In the first of a two-part feature run in partnership with IFS we look at how the dynamics of the contact centre are changing and why this is important for field service organisations.

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The Importance of Transforming Customer Care

To ensure loyalty and win new customers, leading brands are focusing on the quality of their customer care to stay ahead.

This include how field service organisations can:

• Upgrade your support centres to deliver omni-channel customer care
• Introduce self-service and AI without sacrificing the human touch
• Deploy technology to empower support agents to go beyond transactional service and deliver personalised, proactive service

With a multitude of customer engagement channels today, it is difficult for companies to know where to focus their efforts. Contact centres are trying, but failing, to modernise and deliver on the evolving expectations of today’s customers.

How do businesses move away from agents surfing multiple communication and enterprise systems, while reducing costs and customer frustrations? This two-part feature looks at the barriers which prevent companies delivering omni-channel service and then examines the process and technology changes required to overcome them.

The Industry Landscape

Improving customer experience is at the top of many CEO agendas, and as a result customer service teams are being tasked with transforming the care they offer customers, usually with minimal investment and no increase in headcount. Meanwhile, today’s customers have heightened expectations. They expect immediate, informed and joined-up responses to enquiries.

To meet such an expectation requires a new approach to customer service, and new tools to enable the workforce to be more productive and efficient. It also likely means adapting an ageing call centre infrastructure to cope with new channels—from email and chat, to social messaging.

New Technologies Shaping Customer Care

New and emerging technologies, including chatbots and virtual assistants, are leading the way in the future of customer care. But many implementations of such technologies fail, often because they are conceived in isolation from the contact center.

Omni-Channel Customer Service

As humans, we communicate as readily as we breathe and eat. But that changes when we need to communicate with an organisation—with the primary variable being the communication channels at our disposal.

While voice and text have been available to all current generations, their accessibility and immediacy has been transformed over the past forty years: from landline to smartphone, from email to instant messaging.

Our preferences tend to be based on the dominant channel(s) within our peer group. Although logic makes us hope that the latest channels will replace legacy ones, the evidence shows otherwise. It is an expanding, rather than declining, set of channels. So, the challenge for organisations is how to provide a single, unified experience across everyone.

The Evolution of the Contact Centre

The support center needs to evolve from dealing with primarily voice and email, to managing multiple channels—making the choice of contact center technology to support this change crucial.

Vendors of contact center technology generally fall into two categories:

1. Traditional Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) call center vendors supporting voice channels, providing routing and queuing of calls. Some vendors add digital channels, but the actual integration between voice and digital is limited.
2. Customer-relationship management (CRM) vendors who have extended their systems to provide support for non-voice channels such as email, chat and social media.

This presents a challenge for businesses, with many often ending up with diff­­­erent systems from two or more vendors to accommodate the growing number of digital channels alongside voice. This cause a challenge in terms of cost, IT resource and integration investment.

Look out for the concluding part of this feature next week where we explore how field service organisations can introduce self-service and artificial intelligence without sacrificing the human touch. 

Want to know more? There is an eBook on this topic available to fieldservicenews.com subscribers within our premium content library...

sponsored by:

Data usage note: By accessing this content you consent to the contact details submitted when you registered as a subscriber to fieldservicenews.com to be shared with the listed sponsor of this premium content who may contact you for legitimate business reasons to discuss the content of this content...