While live phone calls are still considered the bedrock of a call center, going digital can open new doors for a company’s success in the customer services department.

Nowadays netizens want to engage with their brands directly through messaging services like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. They also want to utilize the live chat option or chatbots to save time they would spend talking to an agent on phone.

However, going digital-first doesn’t mean you should abandon your traditional call center infrastructure. The new channels are only going to strengthen it and work seamlessly together to distribute load and scale consumer demands.

So, let’s find out how you can take the big leap and go digital-first.

Explore a Wider Range of Channels

Although all customers prefer having a live agent respond to their queries, the demand seems to be growing thin as we move down from older generations to the new ones.

This demand calls for exploring newer and more effective communication channels to meet customer expectations regardless of their generation. While these channels are normally available at the fingertips of customers, some of them may also be seen as “informal” means of communication.

There are quite a few messaging and social media channels you can shortlist for your business. It’s not going to be possible to use every channel so the best approach would be to offer an ominchannel support to your customers through a few “formal” channels.

Let Your Agents Lead From the Front

Since millennials are the largest workforce in almost every industry today, they know how they would like to interact with a brand if they need to purchase a product or service. So, your agents are also likely to be aware of the latest trends in customer services.

Allow them to lead from the front and give suggestions on how to improve the experience for the customers. They would also be able to tell which channels are more conducive to growth and whether they should transition to a live phone call to satisfy a customer.

See What Your Competitors Are Doing

Customer behavior is not a constant variable; it keeps changing with market demands and highs and lows in price trends. In a similar way, you have to adapt your contact center goals and introduce new ways of interaction with your customers as per demand.

One of the goals of a contact center is to meet the customers where they prefer to meet. And this involves looking at what other brands and particularly your competitors are offering. The new generation, for example, is now comfortable with shopping right from their Instagram feed and some even prefer one-click checkout options to place their order quickly and effortlessly.

Keeping up with these trends should therefore be your utmost priority. Even if it means dropping one of the older channels to make room for a new one, go for it.

Allow the Customer to Guide You

Customers can be the best guides because they know how they and other people from their generation want to get in touch. It has also been observed that 90% of customers prefer a business that offers multiple communication channels and ones whose customer support is always available.

As a brand, you can focus on fostering relationships with different types of customers through different channels. These meaningful connections built over media that the customers prefer are going to go a long way.

Design Workflows to Give the Agents More Flexibility

Working across different communication channels can sometimes get challenging for the agents. So, if you have decided to adopt a digital-first approach, the first step is to develop workflows that will allow the agents to capture multiple interactions effectively.

Agent training is going to be vital for this type of approach because they have to handle different channels simultaneously and each channel comes with its own pros and cons.

Your KPIs Will Likely Need to Change

An omnichannel contact center with digital-first approach on its forefront is going to be centered around asynchronous interactions. And therefore you would definitely need to revisit your KPIs or change them altogether to measure the performance of your agents realistically.

For example, in an environment where the agents are handling different channels at the same time, it’s very difficult to measure response times, if not impossible. Similarly, it will be cumbersome to determine if an agent was able to achieve first-call resolution or not.

Be prepared to be using a huge volume of unstructured data coming your way through multiple communication channels and performance metrics if you decide to go digital-first. But that doesn’t mean you won’t be using analytics for your future business decisions. The only thing that will change is the way you use that data and turn it into actionable insights to improve your customer experience and the way your call center operates holistically.  

Conclusion

A digital-first approach for a contact center utilizes the ways people communicate with each other in real life. Even if they seem too informal to start with, you have to adopt them because this is what the new generations are moving towards. However, that doesn’t mean you should get rid of the traditional approach of providing support over the phone altogether. It just means scaling your customer service efforts in such a way that they adopt more channels of communication without sacrificing the quality and responsiveness of your customer support.