Category Archives: Tips

Give Your Customers The Channels They Want!

Welcome to C3’s Industry Insight blog series inspired by articles and comment on the web.

In this blog, our Marketing Manager Natasha Rutterford takes a closer look at the importance of tailoring communication channels to your customers.


It should come as no surprise to hear customers have preferences when it comes to communication.

The availability or otherwise of preferred contact methods makes a difference to everything from customer satisfaction to repeat purchases and  revenues.

Despite this clear evidence, it’s surprising how many companies either limit the channels on offer or have them working in discrete ‘silos’. 

The classic example of this is Social Media, which straddles the divide between customer service and Marketing/ PR in a rather awkward fashion, allowing some customer contacts to ‘fall through the cracks’.

If a client has made fruitless complaints via Twitter or Facebook and then have to call a contact centre, they are likely to question your brand commitment to customers (and whether they want to be one of them!)

A well-organised, joined-up approach, however, turns irate consumers into advocates and champions of your organisation.

Think about what contact channels you currently offer your clients. Are they centralised or fragmented? Do you know who is accountable for different interactions via each format?

We are operating in a multi-channel world and brands ignore this at their peril!

Continue reading Give Your Customers The Channels They Want!

Inbound-Only Contact Centres; A Customer Service Roadblock

Recently whilst browsing Twitter I came across a conversation between a leading international bank and a client.

The customer had an urgent issue and had tried to contact the bank’s call centre but was unable to get through. They then took to Twitter, asking for help and a call back from the company.

Continue reading Inbound-Only Contact Centres; A Customer Service Roadblock

Multichannel Management: more than a buzzphrase?

The Forrester Research report ‘Ending the multichannel frustration’ demonstrates how increasingly complex it has become to provide customer service.

According to the report, only 39% of companies earned an “excellent” or “good” customer experience index rating, whilst almost two thirds of brands were rated as delivering an “ok” to “very poor” customer experience.

The report outlines three key areas where customer service departments are struggling:

  1. Supporting the breadth of media types
  2. Empowering agents with a full view of customer interactions
  3. Communicating contextual answers to customers 

These issues stem from the lack of integration between communication channels, both technically and functionally. This might have been acceptable five years ago. But we live in a multichannel age where we expect to email, call and Tweet an organisation, and for them to have a common-thread view of all those interactions.

Without an integrated contact centre solution agents are unable to track customer enquiries across channels, which is frustrating for them and the customer.

Contact is our multichannel contact centre. This browser-based solution gives organisations the ability to stream all their enquiries into one unified interface. We also support outbound campaigns across the various channels, for a complete “360 degree” view of your communications, and PCI Compliant billing across channels.

Where does outbound marketing fit into the multichannel mix?

Companies are finally getting on board with “multichannel” and investing in contact centre software that is able to unify their fragmented communication channels.

There are now a number of solutions available that simplify the management of your multichannel operation. They are designed to capture disparate inbound enquiries and send them, in a unified queue, to your agents.

However, where some of these systems struggle is with outbound capabilities. Many don’t support outbound communication at all, which obviously creates another frustrating interaction silo where valuable customer data can fall between the cracks.

The ideal situation is for your multichannel contact centre to provide inbound/outbound functionality – where outbound campaigns and subsequent inbound enquiries correlate for a substantial impact on the consistent experience. This ensures you can monitor the impact of your marketing campaigns and make any necessary changes in response to live results.

Our multichannel contact centre software, Contact, offers this fused inbound/outbound functionality giving you a 360-degree view of your channels and customers. We also support centralised (and PCI Compliant) billing so customers can easily transact between channels.

Everything can be launched and managed via one browser based interface for a comprehensive and holistic view of your customer.