Taking an omnichannel approach to customer service is no longer an option for today’s business leaders. In today’s world, consumers expect companies to interact with them on the channels of their choice, offering a consistent, personalized, and convenient experience across every platform.
The organizations that adhere to these evolving expectations generate amazing results. Brands with great omnichannel experience around a 9.5% increase in annual revenue on average, as well as a 7.5% yearly decrease in cost per contact. Unfortunately, implementing a truly omnichannel experience isn’t without its challenges.
There are still blockers preventing companies from developing a truly unified customer experience strategy. Here are the 5 biggest challenges businesses face when building an omnichannel contact center, and how you can overcome them.
Giuseppe Careri, Chief Technology Officer at XCALLY says:
“The key to overcoming blockers in an omnichannel contact center is to embrace flexibility and adaptability in all aspects of your strategy.
Here’s where XCALLY can prove to be the winning solution: thanks to a scalable omnichannel system, it will be possible to customize the use of the suite based on the company’s needs and priorities.”
Blocker 1: Mistaking Omnichannel for Multi-Channel
Perhaps the first and most common mistake companies when trying to build an omnichannel contact center, is assuming that omnichannel and multichannel service are the same thing. While both of these strategies involve connecting with and serving customers using a range of platforms and tools, there’s a distinct difference between omnichannel and multichannel service.
With a multichannel customer care approach, businesses use different channels to connect with customers, such as SMS, email, online messaging, voice, and video. However, each channel is managed and utilized independently. With an omnichannel strategy, on the other hand, all of the different channels and platforms are unified, allowing for a truly consistent, end-to-end experience.
To ensure a contact center is truly “omnichannel”, companies need to choose the right flexible, open platform for CX. The right solution should integrate all of the disparate tools businesses use for customer communication, from IVR flows to social media, web chat, voice, email, and more. Crucially, it should also integrate with the essential tools companies use to enhance customer experience, from CRM platforms to workforce management tools, and even collaboration apps.
Blocker 2: Understanding and Enhancing the Customer Journey
The most effective omnichannel contact center doesn’t just focus on unifying as many different communication platforms and tools as possible. Investing in too many unnecessary channels complicates workflows for agents, and increases business costs. With this in mind, companies need to build their omnichannel strategy based on an understanding of their customers.
Utilizing customer journey tools allows businesses to map out the various touchpoints their customers use on a regular basis, to pinpoint where they need to offer service. Innovative contact center solutions can include access to customer journey mapping, helping businesses align and optimize their resources, forecast demand on different channels, and improve agent productivity.
What’s more, the top omnichannel contact center solutions can also feature access to innovative analytical and reporting tools. These resources make it simple to create customized real-time dashboards for agents, track customer trends over time, and make more intelligent decisions about how to adapt, scale, and transform the contact center.
Blocker 3: Engaging and Empowering Employees
Customer experience and employee experience go hand-in-hand. Businesses can’t offer amazing customer experiences, if they’re not first empowering their teams with easy-to-use platforms, valuable guidance, and the right training resources. Failure to properly implement a plan for engaging and supporting staff members could mean that businesses waste money on technology their staff members refuse to implement and adopt.
The best way to address this problem is to make employee engagement a core part of the omnichannel contact center strategy. Start by looking for platforms that include solutions specifically designed to boost employee productivity and performance. Workforce engagement and optimization tools, for instance, can provide agents with access to useful, unified desktops, where they can track customer information, product details, and more in the same convenient space.
Dashboards and reports designed to monitor agent performance in relation to specific metrics like CSAT and call resolution rates can provide managers and supervisors with insights on where staff members need extra training and support. There are even platforms that come with quality assurance and recording tools, to help enhance future training, and call scripting strategies.
Blocker 4: Using Data to Scale
Customer expectations and communication trends are constantly evolving. To stay ahead of the competition, business leaders need to ensure their omnichannel contact center can evolve quickly, based on the changing needs of their teams and customers. While a flexible, omnichannel contact center platform can give businesses the freedom they need to add new channels, integrations, and capabilities to their workflows, they still need data to make the right decisions.
Customizable reports, dashboards, and analytical tools built into the contact center ecosystem can help to overcome this problem. The metrics and insights gathered from these tools don’t just provide insights into the customer journey and employee performance, they can also help business leaders to make more informed decisions about which channels to prioritize going forward.
With extensive reporting tools, companies can improve the performance of their contact center, without having to guess which strategies make the most sense. What’s more, because the reporting features built into omnichannel platforms connect data from all different channels and touchpoints, they provide a more comprehensive view of the full customer experience.
Blocker 5: Preserving Security
Finally, one of the biggest concerns companies face when implementing an omnichannel contact center strategy is keeping customers secure, and teams compliant. Though cloud-based communication tools are designed to keep data safe and private today, the more channels companies need to access to communicate with customers, the more risks they face.
The good news is that simply upgrading to an omnichannel platform can help to boost security, by giving businesses more end-to-end visibility over their communication strategy. Business leaders can implement security policies and strategies that apply across all of the channels teams use to communicate with customers. What’s more, many platforms now include extra security features.
There are tools that support two-factor authentication, end-to-end encryption, and real-time monitoring features which help with tracking compliance and adherence. Maintaining security doesn’t have to be a challenge with the right platform.
Unlocking the Power of Omnichannel
Omnichannel communication strategies are now a must-have for business owners. While implementing a true omnichannel contact center can present some challenges to business leaders, most of these blockers are easy to overcome. With the right platforms, a little perseverance, and plenty of support from your contact center vendor, any business can unlock the power of omnichannel.
