When customer service became formalised into a specific department the primary channels were the telephone and post. Hence staff were organised in a call centre, as a large part of their job was answering telephone calls, along with responding to letters from customers.A lot has changed since then, with a plethora of new channels now available for customers. The rise of email, the web, social medi...
Navigating phone menus when you call a contact centre is a source of much frustration for consumers. Done well, the concept of phone menus should help improve the customer experience. You’ll be directed to the best agent to deal with your enquiry and they will be able to use the information you’ve typed in to give a head start on solving your problem, without needing to transfer you ar...
When contact centres first opened they focused overwhelmingly on the telephone channel – indeed most were referred to as call centres for that very reason. As customer service has developed and become multichannel, email, web, chat and now social media have been added to the customer service mix, all normally handled by the same contact centre.However, the growth of multichannel service does...
Whatever sector you are in successfully managing customer service across multiple channels is a key differentiator in today’s competitive business environment. Customers want the ability to contact you – and get answers to their questions – whether they are using the web, email, phone or social media. And they want these answers to be delivered quickly or they will simply go else...
The reason that contact centres came into being was to provide a central place for delivering service to customers, initially via telephone and then expanding to include new channels such as email, the web and now social media.However forward looking companies now realise that customer service can’t be just left to a small part of the organisation – the contact centre – no matter...
In the move to a digital world it is easy to overlook that a huge percentage of customer communication is still through traditional mail and fax – so called white mail. This is particularly true in industries such as banking and insurance where legal requirements mean documents need to be signed and returned. And in many cases customers feel more secure having signed and posted a document ra...