How to Answer the Call of Driving Your Contact Center to the Digital World

If you haven’t thought about driving your contact center to the digital realm yet, then you’re looking at a long and most likely challenging road ahead. You may be wondering why you need to adapt to more modern technologies when you’ve been satisfied with traditional voice communications for years now. So if you’re asking, “why do I need to go digital?” the answer is “because that’s where your customers are.”

Think about it. Why would you want to be anywhere else? By pigeonholing your business into a one-way street of communication, you’re essentially opening the floodgates for your competitors to swoop in – where prospects are much more likely to bite.

The multi-channel contact center – which provides advanced, real-time options such as Web chat, e-mail, IM and social media for customer service – offers consumers the multiplicity they crave in an on-the-go world. In fact, research from CFI Group shows that contact center channels other than phone (including online techniques like all of the above) account for more than 30 percent of customer service engagements. Even more:

• Over 75 percent of consumers rely on up to four different channels when seeking customer care
• 57 percent of best-in-class companies measure support center success across e-mail, chat, Web and voice
• Failure to respond to customers through social channels can lead to a 15 percent increase in churn rate for existing customers.
• 80 percent of customer prefer to connect with company brands via Facebook

Bottom line: the Web-based contact center is the future of customer engagement, the answer to increasing profitability and the key to securing business continuity.