benefits of multi-channel strategies

Inbound Strategy, Outbound Strategy, and the Most Important Strategy of All: Blending Them Into a Seamless Interaction for Your Customers

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Ensure your contact center provides a better experience for your customers, your agents, and your company with these strategies:

•  Implementing multiple inbound channels

•  Providing easier self-service

•  Prioritizing contacts by channel

•  Giving agents a single view of customers

•  Remembering the importance of data

•  Using other channels in your outbound contact

•  Establishing the right KPIs

•  Blending inbound with outbound

Introduction

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Inbound Strategies

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Inbound Strategy #1: Implement multiple inbound channels

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Don’t think “call center.” Think “contact center.”

Only 7% of 16-24 year olds will call a business—even in relation to a high-value sales query.

And only 35% of customers 55 and over now prefer a phone call.


Today, you should have an integrated, multichannel strategy for every aspect of your contact center.

20% of customers—regardless of age—prefer to buy from businesses that offer multiple channels of communication.

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Hone your channel strategy.

Would they use social media or web chat to work through an issue that didn’t require a lengthy call?


Don’t jump into every possible channel. Understand your customers and how they prefer to communicate so that you can match your channel strategy to their needs.

Would your customers send an email for a nonurgent inquiry instead of making a phone call?

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Consistency is key.

•  Tone of voice Whether you’re using email, telephone, web chat or social media, you need uniformity in your tone of voice.

•  Brand rules Set rules around brand messaging (but keep in mind that some channels are typically “chattier” than others).

•  CRM Integration Integrating CRM data is essential to ensure that every agent is referring to the same information—regardless of which channel a customer is using at the time.


A multichannel contact center must respond to customers consistently, regardless of channel.

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Ensure agents have a unified view of customer communications.


Customers expect your agents to know of their past encounters with your contact center.

35% of customers think it’s important for an agent

to be able to refer to all previous interactions when communicating

with them.

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75% of customers are likely to recommend a company that can communicate with them without them needing to re-explain their query.

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More than

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Intelligently route customers to the right agents.

•  Route those customers to agents with the necessary skills.

•  Ensure that all comments from a single customer are routed to the same agent.


Many customers turn to social media in order to have their voices heard, whether their experiences were good or bad. When that happens with your company, you need to address those comments.

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Train your agents on one channel at a time.

Different channels require different skill sets. Make sure that your agents have acquired and mastered the skills necessary for one channel before training them on another channel. This ensures that agent response quality and attention to detail is optimized.


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Inbound Strategy #2: Make it easier to self-serve

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Customers avoid calling you. Research shows that customers of all demographics are most likely to go to the web first—for queries ranging from initial research through post-sale questions and even complaints. For many customers, contacting you is a last resort. Ensuring that you’re helping as many people as possible through self-serve is now both more efficient and better customer service.

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Put self-service into place at multiple levels.

Start improving your self-service with your website:

•  A well-managed and up-to-date FAQ section on your site can dramatically lower inbound contact volumes.

•  If you’re consistently getting the same questions, consider addressing them in your FAQs to alleviate the need for customers to call or email.

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Self-serve still works with the phone.

•  Implement intelligent data lookups to personalize the customer experience and potentially circumvent the need for them to speak to a live agent. For example, a customer calls on the 15th every month to pay their bill. If it’s the 15th of the month and that customer calls, you can customize the menu options to prompt bill payment first, allowing them to more quickly pay via the automated system.

•  On a more personal level, you can opt to play information such as the parcel service being used or the customer’s expected delivery time.

•  You can also use your system to complete complex interactions such as payment processing without ever needing a live agent.

Allow customers who have less complex issues to interact with the IVR. Automating incoming questions frees your agents to handle more complex issues.

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Don’t go too far, or you can frustrate your customers.

Use uncluttered menus.

Use automation and self-serve intelligently. Tailor your automated systems to your customers’ preferences. Optimize your automation and older IVR systems to make the process easier for customers and ensure that they don’t frustrate customers who actually want to talk to a live agent.

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Continuously review the channel.

Make self-serve an option, not a necessity.

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Inbound Strategy #3: Prioritize your contacts by channel

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Align your priorities with customer expectations. The old, inflexible ACD system could direct calls according to a customer’s request via the IVR, but that was it. In a multichannel contact center, you need to prioritize. The amount of time a customer expects to wait for a response differs wildly depending on the channel. It’s useful to put inbound contacts into three categories and set service levels for each.

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Instant. This includes telephone and chat, where customers are contacting you and expect as little wait time as possible.

Reactive. These responses are for customer inquiries where they don’t expect an immediate reply, including email and social media.

Proactive. Does a customer not necessarily expect a response at all? For instance, did someone mention your brand on social media? By responding, you can delight your customers and contribute to their positive experience.

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Instant Phone Contact

More than 60% of customers expect their calls to be answered within five minutes.

More than 10% of customers expect their calls to be answered in less than one minute.

20% of customers are willing to wait up to 15 minutes on the phone.

Customers have very set expectations about the time it should take to reach an agent when they call.

With intelligent call distribution using a well-optimized contact flow and good resource management, these wait times can be minimized.

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Ensure that chat is only presented to the customer as an option when an agent is available immediately.

51% of customers expect their chat messages to be responded to in less than five minutes.

Instant Chat Contact

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Answering email is obviously important, but it may not require an immediate response.

Reactive Email Contact More than 60% of customers expect an answer

to their email in less than five hours. 35% of customers expect an answer to their email within an hour.

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Set expectations for your customers.

•  Ensure that whatever time frame you mention is realistic, even in times of higher traffic.

•  Always try to respond in a shorter time than promised.

As an example, autoreply to a customer’s email to let them know you received their query and that they can expect a response within a certain time frame.

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In a recent survey, a

“quick response via email” was the top result for experiences that would likely lead customers to repeat purchases from a business.

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Reactive Social Media Contact Like email, social media responses don’t need to be instant, but quicker responses lead to happier customers. •  Include operating and response times in your bio on

your social media pages. •  Know this: If you’re running a Facebook page,

Facebook will automatically present a normal response time to visitors based on your past interactions.

58% of customers expect a reply via social media within one hour.

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Proactive responses delight customers.

•  Monitored keyword and brand mentions can be streamed in real time and prioritized before filtering to agents for a response.

•  Treat social media mentions as inbound customer issues and proactively respond.

•  Reaching out to customers before they contact you is a great opportunity to impress them.

Not all conversations about your brand in social media are aimed at you. Often, customers have conversations about your brand on social media channels with their friends. This isn’t to say that they don’t have an issue they need resolved.

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Inbound Strategy #4: Give agents a single view of customers

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A synched approach is essential in a multichannel contact center. The smartphone generation not only expects to be able to interact with a brand across multiple channels; it also expects continuity between those channels.

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Customers may begin trying to resolve an issue through email, switch to social media, and then escalate to a phone call if they’re not satisfied.

Without a single integrated view of these customers, agents can waste valuable time trying to understand their issues—causing delays and frustrations for everyone involved.

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View contacts in a single, simple interface. In traditional contact centers, the challenge of a single interface presents an expensive and complex challenge when it comes to integration. With a cloud-based contact center, your agents benefit from a fully integrated, multichannel solution where both customers and agents can pick and mix communication channels from a single web interface. This should be available to agents whether they’re in the office or working from another location.

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What to look for in an inbound system:

•  Ability to integrate multiple channel applications, such as voice, email, chat, and social media

•  Data-directed routing

•  Waypoint reporting

•  Real-time and historical reporting

•  Queue management

•  Callbacks

•  Outbound integration

•  Dynamic scripting

•  Single view of the customer

•  Quality monitoring and customer surveys

Outbound Strategies

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Outbound Strategy #1: Incorporate data to drive success

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Ensure sufficient data and its quality.

Even if you have a lot of data, make sure it’s good. Bad phone numbers, along with a high level of retries, can also result in a low connection rate and longer wait times for agents.

When it comes to outbound calls, dialers work far more efficiently than humans. To run efficiently, however, the dialer needs data—in this case, phone numbers. Without it, there could be very high wait times between calls, which can frustrate agents.

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An automated dialing system runs more efficiently when you feed it better data, such as valid numbers. If the system doesn’t have enough data, your wait times will increase. A good predictive dialing system will proactively send an alert to your dashboard if there is a high wait time, which saves you time trying to find the problem in a mound of data.

Monitor your dashboard.

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If bad data is bogging down your system, you have two options. You could look for alternative data sources. Or you could do more with the data you have by sending it back to the cleansing company so that they can verify the numbers are valid.

Cleanse data.

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When purchasing data, get a replacement guarantee. Existing customer databases, business listings, and online lead-generation suppliers can be great sources of data. That said, when you’re purchasing new data, make sure there’s a system in place for refunds or replacements when there are bad leads. And if your calling list contains higher volumes of mobile numbers, remember that typically around a third of mobile numbers are either unavailable, off or roaming—potentially leading to significant wasted time and calls.

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Collect data at every opportunity.

Encourage your agents to capture relevant and accurate information on their calls. Requesting and recording second telephone numbers or an email address might increase your average handling time, but your data quality will be increased for future campaigns.

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Outbound Strategy #2: Use other channels in your outbound strategies

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Improve your success rates with a flexible system. A flexible system allows you to establish rules based on your unique customer base. For instance, if many of your customers work nontraditional hours, you can use the analytics to choose a time where you’re more likely to connect with them versus someone who works 9 to 5. Choose a provider that has a dedicated client service team to devise these strategies with you so that your managers can focus on running your contact center.


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Keep agents productive when the contact rate is low. When you have a low contact rate, it’s a challenge to keep your agents productive while maintaining their performance levels. Predictive dialing can help with low contact rates, but automated campaigns can maximize your successful contacts.


•  Automated campaigns operate in a similar fashion to “live” dialer campaigns, only there’s no need for agents to be logged in to a campaign before the dial is attempted.

•  When a call is answered, a customized recording is played. If appropriate, the recipient can opt to speak directly to a human agent.

•  This is helpful in more than just generic telemarketing strategies. It’s also useful in collection campaigns, because it allows organizations to continue to pursue older debt when all previous contact attempts have failed.

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Statistically, successful results occur in the first five dialing attempts.

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Analyze patterns for more successful outcomes.

Analyze the data where you’ve achieved a successful call outcome in just one or two calling attempts and look for patterns:

•  Time of day

•  Title

•  Gender

•  ZIP code

It’s important to frequently run an analysis on the volume of successful outcomes that you gain per dial count so that you don’t run into a situation that piques the interest of the FCC. Do some analysis on dial counts versus closed records.


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Outbound Strategy #3: Establish the right KPIs

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Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and their assessments are critical. The most important numbers are those

that add to the top line: •  Lead-to-sale conversion •  Converting business •  Booking appointments

•  Collecting debt •  Increasing profit

Just because people look and feel busy doesn’t make them productive or successful. Before you undertake an outbound campaign, clearly define your KPIs. Success isn’t necessarily about the number of dials or connects.

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Review your processes.

An optimized process adds valuable time to the agents’ availability to the system for further calls. Cut your losses to ensure that your agents know when to close a call and move on.

With the right processes, your agents won’t just spend time talking; they’ll spend time talking to the right people to meet or exceed their KPIs.

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Managing data is different than managing people.

Cloud-based contact systems manage the majority of your data and allow your managers to develop agents and the team as a whole.

Many contact centers have the same person managing data and agents. This requires them to have the skills to successfully manage and motivate agents, as well as the skills to monitor your real-time statistics and act accordingly. This is a lot to ask of anyone.

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What to look for in an outbound system:

•  Legislation and compliance •  Flexibility

•  Multiple dialing modes (preview and progressive dialing can be beneficial for some campaigns)

•  Additional contact features and functionality

•  Ease of use

•  Real-time and historical statistics

•  Integration points

•  Easy data manipulation

•  Scalability

The Most Important Strategy: Blend inbound with outbound

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Use skills-based routing for a better customer experience. Your agents have different skills when it comes to customer contact, so make sure you’re maximizing their capabilities if you’re working in a blended environment. Skills-based routing ensures that an agent with the right skills is serving the customer who needs those skills the most. The right system will also provide agents with the customer data they need to provide the best experience possible.

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Put a callback strategy in place. Your customers don’t want to wait on hold. And when they have to, you can experience higher call abandonment rates and lower customer satisfaction. Callback technology gives your customers the option to be reached by an agent at a later time—allowing you to give your customers back what’s most important to them: their time. The less time customers spend on hold, the more productive they and your agents can be. Callback technology is a cost-effective way to increase customer satisfaction, while also alleviating spikes in call volume and improving overall contact center efficiency.

Our Cloud Contact Center is more than just software. It’s an interaction-oriented cloud solution that will modernize your contact center to provide an optimal customer experience and drive your organization’s performance. It’s also a future-proof investment. It can integrate with your current technology environment, regardless of how complex. And you’ll be able to leverage new technologies as they come online. Read more about our Cloud Contact Center Solution. For more information or to speak to a sales representative, fill out our form. We’ll contact you as soon as possible.

West delivers communication solutions that help brands create connected customer experiences. We have 30 years of experience strategically improving customer interaction, enhancing productivity, and increasing profitability with clients in health care, education, utilities, and diverse commercial industries. West Interactive Services solutions include IVR & Self-Service, Proactive Notifications & Mobility, Cloud Contact Center, and Professional Services. Experience Connected at west.com/interactive.

Cloud Contact Center

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benefits of multi-channel strategies

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