5 Ways to Align Contact Center Engagement with Customer Preferences

A massive shift in demand for customer service is creating challenges for contact centers – who must now transform how and when they communicate with customers.
  
While many contact centers still focus on engaging customers via traditional phones calls, customers are thinking otherwise. Results from the Harvard Business Review and Corporate Executive Board of 75,000 consumers found that self-service is the number one preference for customer service and building loyalty – with text messaging and e-mail, instead of phone calls, being more preferred methods of communication.
 
If contact centers don’t take notice, then they will likely be met with a lot of silence on the other end of the phone– resulting in missed opportunities to grow their businesses’ brand, sales and customer satisfaction levels.
 
While these demands may seem straightforward, understanding customer preferences – and designing communication strategies upon them – is a complex feat. Each customer behaves differently, and carries different sets of preferences across different scenarios, requiring more than one form of communication. For instance, one bank customer might prefer to receive account statements via email, fraud notifications with mobile calls, and overdraft notices via text message.
 
Here are five steps contact centers can use to take back control – aligning their communications delivery with how, when and why customers want it for long-lasting, profitable relationships.
 
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