to talk to you about how you’re addressing this challenge. It’s possible that, without a smooth hand-off from chat to voice, the gains may all be wiped out. We have been working on a solution (still in beta) to this problem at Fonolo and we’d love to talk to you about it.

 

Online retail is embracing the smartphone

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A smart phone app has become a must-have in the financial world. (See our whitepaper “Fonolo for the financial industry”). Other industry segments are following closely. A recently study shows that online retail is the next segment to get the bug.

An accelerating trend

The study, released June 29th 2010 by Forrester Research and Shop.org, states that nearly three-quarters of online retailers either already have or are developing a mobile strategy. The average investment is $170,000 but large retailers are spending several times that.

We at Fonolo think this trend is going to accelerate dramatically in 2011, driven mainly by the proliferation of smartphone and tablets. (IDC predicts those two product categories will outsell traditional computers in the next 18 months.)

But something is missing from the feature list

Of those online retailers with mobile strategies, the most popular features are those that support the cross-channel experience. For example, product info, store info and coupons help support the in-store experience.

But we think the providing store info and coupons is just the beginning of making a mobile app part of the cross-channel experience. What do phones do? They make calls! So the most obvious channel hand-off to focus on is mobile app to call center!

New live demos of mobile Fonolo

By adding the Fonolo component to the mobile app, consumers can connect directly with the call center in a smart and cost-effective way. Best of all, no changes to the call center are required.

We just put up some live demos that show what Fonolo on a smart phone looks like. Check them out here.

If your company has a mobile app or is developing one, contact us to find out more!

Fonolo iPhone widget

Getting multi-channel right is tough, but it pays off

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One of the big trends in the world of the call center / contact center, is the growing complexity of the communication channels that have to be managed. Web, voice and email have been joined by chat, Twitter, Facebook and more.

The upside

The good news is that multi-channel customers bring more profit. At least according to Elaine Cascio, VP of consulting firm at Vanguard Communications. She writes on TMC: “The challenge is that providing a great customer experience is getting harder and harder. We’re faced with more and more channels for customer contact and have less and less control over the experience. Study after study shows that multichannel customers are considerably more profitable than single channel customers. So not only is a customer experience strategy good for building customer loyalty, it’s good for your bottom line.” Read the full entry here.

The downside

Cascio doesn’t provide any hard evidence to back up this claim, but we hope that future studies will provide confirmation. What we do know is that the cost of getting the strategy wrong is growing.

The AmEx study from July 2010 illustrates why. After asking a random sample of 1000 people (18 or older), they found that:

  • 81% have decided never to do business with a company again because of poor customer service in the past.
  • 50% reported it takes only two poor service experiences before they stop doing business with a company.

We wrote about that study here.