Greetings from the Mirage in Nevada, where the Bright Pattern team is on the scene for the 17th annual Call Center Week conference and expo. This is one of our favorite industry events, as it’s a melting pot of the best and brightest ideas from across the industry , and we’re thrilled to be a part of it.
It’s impossible to hit the highlights of every session, but one topic that is being talked about and that we wanted to expand on is the importance of building a customer service strategy for the “post-voice” era. It’s a topic that warranted its own workshop, and it’s one of the most important things your business should be considering today.
What do we mean by the post-voice era? Well, in the early days of customer service, during the second half of the 20th century, the telephone was the dominant means of communicating with a company. It was a challenging time for customers, as call centers had little more than the telephone and snail mail at their disposal. As such, long hold times and unsatisfied customers were the norm—hence, companies held the power in the customer relationship.
The death of this era first began around the mid 1990s, with the emergence of the Internet which changed just about everything in customer service. Around this time, brands started looking beyond the telephone for service strategies. Channels like email support, Web chat and eventually mobile service became integral tools, as they made it easier and more enjoyable for customers to communicate with agents.
That’s not to say that voice communication is going away. Rather, it’s becoming just as important to offer other in-demand communication methods.
What we are finding, though, is that today—almost three decades into the Internet era—many brands are still failing to maximize their use of multichannel communications. We are still seeing many major brands using a limited number of channels, and thus are failing to meet the needs of the modern customer.
In light of this, we wanted to use Call Center Week as a call to action for every contact center manager to take a hard look at their strategies and ask if they’re keeping up with the times.
Bright Pattern specializes in helping contact centers integrate a wide variety of channels like SMS, social media, live chat, email and more. To learn more about how Bright Pattern can outfit your brand to handle the post-voice era of communication, click here.
