Serving The Empowered Customer

摘要

Today's customers; they control the business conversations with vastly increased ability to find out information on products, services and suppliers and, through social media, to influence others' buying decisions, not just their own. For these reasons more customers are anecdotally going to self-service: web, mobile apps, IVR/speech recognition, and peer service/support via social media first and then only reaching out to contact centers if their needs cannot be met. Those channels are changing. Voice is still the primary means with e-mail second, but there is a big rise in the number of centers handling chat and SMS, reports Keith Dawson, principal analyst at Frost and Sullivan. This growth in these channels is not necessarily at the expense of voice but as incremental additions, as more sophisticated switching systems get put in.