THE EVOLUTION OF

THE MULTICHANNEL

CONTACT CENTER

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This white paper, based on interviews with hundreds of US contact centers over the past five years, aims to

quantify the multichannel nature of customer contact. After showing where the industry has come from, and

currently is, some of the business drivers and customer requirements for new and existing channels will be

explored, and a view of where multichannel customer contact will be in 2015 will be given.

Even in the past few years, the channels through which customers contact businesses have changed considerably.

The following diagram shows that in 2007, telephony was very much the primary method through which

customers chose to deal with businesses, with over ¾ of the inbound traffic to contact centers directed to voice

agents.

Telephony self-service accounted for 6.9% of interactions, with the same figure for email. Letters and fax were

over 5% of inbound interactions and text chat was only 1.2%.

Figure 1: Inbound interactions by channel, 2007

Telephone (live agent)76.2%

Telephone (pure IVR or speech recognition)

6.9%

Email6.9%

Text chat

1.2%

SMS0.2%

Web collaboration / page pushing

2.4% Letter3.0%

Fax2.1%

Other

1.1%

Inbound interactions by channel, 2007

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By 2011, the picture was somewhat different. Telephony calls made to human agents had dropped to only 71.6%

but this difference had been made up by the growth in voice self-service calls, to touchtone IVR and speech

recognition systems.

Email too had jumped to over 10%, with letters and fax declining correspondingly. Web chat, although still

relatively low, showed significant growth.

Figure 2: Inbound interactions by channel, 2011

Telephone (agent)71.6%

Telephone (self-service)

12.2%

Email10.2%

Letter2.1%

Text chat

1.8%

Fax

1.0%

Web collaboration

0.5%

Other0.5%

SMS0.1%

Inbound interactions by channel, 2011

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Successful channel uptake is generally an iterative process. Businesses introduce a channel (usually based upon it

being cheaper to support than the incumbent channels), and customers trial it. If it works for all concerned, it can

be deemed successful. However, it’s more likely that customers trial it and reject it, either vehemently or simply by

reverting to the existing, well-known methods of contact. In such cases, businesses have to consider whether to

drop the channel quietly or amend it so that it meets the needs of the customer, who will then retry it and make

their decision accordingly.

Figure 3: Stages of channel uptake

This can be seen in the relative uptake of two channels, email and text chat, over the past four years.

Email, which has been around as a major customer channel for well over a decade, was offered by 75% of

businesses in 2007 and 80% in 2011. Text chat on the other hand was offered by only 11% of businesses in 2007,

but grew to 29% by 2011.

On the face of it, text chat looks to have been the more successful in the past few years. However, when we

consider the volume of interactions of each channel – that is, the success of each with the customers – the picture

changes.

From 2007 to 2011, email saw an increase of 7% in the number of businesses using it (from 75% to 80%), but the

proportion of contacts that were through email rose by 48% (from 6.9% to 10.2%). In the same timeframe, text

chat uptake by businesses increased by 163% (from 11% to 29%), whereas usage by customers rose only 50%

(from 1.2% to 1.8%). This indicates that the take-up of text chat by customers is behind that of businesses. Email

on the other hand, hardly changed its penetration into businesses, but customers were keener to use it more

frequently. This suggests that email is a Stage IV of adoption (widespread customer uptake after business

improvement) and that text chat is probably at Stage II (customer trial after initial implementation).

It is interesting to note that social media does not fit this suggested model, being driven far more often by the

customer than the business. Reasons for this will be explored later in this paper, but this is a good point to

emphasize that without customer support, no channel can possibly succeed.

Stages of channel uptake

I. Channel introduced by business

II. Customers trial new channel

III. Businesses address failures of channel

IV. Wider uptake

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Customer drivers for channel usage

Some of the key features that customers look for in a channel include:

The perceived effectiveness of the channel: customers contact a business because they want something

done. Feeling satisfied that their request has been taken care of is a vital ingredient to this – many contact

centers still get calls asking if they have acted upon a customer’s email – and the reassurance provided by

a real-time channel that an issue has been dealt appropriately with should not be underestimated.

Channel availability: one of the advantages of telephony has been its ubiquity. Almost every home has a

telephone, and the wide uptake of mobile telephony has meant that the telephone has near-universal

penetration. Of course, the rise of the cheap computer and the popularity of smartphones now means

that the telephone is under serious challenge in the availability stakes.

Ease of use: familiarity also comes into this. Although it may seem as though most people are comfortable

using a phone or computer, some IVR or speech recognition systems can make life more difficult than

customers want.

Low cost of use: a particular issue for some people, with excessive amounts of time spent on hold in

queue costing a significant amount of money.

Painlessness: a customer’s subjective view on how difficult and ‘painful’ the overall customer interaction

experience has been, including the requirement for any follow-up interactions.

Speed of conclusion: this refers to the immediacy of response and the overall resolution time, including

the need for any follow-up work, or waiting to get an answer.

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As the following diagram shows, the perceived effectiveness of email has risen as companies have invested more

time and effort into answering emails quickly and effectively. In 2007, 34% of emails were answered the same

working day, which rose to 74% in 2011, a clear encouragement to customers to use the channel more frequently,

which they have done.

Figure 4: Customer experience of email and text chat channels

A case can be made for the future rise of text chat at the expense of email. From a customer’s perspective, the

near real-time response of text chat is far superior to even the best email response rates (i.e. less than one hour).

This speed also means that a 2-way conversation is possible, with clarification and multiple questions being

available in the same way that happens in a phone conversation (albeit more slowly). Customer identity

verification is also in theory possible; although, the reality may be that some customers do not feel secure enough

to divulge password or personal information online.

Text chat’s perceived effectiveness is still not as great as email’s, due in large part to the unfamiliarity of the new

channel to many customers, rather than anything intrinsically less effective about text chat than email.

Email 2003 => 2011 => Chat / IM

Perceived effectiveness

Channel availability

Ease of use

Low cost of use

Painlessness

Speed of conclusion

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Contact center managers' views on how channels are changing show a serious decline in letters and fax, with quite

sharp growth expected in email and text chat. Social media is also expected to grow quickly, with both live and

self-service telephony expected to grow but at a slower pace.

Figure 5: Views on how inbound channels are changing (2012)

10%18%

1% 1%6%

10%14%

4%

23%

49%

4% 4%

28%27% 18%

10%

40%

23%

41%32%

33% 24%

24%

31%

22%

5%

14%

18%

3%

1%

15%17%

1%

3% 5%

24% 27% 29%

39%44%

54%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

Views on how inbound channels are changing (2012)

Don't know / Don't use this

Decreasing greatly

Decreasing slightly

No change

Increasing slightly

Increasing greatly

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Email

Figure 6: Proportion of inbound interactions (with 2015 estimate)

Year % which are emails

2007 6.9%

2011 10.2%

2015 12.2%

Email is the first of the ‘multimedia’ channels, and by far the most well-used, having been mainstream for well over

10 years. Although its penetration rate of over 10% makes it a relative success, this should be placed in the context

of the expectations of contact center managers who in a 1998 survey, confidently expected email to account for

25% of inbound traffic.

Email should stand as a salutary lesson that it is not businesses that make new channels a success, but customers.

Put bluntly, email in its first, Stage I incarnation, failed almost entirely. Too many businesses rushed to push

customers to this new channel – commonly supposed to be cheaper than voice – without having the processes,

solutions or staff to manage this properly. What happened next can be understood as a ‘herd inoculation’ –

enough customers had enough bad experiences from enough organizations that the entire channel was

discredited, even for those businesses which were providing a reasonable service through email or even just

keeping a watching brief.

The reason for this rejection was the appalling level of service provided by many of the early multimedia

businesses. With response times stretching into many days, if not weeks, the companies failed to understand that

any communication with the business has a degree of urgency to it, why else would they be trying to speak with

the business? Of course, even when a response was eventually provided, the issue might have gone away, or been

dealt with by calling the contact center, meaning that customers’ existing confidence in the voice channel was

further reinforced at the expense of the email channel.

It took many years, much investment and the coaxing of customers to try new channels again for email to emerge

in Stage III as a credible channel. Of course, businesses and customers now both realize that email is more suitable

for some interaction types than others (the rise of web self-service has meant email is no longer the only online

communication method available), and complex issues such as complaints, or other enquiries requiring a formal

paper trail are well-suited to email. In fact, much of the demise in the letter and fax as channels can be traced to a

direct replacement by email. Email is an excellent outbound channel, providing reassurance, great levels of detail

and being able to link to other specific areas of information via hyperlinks. As an inbound channel, it has inherent

weaknesses: an inability to carry out customer authentication and to carry out a 2-way conversation being

amongst them, as well as the lengthy wait to get a response. It is also not a particularly cheap channel for

businesses to support. As such, it is unlikely that it will ever rise a great deal above around 12% of inbound

interactions, and is likely in the longer-term to be superseded to some extent by more immediate online channels

such as text chat and video agents.

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Text chat

Figure 7: Proportion of inbound interactions (with 2015 estimate)

Year % which are text chat

2007 1.2%

2011 1.8%

2015 5.0%

Text chat seems to be experiencing the start of a big jump in the US, with the proportion of interactions jumping in

the past 12 months from 1.8% to 2.5% (in early 2012). There is no reason why this growth will not continue: it

works well for customers as providing an immediate response, and with multiple concurrent chat sessions per

agent, it can be a lower cost channel than voice for the business to support.

Text chat has often been used as a ‘point of crisis’ channel, for example, to convert an online shopping basket into

a sale by providing timely service, or if a browser is paused on a webpage too long, perhaps as they can’t find what

they are looking for. In such cases, there are two main benefits to the business to provide text chat: revenue

maximization, and the avoidance of unnecessary calls.

Text chat can also act as a safety net for the customer if an online self-service attempt fails. An analogy can be

made with voice self-service, where a failed session is often ended with the customer ‘zeroing-out’ – pressing zero

to get in touch with an agent. Failed web self-service sessions will often end with a phone call being made, but text

chat can avoid a number of these calls being made, which is a cost saving for the business, and better for the

customer as they do not have to switch device as well as channel.

Self-service

Figure 8: Proportion of inbound interactions

Year % which are telephony self-service

2007 6.9%

2011 12.2%

2015 10.2%

Driven in large part by the huge potential cost savings that voice-based self–service offers over conventional phone

interactions, 66% of US contact centers offer full self-service either through touchtone IVR or speech recognition.

Although this has risen considerably in recent years, we would expect to see telephone-based self-service suffer

somewhat at the hands of the more visual self-service channels, such as those on a company website, or via a

smartphone app.

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Visualization will be the next step in self-service, as it is more flexible, powerful and faster for a customer to be

able to see menu choices and act accordingly. This is not just the case with web-based self-service, which has been

available for many years in various guises, but also with interactive voice and video response (IVVR), which offers a

new experience in that customers will have a menu presented to them on a smartphone which will be able to offer

far more options and functionality than any audio IVR could manage.

Although still some way in the future, the step beyond self-service is where people are removed from the equation

entirely – both within the contact center, and even as customer. The day will come when a customer instructs a

device (a virtual intelligent personal assistant, or VIPA) to carry out a task such as buying travel tickets or giving a

meter reading. The device will interact entirely with a company’s systems without the requirement of any input

from the agent – an e2e interaction.

Social media

Figure 9: Proportion of inbound interactions (with 2015 estimate)

Year % which are social media

2007 <0.1%

2011 0.4%

2015 2.0%

Social media is attracting a great deal of interest from organizations worldwide, following in the wake of massive

consumer uptake. The following chart shows that most businesses are interested and active in this, but perhaps

not yet fully in control of how social media is used in the organization.

Figure 10: How is your organization engaging with social media?

Comment % agreeing with this

Actively engaging, but as a minor channel 49%

Vital to our future and there's a lot of focus on it 40%

We'll wait and see 27%

More use as an outbound channel 22%

Not relevant to us or our customers 10%

Distraction from business 4%

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Recent research below shows two main findings about social media: that the majority of companies are taking this

very seriously, but that the use of social media as a customer service channel is not particularly effective. Unlike

other customer service channels, there is almost no investment necessary in starting up a social media channel

such as Twitter or Facebook. It can be done in minutes, requiring no deep thought or integration with other

systems in order to get it working.

However, businesses have found that they can’t put the social media genie back in the bottle. If a corporate

Twitter account exists – even if it was just set up as an outbound marketing channel, then very soon customers will

try to contact the organization via social media, and will expect an answer. What organizations have found is that

social media quickly becomes a de facto inbound channel, requiring support and standards like other channels.

Figure 11: Business views on how effective social media is for activities

Activity driven by social media Score from 10 % scoring 9 or 10/10

Acting directly upon negative comments and complaints about the company 7.4 47%

Monitoring what is being said about the company, products and marketing campaigns 7.4 45%

Delivering marketing and product information to the customer 7.1 34%

Offering customers a fully-supported customer service channel 6.4 32%

Learning more about our competition 6.0 28%

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Uniquely, social media has taken off as a customer service channel as a result of customer take-up, rather than

businesses’ enthusiasm for a cheaper service channel. Revisiting the chart that shows how channels fit customers’

needs, we can see that social media for some customers can provide a very positive experience with a very low

pain point, and at virtually no cost of time or money: the customer complains, loudly and in public, so the business

reacts quickly and effectively. For the customer, this is great: it is the business for whom the current methods of

social media do not work as well. Not only do they have to carry out their business in public, reacting quickly and

without being able to authenticate the customer’s identity, but they often cannot handle the query without

resorting to another channel such as phone or email, which provide more privacy and functionality.

Figure 12: Possible customer experience of social media channel

Both customers and companies are finding out what works with social media and what does not. Crucially, as with

any channel, success will only come when a channel delivers a successful experience for both sides of the equation.

Social media 2011

Perceived effectiveness The customer says “Jump”. The business asks “How high?”

Channel availability Via PC or smartphone

Ease of use Simple to send a tweet or write on a wall – no queue

Low cost of use Free

Painlessness Venting frustration at a company can be a positive experience...

Speed of conclusion Immediate response and personalised service

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Inbound interactions in 2015

Figure 13: Multichannel interactions in 2007, 2011 & 2015

Despite the growth in non-traditional channels, telephony will remain the key channel for the foreseeable future.

People speak to agents because they can handle complex and multiple requests quickly and accurately: web or

voice self-service will only ever be able to cope with a small fraction of these types of request. Agents will require

knowledge bases, dynamic scripting and access to the rest of the organization’s (experts) in order to deal with

generally more difficult queries. This need is where we’ll likely start see more of an intersection with interactions

that have typically been fielded by organizations’ switchboard operators.

It should also be noted that telephony is a rich mine of information: analysis of call recordings can deliver huge

business insights: the vital thing to understand about analyzing interactions is that it gives contact enters the

answer to 'Why', not just 'What'. Why are average handle times so different across agents? Why are customers of

this product upset? Why are people calling the contact center? With high quality data inputs, mixing audio

information with data such as call outcomes and revenues, analytics also identify patterns which the business had

no idea even existed, suggesting best practice and identifying areas for improvement at agent, contact center and

process levels.

2011

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Summary

Observers of the contact center industry and its media could be forgiven for believing that customer contact has

moved away from telephony and is now mostly carried out over social media. As the statistics show, telephony is

still by far the most important channel for customers, and is likely to continue to be so even in the longer-term.

However, there have been some important changes in the ways customers are choosing to contact organizations,

and these trends are gathering pace:

Social media is now a de facto customer service channel, even if the business only originally intended to use it

as an outbound channel, or to 'dip a toe in the water'

Self-service will grow through the visual rather than audio media – IVVR, videos pushed via text chat, on-

demand online support and e2e virtual intelligent personal assistants will develop

Text chat will take some of the work away from the phone and email channels, and email will take work away

from the letter and fax channels

Telephony still the no.1 channel, with great potential for insight through interaction analytics

Businesses can only suggest new channels – it is for customers to decide whether they will be successful or

otherwise.

About ContactBabel

ContactBabel's major ongoing primary research projects match our experience analyzing the contact center

industry. We understand how technology, people and process work together, and what their future holds. We help

solution providers develop their marketing strategies and talk to the right prospects. We've shown governments

how the global contact center industry will change. We help contact centers understand how to improve and what

their customers think of them. If you have a question about the contact center industry, we can help you.

About Enghouse Interactive

Enghouse Interactive delivers technology and expertise to maximize the value of every customer interaction. The

company develops the world's most comprehensive portfolio of interaction management solutions, spanning

structured, unstructured and self-service interactions. Core technologies include contact center, attendant

console, IVR and call recording solutions that support any telephony environment, on premise or in the cloud.

Enghouse Interactive has thousands of customers worldwide, supported by a global network of partners and more

than 600 dedicated staff across the company’s 16 international operations. www.enghouseinteractive.com.