In PhaseWare’s recently announced new eBook—It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad Multichannel World—you’ll find some fantastic information on why multichannel customer support is so important in today’s wired world. In a previous blog post, I covered strategic requirements for multichannel implementations—accessibility, seamlessness, consistency, and reliability. Today, I’ll be summarizing key best-in-class characteristics you can use as guideposts in assessing your multichannel experience and comparing yourself to the best.
For any customer-facing organization, the plain truth is that best-in-class customer service and support delivers numerous benefits for the customer, the support agent, and the company as a whole. When compared to all the rest, best-in-class organizations have seen 24% service margins compared to just 13%; and exhibit first-call resolution rates of 75% in comparison to just 60% for the remainder of the field.Why Best-in-Class Matters
Best-in-Class Characteristics
As a baseline, it’s important to understand a few key characteristics of best-in-class multichannel support. Best-in-class organizations possess the following characteristics:
- Access to real-time information
- Education about alternate or additional channels
- An understanding of the impact of improved customer management
- The integration of all services under a single executive
To reach best-in-class, the upfront investment of time and money will be difficult to avoid. You’ll need to streamline information management, standardize workflows across channels and, in many cases, implement a new customer service and support software solution. If done smartly and strategically, these investments will result in a holistic solution that includes the necessary components to meet the demand of your customer service activities and business goals.
The last point, however, is vital. Without a champion in the C-suite, these investments will likely never be made. Upper management must understand and fully support what it takes to achieve best-in-class status.
Top-5 Improvement Actions
As you begin to formulate a strategy for improving your multichannel support, be mindful of the information shown in the list below. These bullet points call out the top-five activities resulting in the biggest improvements in multichannel support (or any single channel for that matter). In each case, the improvement comes from enabling agents or customers to more easily access the right information at the right time.
- 64% Access to information for quick resolution
- 55% Integrate and capture data for troubleshooting
- 55% Accurate and consistent across channels
- 52% Standardized escalation protocol
- 48% Self-service support
To read more on multichannel support strategy and implementation best practices, download the PhaseWare eBook, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad Multichannel World. We expand on all the listed above with great additional content on best-in-class multichannel models, some tips and best practices for implementation, as well as a bit of information on PhaseWare tools that support the multichannel experience.
Please take the time to check it out and let us know what you think. And if we don’t hear back from you before Wednesday, Happy Thanksgiving!! Enjoy the holiday!