I have a theory that Nordstrom culture informs Amazon.com’s excellent service, but no matter the venue, customers expect prompt and effective support. Never before has competitive advantage in the contact center held more relevance as economic woes mount and eCommerce tramples retail sales (the sad green line):

Companies have to accomplish more with less as evermore consumers seek online savings and competition for their attention intensifies. They need solutions to boost productivity. New insights on the efficiency of text-based communications in the contact center are revealed in an InstantService white paper.  Most notable are the needs for a unified console for chat/email to enable automation wherever possible, and separating text from other communication channels to capitalize on the unique text skill set required.

A properly designed console allows support agents to access information from any application without switching between screens. Anything from CRM, ticket and order management to knowledge base systems and SaaS offerings neatly tie into a unified console.

The unified approach reduces contact center handle time per incident, allowing agents to manage more simultaneous sessions with greater effectiveness.  Abracadabra – increased productivity leads to huge cost savings across the board:

• Reduce handling time
• Spiegel response time fell from 36 to 5.5 hours, less than half the industry standard

• More capacity
• Charter Communications grew from handling 80K to over 300K chats per month

• Decrease expenses
• McAfee cut wait time from 25 minutes to 40 seconds, reducing costs by 86%

Further details can be found in InstantService’s white paper available here.