Call Centers Without Calls: Win-Win

From a consumer perspective, there hasn’t been a lot of disruption in the call center industry. You still experience hold times, dropped calls and transferred calls. You still have agents scrambling to pull up information on the customer.

Web-based chat has helped alleviate some of these problems, but it still requires the customer to patiently sit in front of a computer. It doesn’t allow for any type of asynchronous communication. And it doesn’t allow you to create an ongoing dialogue with the customer – once a chat window is closed by the user, the conversation is over.

That’s why my company, SnapSolv, is so adamant about creating the next generation of customer communication with mobile messaging.

The facts are simple: 2 Billion people have a smartphone, 91% of them keep their phone with them at all times, 90% of text messages get read within three minutes. Your phone is your new computer. So why haven’t companies adapted their call centers to be mobile messaging centers to meet their customers’ needs?

The mobile messaging solution is win-win:

Win for the Customer: Customers won’t have to wait on hold. They won’t have to sit in front of their computer. Agents will instantly be able to pull up their profile. Most importantly, they can get customer support from anywhere, at any time.

Customers are already used to messaging as a mainstream form of communication – more than 200 million people regularly use Facebook Messenger. On the corporate side, many companies have instituted enterprise messaging for employee communications, utilizing products like Slack or Yammer.

Messaging, particularly for younger generations, is an extension of talking or emailing. So why has it not been part of your customer communication arsenal?

Win for the Company: The hiring cost for call centers is significant. There’s a reason call centers are considered a cost center (erroneously… but I’ll save that conversation for a later date). Any opportunity to reduce your forward hiring of call center employees – or make each employee more productive – will help a company’s bottom line.

Messaging communication allows one agent to handle multiple customers at the same time. It allows them to rapidly pull up information on the customer, since the customer is logged in from the phone app. It allows the call center agent to put the customer “on hold” without the worry of losing them.

Messaging also allows for rapid deployment of a call center. You can have your messaging center hub be up in a matter of hours, not days. You can also push visual messages out to your customers, something you can’t do over a phone. If you need them to see what a part looks like, they won’t have to pull up a web page to do so. You own the entire experience, end-to-end.

Why Now?

So why is now the right time for a mobile customer messaging platform like SnapSolv? The ubiquity of smart phones, the familiarity with messaging, and the high cost of call center labor have created an environment ripe for disruption. Companies have always wanted to reach younger consumers. Why not do it where they spend most of their time – on their phone?