218 respondents took part in the survey, which was conducted in conjunction with ProtoCall One and Call Centre Focus throughout the month of May and run on callcentre.co.uk.
Over two thirds of respondents now offer 'social' as a channel, with Twitter found to be the most popular social media channel for customers to use to contact the organisation, with 48% of respondents indicating that this social media channel is more popular than Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs, amongst others.
Only 27% of respondents currently enable customers to move seamlessly between channels – something which is soon becoming imperative in order to provide a good customer experience.
Yet 83% of respondents are ignoring mobile as a customer service channel, as they do not yet offer a mobile customer service app to customers.
70% of teams were found to be multi-skilled and handle all channels within the contact centre. Yet 25% of respondents said that they don't record how customers have contacted them. This disconnect between customer interaction history and the contact centre agents shows that companies are using all channels available to them, but in isolation and without any knowledge of previous interactions with the company.
Companies need to recognise the importance of a single view of the customer – and, encouragingly, 51% of respondents do see that there is room for improvement in how their contact centres handle multiple channels.
"At a time when new communication channels such as mobile are on the rise, businesses must find a way to make the customer experience as connected as possible. Businesses need to unify all communication channels to ensure all interactions are dealt with effectively without losing any element of the conversation which has already taken place," said Keith Wilkinson, Vice President of Genesys for the UK, Ireland and South East Africa."
"It's absolutely vital that companies start investing in this technology sooner rather than later, and this research shows that there has in fact been a lot of progress in recognising the need for agents to handle multiple channels. But there is still a long way to go, and companies need to tie all channels together and record what happens over those channels, so to provide an excellent and consistent customer experience, eliminating the need for people to repeat information unnecessarily," concluded Wilkinson."