Media blending

In today’s modern multi-medium communications age the ability to measure and manage all forms of interaction is known as media blending. Here, voice calls, emails, text messages, and even web call-backs and chat enquiries are received at a single point and distributed to the right people capable of handling the enquiry.

Benefits

Forecasting inbound calls and messages is not an easy task.  Customers call and email when they want to … not when you want them too.  This inevitably leads to fluctuating workloads and organisations then have to decide how to have enough people to deal with the peaks - which means that in troughs you have people sitting idle - or accept that at peak times you will keep customers waiting. 

Blending lets you automatically manage the work.  If you mix inbound calls, outbound calls, emails, SMS text, call-backs and chats you can keep everyone busy all of the time and still meet all your service levels.

Medial blending in action

Increasingly as their customers turned more to the Internet, a leading metal processing firm got more and more customer enquiries through e-mail or other media, than just through normal voice calls. It was becoming obvious that although their agents were still busy on calls, e-mails were being left unattended in the Sales Team mailbox, and customers were not getting dealt with promptly. The day they lost a new customer because of this, they knew they had to do something fast.

The answer was to blend together the phone calls and e-mails, so that e-mails were dealt with promptly, while not keeping callers waiting. When customers call the call centre they don’t want to be kept waiting, so it was decided that e-mails would only be distributed to agents when the number of calls fell below an agreed number.