The Application and Development of Instant Messaging in Customer Contact Center
Date Issued
2007
Date
2007
Author(s)
Hung, Kuang-Li
DOI
zh-TW
Abstract
Customer contact center is already the necessary delivery channel to manage customer service after the evolutions over decades. The major contact vehicles changing from phone to multimedias including fax, short message, email and web since the Internet booming 10 more years ago. Though the technology enables the contacts of various media channels in order to lower down the communication and channel cost, the popularity of consumers usage is still not in the scale.
Is this because the consumer behaviors changes taking such long time? Or the new channels usage didn’t reach the scale of economy? Or the technology maturity hasn’t met the real customer expectation?
On the other hand, the instant messaging and related applications have become very popular communication tools by integrating P2P technology, we can see some key instant message platform providers like MSN, Skype, AOL, Yahoo! Messenger, etc. The application of instant messaging diffuses from PC to mobile phone and other wireless devices. Can it be possible to integrate the instant messaging tool with customer contact applications toward broader adoptions? The integrated applications should meet customer service level requirement, reduce the communication cost and manage the routine operations. What are the necessay functionality required by those enterprises for their adoption and promotion?
We start the research from the macro market analysis. We observed the instant messaging market grows pretty quick in terms of volume and scale. And the trend is moveing from personal applications toward enterprise applications. The instant messaging has several benefits including lower communication cost, effective communication mechanism, network externality, convenient for multi-party communication and collaboration, diverse communication medias and personal privacy consideration. We believe ther’s high possibility of integrating instant messaging and customer contact application.
Besides, we precede the analysis framework from three dimensions. The first is customer usage behaviors analysis. Next is feasibility of technology enhancement, application function and management necessity. The third is the serviceability, return forecast and business benefits assessed by enterprises. It facilitates the change of enterprise and consumer contact pattern if these three factors could be integrated seamlessly. You can see the possible change of enterprise providing different operation model while the customer contact via multimedia and instant messaging becoming the majority.
The last, we apply six forces analysis to simulate the co-opetition analysis of existing vendors and new comers. Try to predict who is the big winner among the new market opportunities and existing vendors’ threatens. How would they form the strategic alliance or commece merge and qcquisition? The findings and conclusions may provide a clear profile for instrial competitions and better direction for those inside players. We expect this research can be the help of those vendors and enterprises who are interest in this domain.
Subjects
即時通訊
客戶聯繫中心
六力分析
競合
網路外部性
正回饋循環
Instant messaging
Customer contact center
Six forces analysis
Co-opetition
Network externality
Positive feedback
Type
other