In today’s digital age, customers are contacting businesses from a variety of different touch points—phone, email, text, chat, Facebook, Twitter—and they expect to be delighted with exceptional service on each. In fact by 2020, the demand for omnichannel customer experience will be amplified by the need for nearly perfect execution. And for businesses, it has its benefits—those companies with extremely strong omnichannel customer engagement retain on average 89% of their customers, compared to only 33% for those with weak omnichannel engagement. Yet still, only 11% of consumers strongly agree that companies are effectively converging digital, mobile, social, and traditional channels.
What is going wrong?
- Businesses are facing difficulties identifying customers across channels: With every customer service touch point (phone, email, twitter, facebook) comes is own unique form of ID. And as digital channels continue to expand, businesses will be expected to store each of these within their database as a means of identifying their customers across touch points. The problem? They don’t, and it is often information that is difficult to access and maintain. In fact, only 6% of businesses say they have a single view of all customers and prospects across devices and touchpoints, making it extremely challenging to identify who is contacting them, and resolve issues or inquiries in an efficient and effective manner.
- Inquiries aren’t going to the right people: Without knowing who is contacting your business and having a means of intelligently routing them, getting your customers in front of the right representative in an efficient manner can be an enormous challenge. And it is something many businesses struggle with—in fact, 26% of consumers report constant call routing, with no resolution of their problem or inquiry. And despite the fact that 90% of customer service inquiries will soon be reported via social media, nearly half of companies assign all social tasks to their marketers—a group that is not necessarily fit to be addressing and resolving customer complaints.
- Systems, channels, and data are disconnected: An astounding 42% of agents are unable to efficiently resolve customer issues due to disconnected systems, archaic user interfaces, and multiple applications. And well over half of consumers state that they were not able to easily switch from one channel to another when interacting with customer service, whether from web chat to phone, email to phone, phone to email, etc. and this is typically due to the fact that communication channels and customer databases are completely siloed, and not operated by the same departments, inhibiting representatives from fully resolving customer needs from start to finish.
How can businesses and contact centers overcome these challenges? Register for 3CLogic and PIPL’s FREE on-demand webinar, “Overcoming the Challenges of Multichannel Customer Care”, available July 14th, to learn more!
