How will organisations communicate with their customers in the future?
An article by guest blogger, and communications specialist, James L Tanner
Today’s primarily phone-centric call handling teams will become a thing of the past in the next ten years with ever changing communication devices and always connected communications habits of today’s younger generation of consumers who will become the dominant customer base of many organisations.
Most people will only have a mobile device, this will also connect to your organisation’s voice and data network so you can communicate from anywhere. By the end of 2014 there will be 6.8 billion mobile connections, equal to the world population and they will almost all be smart phones.
Improving the customer experience using Social Media
Increasing use of self service, and social media including online customer communities, social networks like Facebook, Youtube and micro blogs such as Twitter is likely to bring about a decline in the volume of calls, fax and post to call handling teams by at least 20 percent, but possibly as much as 50 percent for organisations who handle many simple enquiries particularly in the business to consumer sector. The number of social media searches is already more than Google searches. I can imagine walking through a call handling team location in ten years and seeing only a handful of phones and call headsets
Online communities
Online communities and support forums will be used to post questions, give answers, build a knowledge base which customers and call handling teams can access. When a user goes to a customer web site and searches for a term it will integrate the online forum with their web site and show answers from both. If a question is posted on the online forum and it’s not answered within a defined time, the enquiry will go to the contact handling team to answer instead.
Contact handling teams will be interacting with a new generation of customers. These customers will be adept at communicating using social media, instant messaging (IM), blogs and other collaborative communications tools that haven’t even been invented yet. This will be enhanced with data speeds provided by the mobile networks 10 times faster than today within ten years. In the first 6 months of 2010, 5 billion tweets were sent by people using Twitter. By 2013 we estimate there will be 350 million Twitter users worldwide. As this trend for one to many communication continues contact handling teams will need to invest in the latest technology to monitor and manage customer communication.
In the first instance, encouraging self-service across many channels, e.g. automated phone services like payments, online, mobile commerce and 2 way SMS, multimedia messaging and video clips, will be key to cutting the drain on contact handling resources. Organisations need to have on their website the top 50 simple FAQs, updated monthly, from phone, face to face and correspondence enquiries. The good news is that 50% of people under 44 prefer to contact organisations online or by email today and this is likely to increase in the future since up to 30 percent of all customer contact is either simple queries or progress chasing. 40% of grocery shopping will be done online by 2025 according to OC&C. By 2020 IMRC estimate 90% of retail sales will in some way be influenced by the internet eg price checked online or picked up in store. According to Verdict company reputation and good service are the second and third most important factor to buy online from one site rather than another. So organisations should improve the service they offer to reduce customer contact.
But contact handling teams should also prepare for full on multichannel contact engagement and integrate their management software with social media and Instant Messaging platforms. They should prepare for an integrated environment that would enable them to use two or more channels simultaneously when interacting with a customer. Social Media will become a core part of customer contact. Also, regardless the method the customer uses to interact, it will be important to ensure that users have the option of accessing them all from any mobile device.
Contact handling teams will not be confined to reacting to inbound customer calls/contact either. They will be proactively monitoring consumer discussion on social networking and microblogging sites. Today 15 percent of consumers are posting comments on negative customer experience on social networking sites and of this group 14 percent had done this without trying any other way to complain. They expect the company to see their response and respond. With few companies listening to consumer discussion online it’s hardly surprising that less than a quarter of online complainers received a response from the company. This will change as companies recognise that they need to respond to a customer-driven service world.
Making a call handling team perform well is often challenging but making a multi-channel contact handling team perform well can be extremely difficult. Ultimately, a cultural transformation is required, where customer service teams become highly trained advisors dealing with complex issues rather than simply agents handling simple enquiries. Average call duration will increase and first contact resolution will decrease. They should be driven and motivated to achieve or exceed performance targets and to ensure that, irrespective of the communication channel, customers get a consistent quality of service. They also need to measure performance and response times across all contact channels, not just call performance alone.
We may see more call handling team members working remotely, not confined by the need to be in a central office facility particularly for parents with children. Customer service levels should improve as customers are able to interact with organisations 24 x 7 via online communities and self service for simple queries, payments, renewals, booking appointments and chasing up orders.
Customer Communications Technology
Below is a list of technology which will be widely used within contact handling teams in the future:
- Web chat and Instant messaging: most instant messaging platforms will be able to communicate with each other.
- Hosted phone system and call centre software services: to reduce capital expenditure, use on a pay as you go basis, and to integrate different software providers.
- Voice recognition.
- Speech analytics: automatic methods to analyse speech content as 98% of calls are not listened to.
- Voice biometrics: to identify and authenticate people by their voice.
- The convergence of IT and telecom infrastructure – voice, video and messaging.
Work force optimisation software will be used in the back office not just the contact handling front line staff to ensure an organisation has enough resources to process transactions in a timely manner.
People’s presence status worldwide outside the call handling team will be known from their mobile so they can be contacted by a contact handling team member if they have a specific skill set to support contact with a customer across any channel.
Virtualisation: home workers and an organisation’s worldwide sites will all be linked to the contact handling team with one queue
Eco-friendly
The government has a target to reduce green house gas emissions by 33% in 2020 and by 80% in 2050 so organisations will become ecofriendly; they will reduce their energy and water consumption, implement renewable energy as well as increase recycling. Customers will demand this and if organisations don’t comply they will find another supplier that will.
Happier customers
Organisations have already started to encourage customers to follow them on Twitter, set up a Facebook site and get customers to contribute to their blogs. They are starting to communicate with their customers using the method the customer prefers, this keeps customers engaged and allows them to connect closely with them.
Communicating with the mobile generation
From our own research the way consumers under 40 in the UK will communicate in 2020 will be similar to the way teenagers (and Japanese consumers) communicate today. Recent focus groups we conducted with teenagers about their communication habits revealed that mobile devices are the primary communication method. They use them to contact their friends via SMS, instant messaging, to access social media applications and also to make voice calls, which they still, surprisingly, favour over SMS, social media and online forms of interaction.
Japan
For 16 – 24 year olds: 90% use mobile web access, 61% use it more than 1 hour a day. They can access almost all web sites from their mobile and instant messaging is free with a flat rate data bundle. People use their mobile device for almost all transactions/ interactions e.g. mobile TV with built in shopping, payments, flight check in, ID cards, messaging. Mobile content needs to be on one screen and mobile configured, quickly uploaded, brief and simple to interact with, to work effectively.
The contact handling teams of 2020 will need to be prepared for contact on the move. All access points into the contact handling teams need to consider mobile devices. The ‘always on’ nature that fully functional mobile devices provide will require contact handling teams to monitor and manage multiple contact methods 24 x7. For example, the one to many communication (Twitter for example) will mean that customers communicate their issues with the wider world rather than directly to the organisation. Contact handling teams will be working around the clock to monitor what is said about their products and services in the cloud and respond appropriately. The managing director of Starbucks UK personally responds to many Twitter complaints even out of office hours.
The customer is king
As a company’s reputation is the sum of impressions held by the external world, it is important to recognise that today and in the near future, the reputation has to be owned by everybody within the organisation not just by the senior management team and the customer service department.
The social media explosion has created an instantaneous, multi-channel, many-to-many communication web, and organisations will have to invest in tools and resources to manage and contribute to it in order to protect their brands. A blog in cyberspace can be as influential as a negative write up produced by a known journalist, but requires a different but fast response. Customers should start to receive a better experience as organisations will be more aware and responsive to customer feedback, irrespective of the channel. The customer will finally become king!
Author:
James Tanner, Communications Department Ltd. © helps organisations maximise the efficiency of call handling teams to become leaders in their industry. For more information click here to contact us or call + 44 (0)20 8127 8302, email: jtanner@communications-department.co.uk