Sea-Change Coming to How Contact Centers Operate

April 01, 2015

Those who’ve been in the technology field long enough can remember when it took some time to connect with whatever or whomever you were trying to reach. It was just the way it was.

But these days, no one is interested in waiting for anything. If customers can’t get an instant connection with you or your company, they have no compunction about jumping ship.

In a on the homepage of inContact – a leader in cloud-based content center solutions – Joshua March, founder of Conversocial, looks at the impact “Social” is having on today’s contact centers, and how leaders need to respond if they hope to survive.

“Even 30 seconds is too long for today’s in-the-moment, always-engaged customer to wait, spelling trouble for the future of customer service through traditional channels like email and phone,” March writes. “The world is in the middle of the biggest shift in personal computing; the transition from desktop computers to smartphones and tablets requires an entirely new, mobile-first approach to customer service.”

As such, March looks at three major shifts in how people are now communicating with each other (and companies), all of which would be considered outside of the traditional call center model.

The Social Contact Center: “For major companies, social media has risen and now makes up to 10 percent of all inbound customer contacts, and is growing faster than any other service channel,” March says. “This powerful tool ensures customer voices are heard, both by companies and customer peers. Social media offers a convenient, mobile-first, real-time medium.”

Peer-to-Peer Resolution: “As customers trust brands less, they are beginning to trust their peers more. Customers have found their voice on social, and now that voice is growing louder and more powerful,” March notes. “Customers are turning away from brands and toward each other, expecting faster and more authentic engagement than ever before.”

Mobile Messaging Applications: “These messaging apps are the biggest new force in communication, and only growing,” he says. “The daily message volume on WhatsApp (owned by Facebook ( – )) is now 50 percent bigger than global SMS volume.”

It seems the die is cast for the future of communications. As March says, “With 64 percent of consumers preferring texting over voice as a customer service channel when given the choice, customer-centric organizations need to have real agents who are empowered to be flexible, authentic and able to resolve real issues in-channel.” It can’t be made any clearer than that.