The role of the contact center is evolving to “Tier 2” status—taking care of escalated service requests not addressed by other channels, according to NICE Systems Ltd. The company, based in Israel, announced key findings of its 2010 Consumer Channel Preference Survey on the communications channels preferred by consumers when contacting business and service providers.

The survey reveals that this change in consumer behavior reflects the importance and strategic role that the contact center must play as the front line of an organization’s person-to-person customer interactions. It also highlights an opportunity for reducing the number of calls that are deflected into the contact center by enhancing web self-service functionality. To do this, however, an organization requires cross-channel insights that are derived from both the web and the contact center interactions.

The survey polled more than 2,000 people, between the ages of 18-65, in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, regarding channel preference when contacting companies in the following industries: financial services, telecom, retail, travel, and insurance. It revealed that consumers often use a variety of communication channels. When they are unable to resolve an issue during their initial contact with a business, they most often turn to the contact center.

In such a case, the stakes are raised for an organization, as consumers calling a contact center are frustrated, well informed, and their main concern is having their issues addressed effectively. From their perspective, they have begun an interaction journey, which was started at a prior touch point. This means that even if an issue is resolved by the contact center representative the customer will not consider it a first-contact resolution. The survey also showed that the very nature of this journey means that consumers are turning to contact enters with more complex needs than they did in the past.

Two key results of the survey:

• 64% of consumers surveyed contact a business through its website at least monthly; 44% call the contact center at least once monthly; and likewise 55% visit a physical location;
Of those who cannot resolve their issue through the website, 53% will call the contact center next.

• In cases where customers do not resolve an issue during a visit to a business’s premises (e.g. branch office), 51% of respondents then turn to the contact center for assistance; 35% of consumers prefer to interact with a live phone representative for service-related issues, whereas only 22% prefer to interact with a live phone representative for purchase-related issues.

Contact centers are also a cornerstone for customer satisfaction and loyalty. This channel affords an organization with the opportunity to strengthen its relationship with a consumer, identify and mitigate churn risk, and improve upsell results. For the contact center to effectively seize these opportunities, it must be equipped with a holistic customer profile that is comprised of information regarding the customer’s interaction journey—spanning all assisted and self-service channels. By providing visibility into and delivering an understanding of customer intent across the customer’s interaction journey, an organization can understand what improvements are required on self-service channels for more effective self-service containment. It also enables them to understand what cross-channel information they must provide their agents in real time in order to successfully and efficiently handle customer service requests.

Benny Einhorn, NICE’s chief marketing officer commented, “Customers today are taking an ‘interaction journey’ across multiple communication channels before their needs are met. This means that there is a paradigm shift in how companies and their contact centers need to measure and ensure first-contact resolution as well as improve channel containment.”

For more information:
http://www.nice.com/content/when-self-service-web-fails-majority-customers-call-contact-center-which-must-evolve-handle-more-complex-demands