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Ryan Advisory recently released their first big survey of the contact centre industry. The research features information from over 300 executives in the industry so it’s a very good and highly detailed analysis of what is changing in contact centres today.

The research features many insights, but I’d like to just draw out and comment on one area – the changing channel uses on contact centres today. In the UK today there is a split of a little more than a third of contact centre interactions being non-voice (40%) – the remainder being voice calls. The Ryan research indicates that there is a strong shift towards non-voice channels so we can expect to see the proportions changing soon.

But it’s interesting to see how channel use breaks down further in the UK market. With all these new technologies, it feels almost like a surprise to see that 57% of contact centres in the UK are still supporting customers by post and 54% accept faxes.

The most popular non-voice support channel is by far email. 96% of contact centres in the UK are supporting email, but 70% are also supporting social media and 28% are already using chat bots.

There are various other channels such as SMS and chat that are all hovering around the 30-something percent mark, but I think the really interesting point here is that almost three-quarters of UK contact centres are now supporting social media service channels.

What does this mean for the industry? Serving customers is now such a complex business using so many diverse channels – are the measures we are using in contact centres still correct and are we hiring the right people? I think the broader nature of customer service today as indicated by the Ryan Advisory research shows that the industry is now far more critical that it was in years gone by. I’m going to think a little more about some of the outcomes from the Ryan survey because I think there are some trends here that all of us involved in CX need to think further on.

Click here to visit the Ryan Advisory website and if you have any views on my article then please do leave a comment here or get in touch directly via LinkedIn.