Utility companies are increasingly prioritising excellent customer service. An effective contact centre service is the cornerstone of communications with their customers. Now technology dictates that traditional channels of communication are being replaced by real-time digital media.
The Hostcomm Hosted Predictive Dialler Contact Centre service is a perfect platform to help utility companies connect with their customers effectively. Though phone calls are still the main communication method for many, younger customers instead prefer to engage in ways that suit their own lifestyles such as web chats, text messages, social media or phone apps.
Now that smartphones with mobile technology like 4G and GPS are common, this offers you much greater potential to reduce your business costs. Text, email, social media and web chat communications continue to rise in popularity compared with phone calls, and all these multi-channel options are becoming more cost effective.
Nearly 90% of current users with an opinion agreed that technologies through cloud-based solutions will reduce costs. And as a result, a third of contact centres are planning for hosted solutions. (Dimension Data 2015 Benchmarking Report)
Currently, traditional communication channels continue to be the main way that customers interact with contact centres. However, increased use of new digital channels, including text, social media and web chat, can improve customer satisfaction.
Since utility companies are generally only contacted when something's gone wrong, it's essential to make it easy for the customer to make contact in a way that suits them. New channels of contact can shorten customer waiting time and interaction time, all making for a better customer experience.
Mobile channels offer utility companies a great opportunity to meet the need of increased efficiency. By including these to their customer contact options, utility providers can make new convenient channels available that suits their customer's lifestyle, giving them greater control.
Analysis by Statistica suggests that smartphones have reached over 80% penetration in the UK. Combined with the adoption of 4G technology at around 40%, the stability and number of services available for mobile customers will increase significantly.(2)
Hostcomm’s ability to integrate with many quality CRMs and Workflows can increase the effectiveness and accuracy of customer interactions even further. Successful contact centres are now investing heavily in new channels and over 74% are expecting their traffic to grow and 87% expect their non-voice traffic to increase.(3)
Hostcomm's Hosted Predictive Dialler service offers a seamless transition of call centre traffic into the multi-channel technology options. Learn more about how Hostcomm is working in partnership with a call centre that has in-depth experience of working in the utility sector. Download the Inspired Outsourcing Case Study.