Article Customers Demand Multichannel Customer Service

1. Customers Demand Multichannel Customer Service
Are you meeting customer service expectations?
Today’s customers are savvy, opinionated, and empowered. They demand a service
experience which is tailored to their preferences and history.
Customers are more sophisticated today than ever before. They expect much from the
companies from which they do business, including customer service. Customer service is
going through a revolution to match the demands of a customer experience world. Today’s
best service companies use sophisticated technology, customer analytics, and business
intelligence to provide the best customer experience.
The customer services market is going through notable changes as a result of the different
ways companies and consumers are now communicating with one another. Newer
capabilities addressing these changes include: Customer Analytics and Multichannel
Customer Services.
Customer analytics is the practice of analyzing customer data to find patterns, behaviors,
and insights. customer analytics includes predictive modeling, data visualization, information
management and segmentation.
Multichannel customer services serves customers with all the options for how they would
like to communicate with a company. Multichannel customer service is all about creating a
seamless experience to the customer, regardless of which channel they choose to use.
Why is multichannel customer service important?
Multichannel combines with customer analytics to provide a single customer view. For
companies, this offers the benefit of being able to provide service to individual customers far
more efficiently, as well as the data and insight to improve communications, sales, and
service operations. Most important of all, since the customer can be provided with a higher
level of service, it can lead to an increase in customer satisfaction loyalty and advocacy.

2. When prices and products are often very similar between competitors, then customer
experience is one way to differentiate your brand from its rivals. Customer service makes
people talk about a brand. Customers will become advocates, recommending a company to
friends and colleagues purely on the basis of receiving professional service.
Customer advocacy is ultra-important in our socially connected digital age.
Ultimately, poor customer service hurts companies in two ways: in lost business due to
losing disillusioned customers, and in the bad PR and negative goodwill generated by
unsatisfied customers.
“Customer analytics and personalized customer service experiences used to be reserved
once for enterprise Fortune 500 but today these capabilities are easy to use, appropriately
priced and a significant priority," - Stephen Griggs, Infinity Contact COO.

3. The Benefits of Connecting Customer Analytics and Multichannel Customer Service
1. Build rich customer profiles by capturing data across all customer touch points.
2. Arm your teams with the insights and information via analytics to increase
performance success.
3. Target your most profitable prospects and customers through their preferred
communication preferences.
4. Deliver outstanding customer experiences across all channels.
5. Use analytics to uncover new opportunities.
Are you leveraging multichannel capabilities?
Technology is rapidly changing the ways that customers interact with their favorite brands.
To attract and retain customers, it is now essential to provide integrated multichannel
customer support. The proliferation of new channels also yield an unprecedented amount of
data that Infinity can help your enterprise can use to predict customer preferences and
problem areas. Technology (cloud, social, mobile, multiple channels across chat, instant
message, IVR messaging, and the web) are transforming customer service. In fact, by year
end 2014 40 percent of the market for campaign management budget will be spent on
customer service, analytics, and social according to Gartner.
Are you leveraging analytics?
Analytics are the key to understanding customer behaviors, patterns, and demands.
More than half the battle is acquiring and maintaining quality customer data. It is important
to build a customer database repository that allows to effectively utilize unique attributes to
segment buyers. Using segmentation you can:
Build personalized campaigns
Embed business rules engine to support agents to proscribe the right offers to the
right customers at the right time in the right way.
Enable agents to market complex product and service offerings

4. The Business Driver of Customer Analytics Utilization Reason
Augment customer service, customer care 71%
Respond to customer needs in a timely
45%
fashion
Point of sale response time via multiple
42%
channels
To support customer self service 21%
To improve efficiencies (margins, costs) 21%
To increase revenues 20%
To share information, educate 17%
Want to learn more? Visit http://www.infinitycontact.com/RevenueLeadershipSystem/
“The perfect opportunity to create
operational efficiencies while supporting
your customer’s self-service initiatives.”
– Tom Leidigh, Infinity Contact Founder
and 30 year customer service industry veteran.