For the well-ordered customer contact centre, the only difference between voice interaction and interaction by email and other non-voice media should be – the media itself.

Just as any inbound or outbound voice communication should provide an efficient and rewarding experience for the customer, an email or other multi-media exchange should also result in complete customer satisfaction.

Multi-media channels can be managed and tracked in exactly the same way as voice channels. Unified reporting across all channels as standard practice will reveal insights from interactions from whichever media they are conducted. Similarly, business rules should be managed across and common to all channels to give the customer a consistent experience whichever the media.

With common business rules in place across all media types, campaigns can be conducted using a blend of SMS, email and voice channels to optimise agent skills, improve contact centre productivity and contain costs.

Lake solutions can be designed to cater for any media type – email, fax, SMS, web-chat and video, as well as voice. Natural language rules can be applied to trigger automatic responses where the system’s interpretation level of confidence is high. Alternatively, multi-media traffic can be automatically distributed to agents in the same way as ACD distributes voice, and agents can respond accordingly and, where required, make attachments and escalate a multi-media interaction with a ‘call me’ option.