Multi-channel customer service management strategies can delight consumers as well as drive efficiency. Well, you might expect us to say that – as that is what VoiceSage is all about. However, it’s not just us making this call – it’s fresh and independent research from analysts The Aberdeen Group.

Multi-Channel Customer Focus Drives Better Performance
Its analysis shows that companies following a multi-channel customer care strategy achieve much greater rates of improvement in customer satisfaction when compared with competitors using only a single channel – and a really quite marked one: 9.7% versus 3.9%.

The findings also indicate that the best-performing call centres are 44% more likely than their peers to provide agents with access to, and training on, multi-channel tools such as interactive voice, outbound text, two-way SMS conversations, social channels and the like.

Meanwhile, those that provided the capability to integrate multiple channels within a single agent desktop, enabling their agents to seamlessly handle multi-channel and multiple customer interactions, easily proved to be the top performers.

The group’s research also found that more than half of all US call centres today use six or more channels to listen to and engage with their customers. That’s a lot; you have to wonder how effective each is in leveraging each channel to deliver customer delight.

What does all this mean?
Outsourcing of the customer call centre has tended to follow a fairly tried-and-tested route; the outsourcing company typically pursuing an adopt, adapt, transform and innovate strategy to migrate from an ‘as is’ state to one where there is tangible differentiation in service delivery and deliverables. With the UK market alone estimated at 50,000 outsourced seats (worth around £2.6 billion annually), it’s understandable that in the short to mid-term this focus has tended to fall on operational efficiencies and savings.

Automating customer contact – particularly lower value contact – has often been a key element of this strategy and the use of outbound multi and cross-channel messaging has a proven track record in helping achieve such operational benefits. But here’s the issue: what do you do when the outsourcer has wrung out all of the possible saving it can from the contact process?

When that point has been reached focus needs to turn to the ‘customer journey’ and how transformational and innovative strategies, structures, processes, and tools can deliver customer value across all channels. And it’s precisely here too – as well as driving operational savings – cross and multi-channel messaging can add significant value.

Making the difference
Of course, technology alone won’t delight customers. But what this interesting Aberdeen research shows is that as differentiation is sought more widely in customer service as well as operational efficiency, strategies that effectively blend people, knowledge and skills with those that encompass and embrace cross and multi-channel communication will be king.

Marrying multi-channel customer interaction with internal skills to establish a cross-channel, 360-degree view of customer management has very tangible and demonstrable commercial rewards. And we’re delighted someone else is starting to cotton on to this in the contact centre market.

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