The digital customer service universe is evolving rapidly.
Contact center adoption and support for first generation digital channels such as Email and Web Chat, including video chat and co-browsing, is growing very rapidly. Mobile Apps, while tightly tied to mainstream adoption of smartphones, have been around for a while and are gaining traction, even though contact center support has been lagging behind consumer adoption.
While 1st Gen channels are “alive and well”, with chat currently having the highest growth rate of all contact center channels, customers today are rapidly moving beyond those first-generation channels.
Next generation digital channels include social platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. as well as advanced messaging like WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat and many others. Social and messaging are well on their way to become mainstream contact center channels.