Business firms across the world collaborate with multichannel contact centres, to provide reliable customer support to clients beyond the boundaries of their own country. A seamless multi-channel customer contact strategy involves optimizing its resources, while delivering the best grades of services to its clients. Here, you will come across certain mistakes that are common among multichannel contact centres. Eliminating these errors from your system will help you deliver better standards of services to your clients.
Read on to know the mistakes that should be avoided on customer support channels.
1) Recruiting the agents based on their behaviour on phone
It is necessary to hire the agents based on their familiarity with the technical aspects of your platform. Multichannel contact centres often hire the agents solely based on their on-phone skills. However, they need to be well-versed with the sophisticated technology and adapt to new techniques in quick time. They should have a sound technical aptitude so that they can use the multichannel contact center software and enhance the quality of support to the clients.
2) Ignoring channel integration tools
You need to integrate various advanced tools on your multichannel contact center, which enables the agents to manage multiple channels. This prevents the hassles of logging onto your system from various platforms. The agents should be able to provide email support, chat support and phone support from a single platform. You can eliminate these problems when you go for a homogenous approach, which increases flexibility and choice to a great extent.
3) Using the wrong channel
One of the most important areas to focus on in a multichannel contact center is choosing the right channel while responding to customers. The choice of wrong channels often leads to poor quality services. For instance, even if a customer gets through to the call center through email, it is recommended to call them back for a detailed conversation. Especially, when you are dealing with problems, having a conversation on phone turns out to be an effective solution, as compared to email or text.
4) Neglecting your outbound operations
Well, you may be dealing with inbound calls, but do not ignore your outbound call infrastructure. According to research, 40% of the calls in an inbound multichannel contact center are actually outbound. These include the calls that the agents make in response to email, texts and so on. Your organization should have the necessary equipment to tackle these situations. Upgrade your infrastructure to provide the necessary services to your customers.
5) Focusing too much on security requests
Well, customer often get frustrated when the security requests from your end turn out to be endless. The customer journeys can collapse on the multichannel contact centers when they are not able to get through the usability test. Passwords and security measures must not be an issue for the customers. The multichannel contact center best practices involve easing up the situation for the customers, not complicating them. You can integrate technologies like voice and fingerprint biometrics that will enable you to access customer records.
6) Ignoring the mapping of your customer experiences
The reputed multichannel contact centers provide customer service channel preferences to the customers. This enables them to choose any channel to communicate with the company. They can use text, email, phone support or any other medium to get across to the company. It is necessary to map the customer experiences before you add new channels to the system. Integrate all the multichannel touchpoints on your platform to enhance the quality of support for customers.
7) Don’t mess up the task while using multiple channels
When the agents use more than one channel to communicate with the customers, chances are high that they mess up with the task. They should have a detailed picture of their interactions. You need to assess their interaction across various channels in a single system. Your analytics software should cover all the channels of communication. Get technology that converts the calls to transcripts and integrates them in your database.
8) Do not evaluate customer satisfaction on the basis of a single call
Well, you need to evaluate the level of customer satisfaction, considering the experience of the customers over a period of time. While providing multichannel customer support services, you need to keep track on the customers over a period of time. A single conversation may be good or bad, so that does not provide a comprehensive view of the satisfaction level of the customers. You need to track customer journeys over a period of time.
9) Overloading customers with options for channels
You may have all the possible channels of communication on your platform. However, take care not to overload the customers with channel options while interacting with them. When you provide them with too many options phone support, chat support, email support, text support and so on, they may choose a wrong channel. This might not suit the context of the call.
10) Failing to adopt a proactive approach
Integrate the advanced analytics tools on your platform to retrieve customer data and previous interaction details that can help in settling the problems faced by your customers. This will enable you to make your approach more proactive, and you can provide the necessary information to customers before the problem comes up.
11) Prioritizing service quality on all channels
The customers expect quality support from all the channels. Evidently, you need to maintain a uniform quality of services across all channels. For instance, the quality of phone support, chat support and email support should remain uniform on your platform.
12) Don’t isolate the channels
Well, you need to link the channels on your platform to enhance the quality of services. For instance, if a customer reaches out to you through email, your agents should be prepared to reply back through chat, if necessary. You may also provide them with social media support, if necessary. Integrate all the channels of communication on a single platform to enhance the quality of services.
Conclusion
Avoid these mistakes in your multichannel contact center to leverage the standards of your services. These multi-channel customer support tips will be beneficial to your company in catering to the expectations of your customers. You need to adhere to multichannel customer care standards to maximize the satisfaction level of the customers.