Contact centers are increasingly seen as vital to boosting customer loyalty and generating customer intelligence. However, in today’s uncertain economy, contact centers are under renewed pressure to drive down costs—even as call volumes grow, headcounts and budgets shrink, and customers demand fast, personalized service.
While the typical contact center has more buy-in, access to technology, and data than 20 years ago, the combination of intensified expectations and constrained resources makes it now “more daunting to deliver an exceptional experience and true business value than at any point in the history of the contact center,” says Brian Cantor, principal analyst and director for CCW Digital, a global online community and research hub for customer contact professionals.
One way to cut costs is to shift customers away from phone-based support to purely digital and automated channels, such as chatbots and self-service tools. But doing so is not the complete answer. For one thing, these approaches don’t always deliver on the personalized service that customers increasingly expect.
For another, some customer issues are complex or urgent enough to require the empathy, judgment, and knowledge that are still best conveyed by speaking directly with a human. Done well, these one-to-one experiences are often the difference between a satisfied customer who will increase their spending with the company and recommend it to others and one who will vocalize their dissatisfaction and shift to a competitor.
However, live phone support is also the costliest form of customer service, which is driving contact centers to look for new ways to reduce support costs through automation while still delivering a high level of personalization at scale. This Harvard Business Review Analytic Services report will explore the challenges businesses face today when working to deliver a personalized and cost-effective customer experience through the contact center.
This article is posted at salesforce.com
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