However, with this much variety, it is very important to define priorities. The Pareto Principle states: 80% of business success is a result of 20% of the invested input. For sales and customer service channels, this means: 80% of all customer requests come through 20% of the most common channels.
Most people still prefer communication via phone calls, emails and, during recent years, web chats. Thus, it is very important to focus on these customer channels and make them a priority of your contact center, while implementing new client interaction technologies as well.
Focus on Emails
According to Radicati Group research, the number of email users will reach 3 billion by December, 2019. Therefore, email will continue to lead customer service channels of communication. According to 2016 statistics, an average employee receives 90 emails and sends 33 emails daily. Some of these are communication from you or your company. Try to make email as useful for the client and full of information as possible. Attach a special offer, renewed price, book, or other incentive after or during communication.
Focus on Web-Chat
The Forrester studied live chat usage in 2015. It revealed that 58% of contact centers adopted this channel. This year the number of live or web chats is even larger. Why do contact centers need to focus on this type of communication? It does not require any extra dialing, and your customer can save the chat log for the future. Chat records, by the way, are useful for the contact center as well. Save them and some day this information will come in handy.
How to make web-chat stronger?
1. Female names for agents will increase your sales.
2. Post-chat questionnaires will help your clients to evaluate the agent’s work and will give you valuable statistics.
3. Reduce the number of chats activated simultaneously per agent to three.
Focus on Phone Calls
The later Forrester research shows that phone calls bring you 79% of requests. Clients are becoming better and better at using voice-activated or self-service platforms, giving some down time to a live agent. It doesn’t mean more rest and less work for call center employees, but it means they will be busy with more productive tasks instead.
