Creating an Intelligent Contact Center Improves the Customer Experience: Industry

Creating an Intelligent Contact Center Improves the Customer Experience

Product Type: Market Research Report
Published by: Yankee Group
Published: December 2006
Product Code: R388-2310

Description

An Effective Contact Center Stays Nimble Amid Changing Customer Service Demands

In today’s environment of heightened customer expectations, fast-changing industry dynamics, mega-mergers and acquisitions, and increased use of outsourced call centers, enterprises must be adaptable while remaining responsive to changing demands. The contact center must become more agile, provide a consistent customer experience and be optimized for improved performance.

Providing superior customer service across all interaction channels is essential for all organizations. When a customer contacts the company, businesses must manage that customer interaction quickly and accurately across any touchpoint. A poor service experience will have a negative ripple effect on customer satisfaction. Over time, it could potentially:

Increase costs by potentially forcing multiple interactions with different employees over multiple channels as customers create multiple service requests through the phone, web, e-mail or chat channels of access
Decrease potential wallet share by losing valuable cross-selling or up-selling opportunities
Force the customer to look at competitive offerings

Strong customer relationships are critical to the success of many businesses. Businesses rarely have a second chance to make a quality first impression. Because 77% of today’s interactions are still being conducted by phone, it is still critically important that front-line customer service representatives can operate efficiently and effectively. Contact centers engage in CRM projects to transform themselves into an “intelligent contact center” defined as a single point of contact to provide quality customer care, while also acting as an individualized marketing channel to push new products and services. A contact center must empower front-line customer service representatives (CSRs) and customers with actionable information through context-driven assisted and self-service applications. CSRs and customers now have the correct information in the right format for each interaction, increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the experience. By combining the right offer with the right agent skills set to credibly present that offer will lead to a better conversion and increased revenue.

Yankee Group research reveals that 41% of contact centers perceive themselves as evolving from cost centers to profit centers. With seamless integration of telephony communications and data within the enterprise applications, companies can ensure that customer data from any source can be not only used in routing decisions, but also that data can be used to personalize interactions either through customer self-service or assisted service.

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