December 1, 2012
By Leonard Klie, Editor, CRM magazine and SmartCustomerService.com

Piecing Together Multichannel Support

In 2011, it turned to Parature for a customer service solution. With the solution, the players can contact customer service through email, Facebook, and Twitter. The company has shied away from phone and live chat support because its customer service interaction volumes on those channels are relatively low, according to Christopher Newman, PlayFirst's social media and customer support manager. The company receives about 250 support tickets a week via email and 15 to 20 tickets a week through its social media outlets.

Through the Facebook and Twitter support channels, gamers can also access PlayFirst's online knowledge base and customer forum and submit inquiries, without leaving the social networking site.

Thanks to the extensive knowledge base and forum posts, the number of support tickets submitted has decreased by about 30 percent. When tickets are submitted, the response time is typically less than 24 hours. This more streamlined and efficient support system has kept staffing and customer service spending at a minimum.

For a company like PlayFirst, "social is very easy to monitor and respond on," Newman says. "And when it's not, we can still direct [users] to our regular ticketing system."

PlayFirst is open to adding other channels, like phone and live chat, should it make sense, but right now, the company and its customers are satisfied with what's available, according to Newman.

PlayFirst not only realized its own limitations, but also took the time to determine how its customers want to contact the company. And it's not trying to do too much, a frequent mistake.

"Don't think you need to offer the full breadth of channels," Leggett states. "Figure out which ones complement your brand and offer those."

"To be successful, you need to know who your customers are and how they like to be supported, and then have people in place to respond to them in those channels," Chung adds.

Make It Personal

That, too, is sadly not the situation at most companies. A great many still operate under the mistaken notion that automation is a cure-all for high customer service costs and inefficiencies. That mode of thinking is no longer in step with current customer sentiment either.

Regardless of the channel they use, customers want a personal touch. Whether communicating via phone, email, live chat, text message, social media, or other medium, some maintain that problems are more easily solved by a real person. It can also add to their perception of how much the company values them as customers.

For this reason, scripted responses are best avoided with these customers, according to Chung. Customers can see if a company's response is scripted, he warns. "A lot of companies want to automate the response, but [for these customers] you can't do that. You can't have robots respond. You need a real person to respond."

That's not to say that automation shouldn't be applied in other cases and that some of the same elements can't be shared across channels for consistency. Nuance's Skrbina suggests that companies can cross-apply the same natural language engine and voice biometrics technology to multiple interaction types. "A lot of companies have invested a lot in speech and natural language interfaces and are only using them in the IVR," she says. "You can apply natural language understanding not only to the voice channel but also to text applications like chat or a Web-based FAQ," she says.

"We know that two of the most used channels are phone and mobile. You can have the same voice and personality answering the phone for both through one single interface," she adds.

Beyond that, common visual and architectural designs, reusable content, platform logic, services, platform elements, delivery processes, as well as common data collection and analysis tools can all be applied across channels for greater consistency, according to Stephen Powers, a vice president and research director at Forrester. Personalization and contextualization can then be applied across channels based on shared customer information, including the customer's location, social status, past behaviors, purchase history, languages, and devices used, Powers adds.

It's also a good idea to integrate the contact center software with the applications and support databases for the other channels "for greater efficiency," Extraco's Mostiller suggests. "It's all about expanding CRM software capabilities to gain process efficiencies."