The Drive to Lower Contact Center Costs Is Altering Customer Service Access

The telephone has long been the consumers’ preferred channel of access to the enterprise for resolving sales and service issues. Yankee Group research confirms that overall, more than 75% of enterprise customer service contact still occurs over the telephone. The ongoing global transition to the Anywhere ConsumerTM and Anywhere EnterpriseTM resulted in the arrival and rapid growth of the multichannel contact center, which began in the late 1990s. These events have driven the introduction of new self-service and assisted service access channel options such as web self-service, text chat and e-mail. Self-service in the voice telephony channel has also been positively affected by the increased use of automated interactive voice response (IVR) systems (touchtone or speech-enabled), allowing the use of self-service tools to answer simple inquiries and resolve sales and service issues.