Follow Us:
Listening to customers is becoming increasingly complex. Customer Service teams are scrambling to work together with IT departments to implement omni-channel communication strategies that connect employees to customers.
A few weeks ago I was a keynote at a call center business event. During the course of a single day I interacted with co-workers, clients and prospects through at least 8 digital channels including:
The example above, and image below, doesn't do the challenges faced by customer care teams full justice. Channels like Social, IoT (the Internet of Things) and Mobile actually represent an almost limitless number emerging social channels, internet connected devices, and mobile apps.
How important is omni-channel customer care? Let's ask customers what they think. The nearby infographic is based on studies by Zendesk and North American Technographics. Not only do customers want the companies that they do business with to engage with them across channels, they want data to be shared across those channels so that they don't have to repeat themselves.
The challenge is bigger than just transforming to omni-channel - it's actually rethinking the role of the Customer Service department in delivering a great customer experience.
Take a retailer for example. Is centralized customer service limited to answering customer inquiries and complaints? Or does it expand into the experience the customer has when they visit the point-of-sale?
Keeping up with these new channels and strategies creates organizational challenges. Simply adding new applications to handle these channels isn't enough (recent research by C5 Insight shows that there is a 14.5% drop in employee satisfaction when going from using 2 to 3 apps to get your job done - most customer service personnel already use more than 6 apps in their daily work already).
An omni-channel strategy means deeper customer engagement in more places, but employee engagement in fewer. How do organizations tackle this seeming paradox?
Want a handy 1-page infographic overview of this article along with sources? Click here to download the infographic.
The complementary paper includes over 12 years of research, recent survey results, and CRM turnaround success stories.
Request Download
This 60-second assessment is designed to evaluate your organization's collaboration readiness.
Learn how you rank compared to organizations typically in years 1 to 5 of implementation - and which areas to focus on to improve.
This is a sandbox solution which can be activated per site collection to allow you to easily collect feedback from users into a custom Feedback list.
Whether you are upgrading to SharePoint Online, 2010, 2013 or the latest 2016, this checklist contains everything you need to know for a successful transition.