What is Multichannel & Why Do I Need It?

How to make the shift to multichannel and meet or exceed customer expectations for service in a competitive marketplace.

Contact centre managers who have been in the business long enough remember the days when the contact centre was still called the “call centre.” It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out why this vocabulary shift happened; the term “contact centre” emerged to make room for various other methods of contacting customer service representatives, including video, email, smartphone, social media and more.

Omnichannel vs. Multichannel

Is your contact centre only offering an omnichannel experience in a multichannel world? There is a bit of confusion about these two terms – omnichannel and multichannel – so for the sake of this blog post, let’s disambiguate them a bit.

Multichannel (for our purposes here) means offering customers multiple routes through which they can complete their transactions: telephone, social media, email, etc. Omnichannel, in this context, means offering only one channel – usually telephone – through which customers can resolve their inquiries.

If you’re running an omnichannel contact centre in a multichannel world, you’re operating in a way that’s becoming increasingly obsolete with each passing day. The time is now to invest in expanding your reach in order to accommodate changing consumer tastes: in fact, according to research from Genesys, 77 percent of today’s consumers currently use more than one channel when contacting customer service. See that? It’s already happening. Here are three ways you can invest in additional contact channels to remain competitive in a complicated consumer marketplace.

1. Telephone Service Improvements

Just having an operational telephone contact centre is not enough in the competitive economy of meeting and exceeding consumer expectations. You must “level up” your current telephone service game by investing in improvements to interactive voice response (IVR) menus, call labeling, call routing and smart metrics that will give you key insights about how your contact centre is performing. Smart telephone software will give you real-time data on KPIs like average abandonment time, numbers of queued callers and agent status so you can improve performance and efficiency – two constant goals of any contact centre.

2. Social Media Mastery

Maybe you hate social media and think it’s a useless time-waster and showcase for peoples’ insecurities. Maybe you’re right. But you know what else it is? A vital part of any successful multichannel contact centre’s toolkit. Since customer service calls are not only costly in dollars but also in time, social media can really improve efficiency if you’re prepared to use it in a smart manner. Not all companies are prepared to effectively tackle social as a customer service channel: in fact, nearly 60 percent of consumer tweets to companies are being flat-out ignored. That’s a dangerous policy as it can quickly alienate customers used to operating at the speed of Internet.

To use social effectively as part of your multichannel approach, be sure you’re prepared with well-trained agents who are armed with the tools they need to respond to customer inquiries quickly and effectively. Doing so will turn your omnichannel contact centre into a multichannel powerhouse.

3. Video Vitality

For the contact centre that adds video to its arsenal of multichannel tools, the personal approach can mean a great deal to customers. If your business needs to connect on a deeper level with clients, especially those confused by part of your service model or products, adding video to your multichannel contact centre plan may help leverage a smiling face and a pleasant attitude to convert an irate consumer into a loyal fan.

Video may not be appropriate for all businesses or markets, so consider whether your business can truly benefit. Keep in mind this surprising statistic, however: Fonolo reports that 18 percent of contact centre managers plan to add video chat technology to their multichannel service model in the next two years.

As the Internet continues to reshape the way we do business, only multichannel contact centres that genuinely offer customers a variety of fully functional routes through which they can contact customer service will survive. The wired economy puts the focus on customer service, since consumers are looking for their inquiries to be resolved the first time and at a rapid pace. For more on how to uplevel your contact centre game, download our free white paper.