There is little doubt that in order to be responsive to customers, companies must go multichannel/omnichannel.
One reason is to accommodate customers’ preferred mode of interacting with your brand, be it self-service, through social media, on their smart devices, or that old mainstay the telephone. Another is to empower your frontline people with all of the information and tools they need to resolve customer issues quickly and permanently. This means not only dealing with real-time interactions, but also capturing and analyzing the information from those interactions and integrating them with other customer journey systems and processes.
The challenge, and this goes regardless of contact center size, is to get to a multichannel environment that both covers all of the critical touchpoints and is optimized to meet the needs of customers. And, just to make things a bit more complicated, SMBs must tackle the issues of limited budgets and resources.
The good news is that there is recognition by SMBs that they need to get to a seamless, consistent and high-quality multichannel contact center environment with some sense of urgency. In fact, recent research has found that more than 50 percent of SMB contact centers anticipate their interaction channels being fully integrated by 2016. The key word is “anticipate.” Getting from here to there is great as an objective, but the path is not easy.
If you are an SMB that is part of that 50 percent, and possibly more important if you are not but know you need to move on this, the forthcoming webinar Six Challenges of Deploying a Multichannel Contact Center and How to Beat Them, to be held Tuesday, November 10, 2015 | 11:30 AM EST (3:30 PM EST) is an event you may not wish to miss.
This is a unique opportunity to hear from two industry experts, Nancy Jamison is Principal Analyst at Frost & Sullivan, and Tim Passios is VP Solutions Marketing at Interactive Intelligence as they go over in detail and answer questions about how to overcome the six challenges which include:
As event host Interactive Intelligence says, “Get to multichannel, give customers everything they expect, and don’t break the bank.”
As noted at the top, having a multichannel contact center is no longer a nicety but rather is a necessity. If you are in the process of deploying multichannel, or merely in the evaluation stage, the six challenges are ones you will have to consider, and learning about the way to deal with them can be invaluable.