Multi-Channel Customer Experience: The Next Battleground for Mid-Size Businesses

A Frost & Sullivan White Paper

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contents

Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 3

The Changing Customer Experience .......................................................................................... 3

Multi-Channel Contact Centers Give Customers What They Want ....................................... 4

Key Elements of a Multi-Channel Contact Center .................................................................... 6

Analytics Puts it All Together ....................................................................................................... 8

What to Look for in a Multi-Channel Solution .......................................................................... 8

Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 9

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Multi-Channel Customer Experience: The Next Battleground for Mid-Size Businesses

INTRODUCTION

One of the best ways for mid-size organizations to distinguish themselves from their larger competitors is to deliver a truly personalized customer experience. Indeed, consumers have come to expect better service from mid-size businesses compared with impersonal global brands. But as customer interactions grow increasingly complex–with more people contacting companies through social media like Twitter and Facebook, on mobile devices and the Web–it is getting harder for mid-size businesses to deliver a world-class experience. To do so, they must deploy next-generation technology that will allow them to support a multi-channel contact center that leverages every customer contact point and all relevant back-office information.

As traditional channels–including IVR, chat, and the Web–meet the newer ones, the goal is to deliver an effortless customer experience that lets customers move among channels, and have their personal context and history move with them. But until recently, mid-size organizations have been slow to embrace a multi-channel contact center for various reasons–including cost, complexity, and staffing resources that they felt limited their ability to support a next-generation environment. Now, that is changing: Frost & Sullivan research shows that the adoption of multi-channel contact centers is on the rise, driven by the growth of social and mobile channels, and by the imperative that mid-size companies do everything they can to put the customer experience first.

Although multi-channel routing has been possible for years, it was not until consumers started demanding service on their terms–and via the channels they prefer, including social media sites and mobile apps–that companies began to pay attention. The benefits are clear: a better experience for the customer, lower times to resolution, deeper relationships, stronger loyalty, and ultimately more sales opportunities and higher revenues.

But, despite the newfound interest, leading-edge organizations face challenges as they try to change the customer experience. These include the need for more IT resources, lack of organizational support, the gap between consumer desire and available contact-center technology, application and data silos, and cost. Layering on the desire to apply analytics to integrated multi-channel data only adds to the complexity. As a result, it is imperative that companies find the right vendors to support their multi-channel efforts to ensure a successful transition for the organization, its contact center agents, and the customers they serve.

This paper will discuss the changing nature of the customer experience; outline the need for and benefits of a multi-channel contact center; highlight the key drivers and challenges companies must consider as they embark on this approach; identify what to look for in a vendor partner; and offer best practices for success.

THE CHANGING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Frost & Sullivan has identified the increasingly mobile world as a global Mega Trend that is disrupting every business and every business process. Increasingly, people want to be able to communicate with their vendors anytime and from anywhere, on their smart phones and tablets as well as their landline phones. Likewise, social media is changing the ways in which people communicate, engage and interact with the companies with whom they do business. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social sites have become defacto customer contact centers, as customers use them to voice praise and complaints–and increasingly expect a prompt response and resolution.

Both of these larger trends are changing the ways in which people expect to interact with businesses and organizations. Today’s customers expect an open, iterative relationship to deliver a truly personalized experience. Customers who contact a business via a traditional contact center–whether via phone, chat or Web–expect the responding agent to know everything about the customer’s relationship with the organization. This includes

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basic information, such as account numbers and payment history. But it includes less explicit data, including personal preferences for specific products and services, the history of the relationship (and any prior issue resolutions), and so on.

Figure 1: Self-Service Appeals to Customers Looking for Support

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Website Self-Service

Phone/Live Agent

E-mail

Website/Chat with Live Agent

Phone/IVR

1=Very dissatisfied Mean scores 7=Very satisfied

Source: Frost & Sullivan

And, of course, customers expect all their interactions with a given company to be integrated in the organization’s systems, so that whether they connect via Facebook or phone, they are treated in the same way, and they do not have to continually repeat information. Authentication is critical in a multi-channel contact center.

Advanced multi-channel, Web-enabled smartphones are fast becoming the dominant consumer wireless device type, requiring changes in the contact center:• Deliver relevant and personalized account information on the consumer’s device or tablet display;

• Allow navigation of the app using speech, touch, or typing;

• Offer one-touch access to agents;

• Display expected wait time if an agent is requested;

• Give the option of an immediate or scheduled call back by an agent; and

• Use the unique attributes of the devices–geolocation, video, speech recognition, etc.

MULTI-CHANNEL CONTACT CENTERS GIVE CUSTOMERS WHAT THEY WANT

Multi-channel contact centers address these changing consumer and business needs by delivering a single view of the customer, regardless of his or her chosen contact point. The goal is to ensure that customers can meaningfully contact the organization via both new and traditional methods, and agents can support them with a 360-degree view that offers relevant information on the entire customer relationship. Without proper attention to all channels, businesses cannot offer their customers a complete and satisfying experience.

Multi-channel contact centers enable companies to offer a much more personalized approach to their customer interactions. This is good for the customer, who gets the support and offers he needs specific to his preferences

*3000 Customers Surveyed

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Multi-Channel Customer Experience: The Next Battleground for Mid-Size Businesses

and experience with the company’s products and services. And it is good for the business, which is able to treat each customer as valuable, deepen and retain its relationship with them, and close more up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.

A multi-channel contact center delivers a truly consistent customer experience, so that regardless of how the client “calls in”–by phone, text, Web, chat or social media, and on any device–he receives the same level of high-quality support and service.

Research shows that customer loyalty is less a product of satisfaction than it is the result of ease; the simpler companies make it for their customers to purchase, use and service their products, the more satisfied those customers will be–and the more likely they are to become repeat buyers. A multi-channel contact center makes it much easier to lower customer effort, since customers can get the information, products and services they need on their own terms. Whether they are calling in from a mobile device or contacting the company via chat or social media, when customers can reach an agent or IVR system that can actually resolve their issue when and where they want to, their overall effort decreases and their satisfaction goes up.

Frost & Sullivan research shows a decided increase in interest in multi-channel adoption thanks to changing consumer behavior and technical improvements. In many cases, the trigger is a desire to unify “digital” relationships with customers through social and mobile engagement. But there are other drivers, too:

• Cloud adoption. Mid-size companies that lack the internal IT expertise to support new channels can launch them in the cloud, without investing in equipment and personnel. Cloud-based systems are easy to deploy, scale well, and offer maximum flexibility, so that if activity suddenly increases on one channel, capacity can be increased without provisioning for traffic peaks. And since other tools mid-size businesses use every day (email, accounting, CRM, etc.) are cloud-based, their IT staffs are increasingly familiar with supporting cloud-based tools.

• All-in-one, software-based systems. All-in-one platforms let customers license them as needs change, using specific capabilities as they desire. These platforms also provide common administration and reporting, simplifying the addition of new channels and providing a more integrated picture of the customer experience.

• Big Data analytics. Analytics and reporting deliver information on specific channels or across channels, helping even mid-size companies gain insight into consumer preferences and improve and personalize customer interactions. When applied to multiple channels, analytics delivers valuable information that can significantly improve the bottom line. Likewise, data about the customer journey allows companies to optimize those experiences and proactively engage with customers that look to be in danger of falling out of the optimal path.

• Extending mobile and social attributes to in-person experiences. Using attributes of mobile devices and social services, such as geolocation, scanning, or picture-taking, lets companies develop applications that can change the in-person experience. For instance, a retail chain might allow a customer to scan QR codes to get information or help while in a store.

• Application integration on legacy systems. Leading contact center solution providers are integrating all customer contact channels. Enhancements include a single data repository for disparate systems and applications, a unified agent desktop, centralized management, and Web services that enable linkage between technologies.

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KEY ELEMENTS OF A MULTI-CHANNEL CONTACT CENTER

To achieve the results outlined above, companies must develop a clear multi-channel strategy before they add new customer interaction channels. If new channels originate in different departments without a plan detailing how they should work together, or if context and history are not shared, customer effort can increase, rather than go down. When channels are siloed, activity on one channel remains hidden from others, negatively impacting the customer experience.

The goal is to deliver a customer experience in which all channels work together as customers move through them. This improves interactions by blending in customer channels outside the contact center, including postal mail, in-store and business contacts, social media posts and comments, back-office systems, and anything done on a mobile app. Best practices dictate being able to present the right media at the right time on the desired channel, and having the appropriately skilled agent available if the customer needs live support.

Multi-channel contact centers must include traditional voice, IVR, chat, outbound contacts and the Web, as well as newer social and mobile interactions:

Social Media is fast becoming a viable channel for customer interaction. Content comes from blogs and microblogs, private communities, public social media sites, wikis, videos, pictures, personal messages, audio clips, and more. By engaging with customers on social sites, companies can increase promotion and brand management, provide customer support, and use analytics to identify broad trends and specific customer preferences and buying patterns. And because social sites naturally amplify any customer contacts and behavior–around both good experiences and bad–it is critical for companies to get a handle on these interactions.

A range of applications facilitate the listening, capturing, sorting, and dissemination of social media interactions. But too often social media initiatives start in areas other than the contact center, such as marketing, without a plan for handling customer support issues, analysis, and follow-up. Frost & Sullivan’s Social Media Maturity Model is a map of how using social media as a customer channel typically develops over time.

Figure 2: Social Media Maturity Model

Current stage of adoptionfor most companies-moving

from Phase 1 to Phase II Phase IVSocial Media as a Customer

Communication Channel

Companies interact withcustomers through Social Media

Phase I11

Listen andMonitor

Phase I

Social Media as aMarketing Platform

Phase I1

Pene

trat

ion/

Ext

ent

of A

dopt

ion

Maturity of Strategy Over Time

Source: Frost & Sullivan

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Multi-Channel Customer Experience: The Next Battleground for Mid-Size Businesses

Chat has been in use for years, but it did not see rapid adoption until 2011, when Frost & Sullivan estimates the total chat market in North America was $323.1 million; we expect it to reach $633.6 million by 2017 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.9%. Chat has now become an important channel to “save” failing self-service or to provide a richer online experience. We attribute this growth to two main factors: first, the growing preference of customers for texting and instant messaging makes chat a familiar interaction, and one that allows them to multi-task while they are getting service; and second, the richer chat functionality available today, including collaboration, predictive analytics, proactive engagement, and personalization.

Persistent Conversations essentially remembers the information exchanged in any given customer interaction and immediately brings it back up when the customer re-engages. This is very important to creating the sense that the company really knows the customer and has the institutional memory to treat him as an individual–with specific experiences, needs and purchasing history–regardless of how or when he contacts the organization.

Mobile Customer Care is no longer a “nice to have”– it is a critical part of any multi-channel solution. Rich Internet applications (RIAs) built on open standards like HTML5, coupled with speech recognition, video, geolocation, SMS, QR codes and other technologies, are creating compelling customer experiences on mobile devices. But the next important step is to integrate them with the contact center, so that the app experience extends to customer service and support.

Figure 3: Increasing Versus Declining Contact Center Applications, North America, 2014

CURRENTLY USED APPLICATIONS

AP

PL

ICA

TIO

NS

PL

AN

NIN

G T

OU

SE

TW

O Y

EA

RS

FR

OM

NO

W

60%

60%

55%

55%

50%

50%

45%

45%

40%

40%

35%

35%

30%

30%

ACD

Speech Analytics

IVR

Outbound ApplicationsCRM

Chat

WorkforceManagement

Customer Surveys Web Collaboration Tools

Social Media Contract& Mobile Contract

QualityMonitoring

25%25%

Declining Use Constant UseIncreasing Use

Source: Frost & Sullivan

Text Analytics improves on speech analytics, which helped revolutionize the contact center, making it possible to analyze a different set of customer data that follows different rules and have different linguistic attributes, including social media interaction, customer surveys, chat, and email. But not all text is created equal when it comes to customer communication. Customer surveys, tweets, blogs, emails, and Facebook postings follow different rules and have different linguistic attributes; a good solution will recognize those specific patterns and tag and catalog them accordingly, making it easier for agents to leverage the resulting information.

Universal Queue/Unified Desktop helps contact center agents juggle dozens of applications during the day, without having to repeatedly switch screens during customer calls. This decreases the load on the agent and time to resolution.

Base: Filtered respondents - Those who currently use hosted/cloud solutions

(n=160); those who use or plan to use hosted/cloud solutions (n=284)

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Workforce Management is one of the thorniest issues with multi-channel contact centers. Traditionally, forecasting and scheduling were done by time increments, such as half-hour blocks. But that does not work for emails, chat and social media interactions, or broader casework engagements, since they do not conform to time-specific metrics. WFM systems must factor in the differences among channels, so that agents are able to focus on each customer interaction and provide a consistent experience across all channels. Each channel should have its own service-level agreements (SLAs) based on the time and attention it takes to service queries within that specific environment.

ANALYTICS PUTS IT ALL TOGETHER

Multi-channel contact centers are designed to improve the customer experience, but to do so they require a new level of understanding of the customer journey. Historically, it was enough to understand IVR usage, analyze phone calls to identify repeat contacts, and measure first-call resolution. Today, a single call from a customer may result in resolution, but the customer may have tried to use the Web, then chat, then email, and finally the call center before getting satisfaction. Only by tying all these interactions together can businesses get a complete picture of the customer experience.

Contact center solution providers have embraced the concept of cross-channel analytics. The power of a multi-channel contact center comes from combining everything the company knows about a customer’s past and current interactions from all touchpoints, predicting where future interactions may lie, and turning that data into actionable information. A true understanding of the customer experience requires having a grasp of customer interaction history and demographics, and entails looking at the entire relationship from the time the customer initiates contact (via any channel) through issue resolution.

A recent National Retail Federation (NRF) survey revealed that 82% of retailers are making customer service strategies their primary strategic focus.

WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN A MULTI-CHANNEL SOLUTION

There are many benefits of creating a cross-functional, multi-channel contact center. Even mid-size organizations can use them to jump on new business opportunities; improve marketing campaigns; differentiate with a stellar customer experience; reduce customer effort while increasing retention and satisfaction; identify places for product and service improvement and cost reduction; and mine customer data to improve all areas of the business.

But companies must take a disciplined approach to deploying a multi-channel solution. Frost & Sullivan has identified several key strategies for success:

• Create a cross-organizational customer experience team. One or more C-level executives should focus solely on creating a customer-centric culture across the organization. Choose someone who has experience in the contact center or front office and the authority to work with multiple lines of business.

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Multi-Channel Customer Experience: The Next Battleground for Mid-Size Businesses

• Determine goals for new channels. Are channels being added to encourage self-service or to create additional opportunities to engage with customers? Business goals should drive decisions about whether to upgrade, replace or leave existing channels, and how to integrate them with the existing contact center.

• Consider a solution from a single vendor. If all of the channels are built on a common platform, then adding new channels does not result in a siloed experience for consumers or for agents.

• Rethink staffing –and performance metrics. While it is often assumed that adding channels will decrease calls to the contact center, Frost & Sullivan clients have reported the opposite. Beefing up self-service channels will change the nature of the calls agents receive; they will increasingly be asked to help with difficult issues or deliver added value. This will impact staffing (especially around experience levels and training) and it may mean that measurements for success need to be modified.

• Create best practices for agent hiring and training. All channels should not be handled in the same way. Create channel-support guidelines and deliver channel-specific training.

• Create a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program. The addition of new channels provides an excellent opportunity to create VoC initiatives, as well as to collectively mine all channels to uncover additional opportunities and challenges.

• Move toward eliminating information silos. If a company has moved to SIP and/or is in the position of upgrading infrastructure, it should create a plan that will allow it to eliminate information silos, whether through the cloud, an all-in-one platform, upgrading legacy software, or partnering with vendors that can tie disparate systems together.

An effective multi-channel strategy should go beyond the issues of which channels to add, and when and how to integrate them, to include:• Agent hiring and training, and understanding which agents are best at working which channels.

• Interaction handling guidelines, based on the fact that phone and chat do not mix, but phone and email work well.

• Proactive customer care, including callbacks, customer surveys and outbound IVR.

CONCLUSION

A multi-channel contact center is a must for organizations of all sizes. Best-in-class customer service organizations continue to raise the bar in delivering seamless multi-channel customer experiences. This presents both an opportunity and challenge for mid-size businesses to differentiate and drive greater customer satisfaction, retention, and growth. A multi-channel contact center will allow customers to contact the organization on their own terms; enable the delivery of a personalized, integrated and consistent customer experience; lower customer effort scores; and apply analytics to the resulting data to shape strategy and product roadmaps, improve marketing campaigns, shrink times to satisfaction, and drive sales.

Challenges exist but can be overcome with the right contact center solution. To be successful in their efforts, companies must prioritize their key strategies, consider operational needs, and deploy enabling technologies that will help deliver an effortless multi-channel customer experience.

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MELANIE TUREK