“Hello! It’s fantastic to hear that you rolling out your new offshore call center. I’ve been thinking about our discussion last week, and the high touch model talked about really coincides nicely into my next Nuance blog post…”
I launched into an email to an old business associate who works on the cutting edge of outsourcing and often seeks to get inputs and vet his ideas – now via his social network where we reconnected recently on LinkedIn. His current venture in outsourced customer service for technical support creates value through applying something radically new, yet suspiciously old. This direction may reflect the direction many customer service contact centers may need to head towards – with fewer, highly trained, empowered specialists. My friend just launched a contact center focused on, “smaller projects, which are low volume but need a high-touch approach.”
This model, while seemingly expensive and not very profitable at first glance, is a model contact centers not prevalent today, may insure the future of your customers experience with your brand as the calls that do get to an agent become fewer but more complex. Evolving contact centers will at first augment the current business processes including home agents, as well as other channels available to your customers such as mobility.
The current economic and technologic climates require this move towards one to one care. For most enterprises 2/3 to a full 3/4 of people who interact with banks, airlines, telcos, mobile carriers, eTailers, work with them over the web. Additionally, mobile and web payments are becoming more and more distributed to the edge where the individuals sit and data is distributed channels across individual networks (see iPhone apps like eTerminal...) Consumers simply need this high touch, high specialized agent that everyone would have thought only good for Zappos.com about 18 months ago.
But in the end, companies that don't adapt and evolve more quickly can risk losing an opportunity or change. And change they shall, because overall experience matters more than ever.
Originally Posted on http://community.nuance.com/blogs/expertsblog/default.aspx
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