Traditional contact centers represent a highly regulated industry with multiple metrics to identify performance and costs. Most companies use measurements to determine how effective they are in handling customer issues and achieving high customer satisfaction ratings. But the huge growth in social, mobile and self-service channels has left many customer service organizations without a means to measure and monitor performance on these growing channels. Dimension Data’s “Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report 2012, Dimension Data plc” revealed that only 9.9% of companies surveyed measured costs and time for social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and speech self-service. Additionally, only 6.1 % measured their performance for smartphone mobile application support. These results indicate incredible oversight by most companies and pose a serious risk to customer support operations.
This issue most likely occurs because companies delegate social media response to a separate group within marketing that is not connected with the core contact center organization. Also, most mobile apps do not have a software feature that provides a direct link into contact centers when customers need live support. While most companies want to increase customer use of self-service channels, a surprisingly low number (19%) have deployed advanced speech recognition capabilities today according to this same benchmarking report. Speech enabled voice portals that capture the intent of the caller significantly increase task completion without assistance and results in significant cost reduction.
Companies cannot afford to wait until this problem gets worse and customer satisfaction declines to correct this problem. There are many vendor solutions available today that provide effective e-service monitoring solutions. Leading cloud e-services vendors, such as Kana and Oracle RighNow Cloud Service provide turnkey solutions across all channels. Premise-based contact center solutions from Avaya and Cisco also provide social media support modules within their contact center suites. Additionally, Genesys and Interactive Intelligence provide integrated mobile app support, as well as social channel monitoring and measurements to deliver an integrated experience to smartphone users. There are additional e-services software service providers and I expect new entrants in 2O13 for all-inclusive e-service products to help remedy this situation and enable contact center managers to accurately measure and monitor performance across all channels. Selecting the right vendor for your company to solve this major shortcoming should be a major priority for 2013.
