Smart business owners know that it costs them less money to keep a customer than it does to acquire a new one.  This point is especially important to note for small to medium-sized businesses that have limited marketing budgets and resources.

First-contact resolution is a critical factor in keeping your customers happy, loyal and away from your competitors.  Customer service and help desk agents that are a company’s front line of communications must be armed with the tools to satisfy customer questions quickly and effectively – in one call. Customers expect to bring a problem or question to your attention and have it resolved in a timely manner.

Today’s consumers are finding themselves on a “highway”  of communications mediums in which they can ultimately choose the optimum, quickest method of interacting with a help desk or customer service department. Whether these customers generate inquiries via phone, e-mail, fax, Web chat or SMS, contact centers are quickly realizing the need for their own “traffic cop” to control and efficiently manage every contact, and are doing so in the form of a multimedia contact center within their help desk.

A multimedia contact center is designed to give customer service agents the tools to optimize communications and control the delivery of every contact, regardless of media type. By creating this “multimedia highway,” every communications channel receives the same care and attention as a phone call, resulting in consistently high service levels for customers.

Integration of a multimedia contact center into the typical agent help desk is guaranteed to help companies improve first call resolution, limit call abandonment rates, and boost customer satisfaction.

Improving first call resolution can be achieved by enabling agents to view at a glance the availability of others so that they can properly route calls to the team member best-equipped to resolve the caller's issue.  Having this relevant information on hand will enable the agent to greet the individual by name and redirect them to the appropriate “expert” if more dedicated attention is called for.

Then, more basic inquiries, like paying a bill, can be navigated to an automated speech recognition or self-service system and later transferred to an agent, if need be.

Tools and functionality like multimedia queuing and intelligent routing give customer service agents the tools to treat all customers with the same levels of attention, regardless of how they contacted the business.

The companies that do not address this evolution in how they interact with their customers will soon find themselves out of business, with one of their many competitors happy and ready to accept their customers.

ERNIE WALLERSTEIN JR. is president of Zeacom, a global provider of contact center, unified communications and process automation software, solutions and services. Nearly 4,000 enterprises across the globe count on Zeacom to optimize their workforce and drive operational efficiencies, cut costs and increase customer satisfaction.