Remember that not everyone wants self-service. And even the most Web-savvy users will encounter situations when they need to send an e-mail or will want to chat with an agent or even send a fax. From a business perspective, there are also times when you want users to call. In situations such as a product recall where there is an issue of safety, or when there appears to be a good, old-fashioned sales opportunity, we can’t forget that a live interaction may be the most effective option.

It’s a Multi-Channel World
In a research study published by Yankee Group in 2006, analysts point out that customers often choose self-service as the way they interact with companies, and that Web-based service channels will grow the most (compared to other options), with an expected increase of 86 percent from 2006 to 2008. Meanwhile, live-agent calls are projected to decline by an average of 18 percent during the same period. Yet, the same study shows that even after this shift, Web self-service interactions will still account for less than 15 percent of all interactions, with chat and e-mail accounting for another 30 percent.

So, yes, as eVergance and others have predicted, self-service has taken off. But the phone (or e-mail for that matter) is not going away. And just to complicate things further, more and more interactions span multiple channels before they are completed. A request that starts by searching in an online knowledge base may lead to a chat session, which escalates to a call, and then is confirmed via an e-mail message. In fact, Yankee estimates that 60 percent of interactions between customers and organizations are cross-channel and span the entire customer lifecycle.

Are You Ready?
This complexity puts a premium on having a CRM optimization strategy that is truly multi-channel and supports all of the “old” (phone, IVR, e-mail) and “new” (chat and IM, forums, wikis, RSS) channels. Despite the emergence of open source components and the appeal of a best of breed approach, it also may swing the pendulum a bit back to suite vendors—and especially those that offer a multi-channel framework approach that provides the flexibility of best-of-breed, with the simplicity and scale of pre-integrated solutions.

If customer service channels behave like media channels, the latest approaches will continue to provide new capabilities (think Web 2.0) and take “share” from existing channels, but will never completely replace them. This is similar to the historical impact of broadcast television on radio, or what online media (and eBay!) initially did to newspapers. We can do things we never dreamed of online, yet despite their challenges, newspapers or broadcast radio stations aren’t going away anytime soon.