Today’s Challenge: The speed and usefulness of information sharing is growing exponentially. We swiftly search, watch, listen, read, type and talk – all at the same time – until we get the answers we need.
Innovation/Acceleration/Transformation: Redefine the customer experience to fit the multimodal mindset.
It’s all about speed, choice and a “cool factor” that’s hard to measure. Just adding another channel isn’t going to cut it. Reinvent the way information is assembled and shared. Develop new, multimodal content. Make sure customer-to-agent communication includes multiple modalities with the ability to move from one to another smoothly within the same interaction. Accelerate customer progress.
Multimodal customer service, as defined, helps deliver a more effective omnichannel experience. Omnichannel for contact centers involves blending all customer communication channels using consistent routing rules, unified reporting and real-time visibility into omnichannel performance. Multimodal content and personal interaction brings life to these channels to help meet customer needs quickly and intuitively.
A working definition of multimodal customer service in the 21st century: providing short, targeted bytes of information to customers – in the form of content and/or personal interaction – incorporating an optimal combination of communication modes (aural, gestural, linguistic, spatial, visual) and channels (chat, video, voice, email, social, mobile, Web) to effectively resolve a specific customer service need in the shortest amount of time possible within a single/the same interaction.