Watching a recording of last week's Creative Virtual webinar: 'A New Customer Service Paradigm: Customers are Now Demanding Self-Service Options and Why You Must Adapt' raised some interesting points about how far we should be taking our multi-channel approach.
Although I'm a huge advocate of us looking to global leaders not just leaders in UK housing there has to be a limit. Although IVR (Interactive voice response) seems like a tool that is being widely adopted among the big corporates I'm not sure it would work for us at the moment.
This session also highlighted how far behind we are in terms of customer access with chat and email being incorporated into call centres in 1996.
This was incidentally the year I started secondary school and if I remember rightly a year or two before I had a mobile phone. I don't think at that point I had an email address and think web chat would have been far beyond my imagination. If memory serves me correctly this is only slightly after my mum professed the opinion that the internet would never catch on whilst we did homework on Encarta.
Another eye opener was social media being incorporated into call centres in 2008. A quick trawl of my timeline tells me it was July 2008 I joined Facebook making me a very late but enthusiastic adopter.
Now we can all agree the internet has caught on where now? Someone asked me at a project meeting what was the 'next big thing'. Having just been to a seminar on digital and comms I was able to talk about augmented reality and RFID both of which I can see becoming really useful tools for housing in the future.
But if we consider that we're only now looking at introducing live chat into our contact centre that puts us 16 years behind the leaders in this field. Given that I wouldn't have dreamed of some of the technology we now see as everyday I'm not sure I can imagine where we'll be in 16 years time.
I'll be keeping my fingers crossed that it will include the huge transparent video walls you see on CSI. And with creator Antony Zuiker putting this only two years behind the times four years ago I hold high expectations for our new offices!
@creativevirtual
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