We’ve just come back from the International Avaya Users Group conference in Las Vegas. It was an exciting time to be at Ceasars Palace. With over 3000 representatives from the entire Avaya user community, the conference had the best attendance record yet.
Attendees who dropped by our booth had a great opportunity to see a demo of our products and to meet Dan Campion, who recently joined our sales team. Dan’s enthusiasm for providing the right solution to our customers comes from over 25 years experience in various strategic roles in the telecommunications industry. Dan says that “after seeing the excitement in a customer’s eyes once they saw a demo of a TASKE solution, and then after selling TASKE and hearing how much they loved the product and how it changed the way they ran their call centers, I decided I had to join the team.”
We also had the opportunity to share a customer success, presenting our solution for LogistiCare, a leading manager within the U.S. of medical transportation programs for a diversity of public and private organizations. The problem that LogistiCare faced was how to obtain accurate and usable data from 14 individual sites. These sites work together across time zones to manage more than 1,500 transportation providers and to coordinate over 25 million trips for more than 8 million people each year. Our solution gave call center supervisors real-time monitoring and reporting of their agents in each site, as well as summary reports for operations across all sites. To help the organization meet evolving requirements, we provided the company with tools for continuing to produce new reports, customized to their exact specifications.
Now, let’s talk about what we heard at the conference. The theme of the week was about the changes affecting our industry, which, more than ever, are driven by consumer demand. One speaker reminded us of a time not so long ago when many IT departments resisted allowing smartphones to be part of their communications infrastructure. Today, end users expect to be able to communicate using the devices of their choice, and we’re seeing an explosion in the diversity and number of those devices. As well, the growth of social media presents challenges in meeting expectations for instantaneous and spontaneous client interactions.
It would be easy to conclude that voice communication alone no longer offers the best service to customers. However, “The US Contact Center Decision-Makers’ Guide” reports that voice (via telephone communication with an agent) remains the channel of choice at 71.6 percent of all inbound communication channels. Other options, such as email, text chat, SMS, and web collaboration are used in relatively equal proportion across the remaining 28.4 percent.
With customers showing little preference for options other than voice, moving into other service offerings without the proper planning and resources can be risky. Customers themselves are changing. Generally, the “Millennial Generation” doesn’t give second chances. One speaker at the conference indicated that 73% of users in this generation will abandon after one bad experience and of that group, 85% will turn around and air their dissatisfaction in social media. On top of the bad PR, you risk that a poor customer experience is literally going to cost you financially. Adam Mandelbaum reports that a recent Harris Interactive and RightNow Technologies poll shows that “the customer experience does more than just determine who your repeat customers are. It also determines how much they spend.”
Let’s go back to basics and remember that the goal of a contact center is to provide accurate and timely information. So what does all the recent change mean to your contact center? Offering a service just because it’s available doesn’t necessarily mean your organization will benefit. Unless you do something well and have sufficient resources to ensure it actually makes a difference to your customers, there’s the potential that you’ll lose more than you’ll gain.
Voice has been around for a long time, and while it may not be “the latest thing”, it works. Focus on doing it well, and you’ll continue to benefit from satisfied customers.
See you next month.