Friday, October 29, 2010

Top 5 Takeaways from the Multi Channel Contact Centre Webinar

It was great to participate in the webinar "How to Develop a True Multi-channel Contact Centre" (#multiCCC) this week, hosted by Dr Catriona Wallace of callcentres.net. Catriona shared some of the latest research with the panel and the attendees – with comments and case studies from myself at Telnet, as well as Hamish Grant from Ezibuy and Matthew Beeche from Pitney Bowes – around the take-up of multiple channels (outside the traditional phone/fax/email – and into Webchat, SMS, Social Media, Internet and the like) into Australian and NZ contact centres.

One of the things that perhaps surprised me most was that the stats, and feedback from the attendees seemed to show that multi-channel seems to be regarded as "very hard" by most centres. After living and breathing multi-channel at Telnet for so long, it was really interesting to take a step back and look with fresh eyes at this topic – and particularly around emerging media types like Social Media.

The top 5 biggest "takeaways" from the session though were probably:

  1. Despite hype to the contrary 80% of CC interactions are still with real live agents – Kiwis and Aussie love to talk!
  2. Setting up a true multi-channel contact centre needn’t be a daunting task – provided you have the right partners and vision
  3. Never implement a CC channel "just because you can" – listen to your customers needs
  4. Getting into social media (such as Facebook, Twitter, Forums) can be scary – but these are also really easy to introduce gradually – Before you do anything LISTEN to your customers and see if your customers are talking about you!
  5. Experience shows that multi-channels does not tend to lower your overall interactions, or simply transfer interactions from one media to another – at least in the short term, interactions will INCREASE as you improve your accessibility to your customer base.

Thank you to Catriona and Julie at www.callcentres.net and their sponsor for hosting this great webinar.

Rebecca Elliot
Telnet

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