When contact center managers are looking at self service solutions for their contact centers they tend to treat the channels as independent, and that quickly runs into problems. Sometimes a client might send an e-mail in, and they may or may not hear a response and then call in. The difficulty with that situation is that if the customer service agent (if they are implemented as separate channels) doesn’t have a record of the e-mail. How much better would it be if a customer sent an e-mail and then phones 2 days later and the representative can say “I see that you recently sent an e-mail, are you calling about that issue? Or is it a new issue?” These are really quality of service issues when you do multi-channel service. Also, when you do multi- channel you also need a common knowledge based strategy across the multiple channels. -Greg Gianforte, CEO, of RightNow Technologies