Communication Channel Selection - A customer's view!
Last week I had a poll on LinkedIn to understand the customer's point of view in selecting the communication channel to reach out to any product / service provider company, when they face issues.
Though the poll didn't fetch as many responses as I would have loved, but nevertheless I have still put together inferences I could draw from the result as it stands, and would like to share my POV on how companies can use this for building Consumer Contact Centre Strategy.
To begin with, here's how the poll result looks like:
Without going any further, let me put a disclaimer in place:
Views expressed in this article are entirely my own and represent only my personal interpretation of the results of poll hosted by me on LinkedIn as shown above.
This has no link / bearing on my present or past employers, nor has any data used from organization or its clients.
Now that being said, let me go straight into the topic.
To structure this article, I will go through each of the options listed above in order of percentage score in the poll and provide following:
This option represents in essence that the customers are smart enough to pick a channel most appropriate for the type of issue they are facing. The "type" of issue could vary to great extent though so might be worth looking at some of the broad categories here:
a) Urgency - If the issue requires immediate response, most likely customer will choose Live channel like Phone, Chatbot instead of email
b) Complaint Vs enquiry - Most customers would prefer straight away registration and acknowledgement of complaints, while they would be willing to wait for general equiries
c) General Vs Specific - If customer is not clear about the query itself or who should be contacted to address the issue, they are more likely choose live channel than others where a template based approach is used.
If my poll result is assumed to be true in general (may not be in all cases!), then I feel it would be good idea for companies to consider following strategies:
I) Reason Code Analysis - This is most logical conclusion, isn't it! This will result in identification of common type of issues faced by customers and defining scope / coverage for each of the channel of communication.
II) Fix Root Cause - If above analysis reveals large number of inbound communication for any particular issue, it makes complete sense to fix the root cause to reduce the inbound communication and optimise workload
III) Avoid unnecessary channel deflection & keep IVR options crisp - If based on this option, the customers are indeed smart enough to choose the right channel for communication then to provide better user experience avoid unnecessary channel deflection and go to customer through their preferred mode (Refer points in "Access to channel itself")
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2. Access to channel itself:
This option indicates that customers tend to simply act based on the means available - it could be due to any of following:
a) Channel not known to them
b) Availability of channel on medium of their choice
c) Simply their personal limitation
Whatever be the cause, each one can be used by companies to put forward better strategy. Here are some pointers:
I) If channels are not known, it is purely because company has not advertised these channels clearly. One easy way to do this could be putting the channel details in place right at the point of usage itself instead of in some separate place which customer has to search.
II) Sometimes the customer might prefer one medium over the other (e.g. web instead of phone) and if you don't provide appropriate channel through that medium it could lead to customer not able to reach you. If this is true, you must ensure that you provide communication channels over variety of mediums (including social media!)
3. Previous best experience:
According to me, this choice plays a very crucial indicator and determines which channel customer chooses to contact the provider (strangely, this happened to be the third popular choice in my poll result!!). A very simple example of this is, if you happen to get a prompt response via chatbot, you might always prefer that as against calling customer care, but at the same time if chatbot happened to be useless in your experience, you will perhaps not choose that medium again!
Perhaps most human behaviours are driven by past experience and hence I feel if you want to strategically push for a particular channel as your preferred way in which you would like your customers to contact you, then you must focus on customer experience for that channel.
I think this is why there is such a huge demand these days for CX (Customer Experience) across all industries and I would fully endorse those initiatives!
4. Time of the day:
And this happened to be the least voted reason in my poll and I'm not surprised to be honest! When one needs to contact the service provider I'm sure one wouldn't bother choosing the channel based on time of the day!
Companies might like believe that due to unavailability of contact centre agents at particular time of the day customer will choose alternate medium to raise their queries, but I feel the choice will be largely determined by earlier three reasons than the time itself.
If you would like to however ensure that some of the queries which overwhelm your contact centre at the start of the day be routed to other channels then I would advice better Self Service facilities to be offered to the customers so that they can get necessary details by themselves instead of attaching your contact centre straight away!
In summary, here are some final take-away from this: