With advancements in the field of technology, the call centre industry began to understand and adopt newer technologies that help in delivering more value to business. Call centres no more solely rely on phones to take orders and assist customer queries. Customers prefer to call/contact service providers through multiple channels including email, voice or web chat, social media networking, etc. Researchers have shown that businesses following multi-channel customer care strategy achieve more than two times improvement in customer support services as compared to peers using only a single means of communication.
According to a recent report, the following are a percentage of companies using multiple channels to communicate with customers, 98% phone, 96% email, 90% web, 76% IVR, 76% mail/fax, and 55% social media. For increasing customer retention, improving customer satisfaction, and augmenting up-selling and cross-selling, call centres in UK are increasingly employing multichannel marketing process. This helps in delivering best-in-class services to customer’s thereby building strong pipeline.
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Call centre in UK uses multi-channel communication platforms and thus allow companies to engage in the core responsibilities of the organisation. The service providers offer additional opportunities to improve their performance result. The more visible you are to your customers, more is the potential and qualified customer that you attract toward your brand. Companies can use their online presence to mould a brand image that can fortunately boost customer loyalty and retention. The agents of service providers are rigorously trained to better serve customer demands and requirements across numerous channels. In addition, when the prices of products/services offered are similar to competitors, then excellent customer experience is the only way to differentiate from other brand rivals. Poor customer support service leads to lost business and disillusioned customers. Long waiting hours and extra repeated calls can have a negative impact on the reputation of the company.
Therefore, it is very crucial for call centre service providers to offer great customer services thereby optimizing the rapport of the company.
Many contact centers employ multi-skilled routing strategies across multiple sites in order to provide quality customer service. Let us take a look at the top three channels that telemarketing companies use:
1. Phone
According to a report, 98% of companies are the primary means of communication, i.e., phone to connect with customers. However, with technological advancements, numerous innovations are made by telephone as well. Below mentioned are new features evolved in the telephone in recent years.
• Multilevel IVR– Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is a telephone menu system that helps in routing customer phone call to an appropriate agent. This effective technique helps in augmenting customer satisfaction at lucrative cost.
• Advanced Routing – this method helps in routing the call to a specific agent who has domain knowledge and can efficiently solve concerns of the customer thereby meeting the needs and demands of customers.
• Queue Callback – With automatic call back feature, customers no more need to virtually stand in the queue. The caller just needs to request a callback and the professionals of the call centres will callback at the scheduled time without any hassle.
• Warm Transfers – A warm transfer is when an agent transfers the customer call to another agent. The executive informs the new agent about the caller’s issue thereby giving detailed background information about the caller’s issue. This inevitably keeps the agent on the same page and reduces customer frustration.
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2. Video
With continuous evolving technology, video support allows f2f conversation with agents. Video can also be used as a chat feature, which allows the agent to visually see the caller and even the caller’s issue in some cases. This eventually results in excellent customer experience.
3. Social media
Call centre UK are increasingly adopting innovative tools and methods to match up with the changing behaviour of the customer. Social media support is one of the effective means of providing customer support. Many customers prefer to reach out to support service providers through Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc. today, more than 60% of the population expect their inquiries to be resolved quickly. It is reported that more than 15% of people stop doing business and move to competitors if their issues are not resolved on time. Social media is one of the effective tools for harnessing quick response time.
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In essence, it is very important for a call centre in UK to optimise your support service centres with multi-channels of communication to effectively meet the demands and needs of customers.