Sabio identifies ten key 2011 trends impacting today's changing customer service landscape

Sabio, the specialist contact centre and unified communications systems integrator, predicts that organisations will need to wake up to the reality of the connected consumer during 2011 if they are to successfully balance today's rapidly-evolving consumer landscape with continued growth. The company believes that three issues particularly will have a strong impact over the coming year: how organisations successfully manage their brand in an increasingly 'social' world, how businesses adjust to dramatically increased smartphone penetration, and how they respond to the requirement for effective multi-channel service propositions.

According to Sabio's Head of Consulting, Stuart Dorman: "Contact centre operators are operating in a more complex customer service environment, where consumers simply won't tolerate bad service and are more than happy to go online and broadcast their dissatisfaction. Having to address this more complex connected world - while still having to manage day-to-day customer demand levels and respond effectively - will prove increasingly challenging during 2011. Next year will see a growing gulf between organisations that successfully respond to the customer service challenges created by social network feedback; the new always-on service imperatives driven by 24/7 smartphone access; and the need to create a single view of customer interactions across multiple channels."

To help address these and other challenges, Sabio has identified the ten essential activities that the company believes should be top of any customer service director's agenda for 2011. The company's Action List includes:

1. Reaching out to customers on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, monitoring and making sure customer feedback is listened to and actioned.

2. Ensuring your website, self-service channels and agents are ready for the impact of the Mobile Web enabled by 3G smartphones and tablets - customer service operations need to be optimised for mobile - especially given new OFCOM research that shows the UK leading Europe in smartphone penetration, with 70 percent growth year-on-year.

3. Consistent response across all customer touch points and channels - ensure you're ready to process interactions across multiple channels, and blend work items to create a single view of each customer.

4. Optimising the return from your web engagement by improving your online help capabilities: aim to keep customers online, and implement web chat to help with order confirmation and fulfillment. One Sabio customer is clearly getting its growth plans right, having experienced 100 percent month-on-month growth in website usage for a number of months this year.

5. Refocusing on external quality measurements by using Customer Feedback to measure metrics such as Net Promoter Scores and agent performance, and incentivising agent performance based on specific customer feedback. It's increasingly clear that today's best practice organisations - such as the winners in this year's European Call Centre Awards - are now measuring agent performance based on external quality feedback scores such as NPS and Customer Feedback, rather than traditional metrics like Average Handling Times.

6. Making sure you've got an App for that - dedicated mobile apps for iOS and Android platforms provide customers with a pre-configured channel for their mobile interactions and account management - effectively creating a 'brand in the hand' opportunity. Apps encourage customer stickiness and, when integrated with the contact centre, will prove an essential element of your broader customer contact strategy. According to Forbes research, 44 percent of US retailers plan to enable a mobile app within the next year, while an Adobe study conducted this year suggests that 37 percent of consumers prefer purchasing a product from an app rather than using the Mobile Web.

7. Giving your customers real choice - stop hiding your phone numbers and e-mail addresses, it only skews your demand curves and makes it impossible to get an accurate measure of real customer demand. Instead, open your floodgates, let customers use the channel of their choice, and start gathering customer insight.

8. Making the most of customer insight - your contact centres are a goldmine of customer insight and information - make sure you capture this data and find ways to action it - investigate speech analytics techniques to help automate this key process.

9. Optimising back-office performance - there's been a lot of focus on workforce optimisation in the contact centre, now there's a real opportunity to extend these best practice techniques - and develop a single view of interactions - to the back-office processes that also significantly impact customer service levels.

10. Adopting a more proactive service approach - help avoid un-necessary contacts by reaching out to customers first. Use SMS, email or outbound IVR techniques to get in touch with customers to keep them up to speed on where they are in the process. Examples here could include payment reminders or approval confirmations.

"2010 has been a challenging year for most customer service organisations, and it looks like 2011 will bring more of the same. At Sabio we believe that actioning any of these ten recommendations can deliver immediate benefits for organisations. This is particularly relevant within today's more connected customer service environment - where consumers are increasingly happy to serve as advocates for those organisations that consistently deliver a high standard of service," continued Stuart Dorman. "However, with a powerful social framework now in place, companies simply can't afford to ignore customer feedback. That's why it's essential that organisations do everything they can to make sure that their service infrastructure is fit and ready to meet 2011's customer service challenges head-on."