The term multichannel covers a lot of ground, and is taking on growing significance in the contact center space. Initially, multichannel simply meant using a second mode in addition to voice. Of course, being an open-ended concept, multichannel takes on more meaning today, as contact centers routinely incorporate several modes, and we all know that more are on the way. At face value, this is a good thing, as it provides more ways to engage customers and solve their problems. However, for contact center decision-makers, all these modes add complexity, and with that come new challenges to manage day-to-day operations, as well as leveraging the tools to deliver meaningful benefits for the business.

Let’s start with the basic question as to why contact centers would adopt new modes on top of voice – email, text, chat, and now the burgeoning morass of social media. Of course, more choice is better for the customer, but the core driver is cost savings. Ideally, all contact center inquiries would be answered on the first ring by a live agent who can actually help us. The reality is quite the opposite, and these other modes simply provide lower cost channels to divert as many inquiries as possible from the phone. Telephony has always been expensive, and even in the world of IP, it still costs more than these other channels.

Fair enough, but these channels do not operate in silos. To truly make the most of multichannel tools, the contact center must make them work together, and ultimately provide a better customer experience at a lower cost to the business. This is far harder to do than it looks, and I’ll address some of the challenges here, and continue the analysis in future articles.

The first consideration is the fact that not all customers are equally important to the business. Multichannel is great for handling routine inquiries, especially among low value customers. To ensure that high-touch (telephony-centric) service is provided where it is most needed – namely high value customer and/or complex, time-sensitive issues – the contact center needs adequate business intelligence to prioritize and manage processes. On a high level, this can be addressed with simple database queries that segment customers into pre-defined groups.
 
However, there is not much intelligence here, and to get beyond this, the contact center needs to incorporate performance metrics such as hold time, call length, first call resolution, etc. Today’s advanced analytics and data mining tools enable businesses to identify meaningful relationships between the value of a customer and how well the contact center is solving their problems. It would be easy to infer simple causality here, but the real world is more complex. In other words, it can be dangerous to assume that low value customers will tolerate lower quality service, or that poor service is the reason why they are low value customers. Consider the following example: the business opportunities that may arise from a quality customer service experience are likely very different for low value customers who were once high value, as opposed to customers who have always been low value. The dynamics among these variables are complex, and if they are not properly understood, multichannel can easily devolve into a blanket solution that adds little value to the business.

To prevent this from happening, here are just a few questions that contact center decision makers need to consider – not just in isolation, but in concert. The intent should be to deliver an additive benefit for each new mode deployed, rather than some being positive and other being a drag, but still a net gain.

Which new channels to add? It may be a given that contact centers need to deploy some core channels like email, chat and text, but the options are ever-expanding, especially around social media. To do this right, processes must be developed to assess, define and measure the benefits of each channel, as well as determine its impact on the network and overall operations.

Which channels for which customer? This is probably the most challenging consideration, especially since there is an absolute and relative component. Simple rules can be developed in the absolute; e.g. “all customers with sales exceeding $xxx will be served with channels A, B and C”. Relative is far more complex, as there are a multitude of variables that create exceptions to the absolute. This is where customer analytics come into play, and make all the difference for using the right mix of channels for each inquiry.

How do you bring new channels to market? Customers cannot take advantage of new modes if they don’t know about them.  Depending on the mode and type of customer, the contact center – and the business, by extension – resources must be devoted to creating awareness and incenting customers to use them. By analogy, banks have invested heavily in ATMs to reduce the need for customers to stand in line for teller service. Over time, this lowers their operating costs, but look at how long it’s taken to win customers over. Adding new modes will improve contact center performance if handled right, but building awareness and adoption takes time.

How will each of these channels be managed? Each channel is distinct, and requires a skill set to work with. Email has its own conventions. Text and chat are highly nuanced communications modes. Video is highly visual, and not everyone is comfortable with it. Social media is a vast and rapidly evolving space that contact centers cannot ignore. Incorporating social media into a multichannel environment requires a degree of tech-savvy that most people lack. Some contact centers may be sophisticated enough where all agents can manage all modes, but the more likely scenario will be specialized, where agents will only handle one or two modes. Clearly, this has implications for the skill sets needed in the contact center, along with an overriding framework to manage it all.

How will all of these channels be managed? This is a very different question, as many inquiries engage multiple channels, sometimes at once. For example, a customer may be speaking with a live agent on a chat session, asking a separate question via email while at the same time navigating an IVR tree over the phone. With today’s choices, having one customer engaging the company with three separate modes at the same time is not a big stretch. What reporting tools will the company use to monitor performance here? Will the reporting tools be different if the customer is trying to solve the same problem in all these cases – as opposed to trying to solve three different problems with three different modes? Managing performance on a silo basis can be pretty straightforward, but managing across modes requires more sophisticated tools.

What management tools will be needed? The more channels you have, the more complex it becomes to measure, monitor and manage the contact center. Each mode will likely require its own set of metrics, and then you need to consider how to compare performance. Some agents will only handle one channel and others will work with more than one. Then consider the customer. Some channels will be used to solve simple problems and others just for complex problems. In time, the business will come to learn which channels drive sales, and those that drive customers away. Multichannel will always be a moving target, but as long as performance management tools keep pace, the contact center will have the ability to use them effectively.

As a coda to this, I’ll wear my telecom analyst hat and cite the relevance of Unified Communications. Just as businesses are running up against the limitations of their costly, single-purpose PBX telephony systems, contact centers are in the same boat with their legacy systems. In both areas, day-to-day communications have moved well beyond the desk phone. Increasingly, this activity is shifting to the desktop, where lower cost and more efficient modes are the norm.

To manage all this, businesses are moving to various forms of Unified Communications, both in the office and the contact center. Not only does UC lower overall communications costs, but the underlying platform seamlessly integrates all these modes. This allows agents to be more responsive on an individual basis, along with providing tools for collaborative problem resolution. For complex inquiries, agents often need to engage internal experts or resources, and UC enables all this to take place during a live session without the need for a callback.

These capabilities are particularly important for multi-site operations, where experts are usually remote compared to where the agent is. The flexible, borderless nature of IP is ideally suited for this, and takes geography out of the equation when trying to support all these communications modes. As such, when contact centers start taking a more critical, strategic look at multichannel, UC and collaboration needs to be a key part of that conversation. The two really go hand-in-hand, not just for keeping costs down, but for enabling agents to take full advantage of all these capabilities.