The customer journey has changed drastically in recent years. Consumers aren’t just calling companies when they have an issue, or want to find out about a product. Increasingly, they’re connecting with companies through various channels, from social media, to video, and beyond.
Supporting your customers consistently across multiple channels delivers great results, as 74% of customers prefer being able to contact support through various channels. However, creating an omnichannel contact center isn’t as simple as it seems.
Here’s everything you need to know about omnichannel contact centers, and the best practices you can use to improve customer experiences.
What is an Omnichannel Contact Center?
An omnichannel contact center is a customer service strategy that leverages cloud-based software to ensure businesses can manage interactions with customers across multiple channels. Those channels might include phone, chat, text, social media, email, and video.
Crucially, an omnichannel contact center doesn’t just enable communication across diverse channels. It also helps businesses to deliver a consistent experience across those channels, by unifying conversational data and context across the entire ecosystem.
With an omnichannel contact center, agents and customers can switch between channels without losing context, ensuring minimal repetition in conversations.
Used correctly, an omnichannel approach leads to:
- Friction-free customer journeys: Omnichannel contact centers allow customers to switch effortlessly between multiple channels without repeating information, fostering a smooth and immersive experience with companies.
- Improved customer satisfaction: By enabling companies to cater to the different interaction preferences and communication styles of their customers, omnichannel strategies improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Increased agent efficiency: With consistent access to context, and the ability to move freely between channels, agents can resolve customer issues at speed. They also spend less time switching between apps and tools.
- Enhanced insights: With an omnichannel contact center, companies can capture valuable information throughout the entire customer journey. They can access deeper insights into customer behaviors, preferences, and pain points.
- Cost control: Omnichannel platforms can even help companies save money, reducing the amount they need to spend on disparate systems. If they offer access to self-service tools, they can even help mitigate the costs associated with human-only customer service.
Steve Nattress, Vice President, Product Marketing at Enghouse Interactive says:
“Contact centers are constantly adapting to accommodate changes and escalations in customer expectations. As a long-time developer of contact center solutions, Enghouse has witnessed enormous transformation over the last 30 years, and the great news is that all leading technology providers continue to innovate to stay ahead of this demand.
Customers have always wanted agents to know their complete history with an organization whenever they interact – no matter what channels they’ve used to engage.
And we know it’s also equally important for agents to have that comprehensive view of all interactions. Now, with the advancements in generative AI, contact centers can use that interaction data to provide much more accurate Voice of Customer details, enabling contact center leaders to understand and proactively shape the experience they offer to meet their customers’ needs. The seamless experience of omnichannel engagement is really just the beginning.”
Omnichannel Contact Center Best Practices
As demand for omnichannel experiences continues to grow, businesses need the right strategy to connect the dots between their contact center tools and channels. Here are the key best practices to follow when implementing an omnichannel contact center.
1. Invest in Comprehensive Planning
First, creating an omnichannel contact center doesn’t necessarily mean you need to enable communications with customers on every channel. Your focus should be on serving customers wherever they are, which means developing a clear view of the customer journey.
Map the customer journey carefully, gathering insights from historical data and competitor analysis to determine which channels and touchpoints you need to prioritize. Consider which channels will be most beneficial to your audience. For instance, if your customers need a lot of step-by-step guidance, access to video calling could be an excellent choice.
Determine whether you need self-service resources to help mitigate high call volumes, and support customers on a 24/7 basis. Once you know which channels matter most to your customers, make sure you can allocate the right amount of resources to each touchpoint, with intelligent WFM technology.
2. Prioritize a True Omnichannel Experience
Next, it’s important to ensure you’re implementing an “omnichannel” strategy, rather than a multichannel strategy. Many contact center leaders still think omnichannel and multichannel are the same thing, as they both offer a way to connect with customers across multiple channels.
However, a true omnichannel goes a step further than simply enabling access to various communication methods. It should actually connect the data, context, and information from every channel into a single pane of glass for your contact center agents.
Look for a solution that enables seamless connectivity between voice, email, web chat, social media, SMS text, video, and more. You should also be able to take advantage of intelligent routing for conversations across all channels, as well as outbound dialing solutions.
To adhere to the needs of today’s customers, make sure that self-service solutions are also integrated into the mix. Intelligent IVR systems, chatbots, and assistants will give customers another way to interact effectively with your company, while allowing you to reduce operational costs.
3. Bridge the Gaps with Application Integration
Aside from ensuring you can seamlessly connect with customers across every channel, an effective omnichannel contact center should also help to bridge the gaps between other aspects of your technology stack.
For instance, a contact center solution that integrates with your unified communications platform, like Microsoft Teams, will help your agents collaborate when working on complex customer requests. A solution that connects directly with your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools, will help you to track and record data across channels, and deliver more personalized experiences.
Other integrations to consider include connectors for:
- Recording and quality assurance tools: For optimizing compliance, performance benchmarking, and data monitoring.
- Artificial intelligence: Tools for monitoring sentiment across channels, or delivering real-time feedback and coaching to employees.
- Workforce management tools: Solutions that help you to improve staffing and scheduling with insights into contact volumes across every channel.
4. Embrace AI and Automation
Managing a comprehensive omnichannel contact center can be complex, particularly for larger companies. Fortunately, AI and automation tools can help, offering an excellent way to streamline everything from staffing and scheduling to data analysis.
You can use AI tools equipped with natural language processing capabilities and advanced speech recognition to enhance the customer experience, replacing the traditional IVR system with a natural conversational interface. You can use AI chatbots to help reduce the number of incoming calls sent to agents, or gather information from customers before they begin a call.
Intelligent automation solutions can even help you gather more data from every interaction, rapidly transcribing and summarizing calls, and searching through conversations for valuable information. This can give you deeper insights into the customer journey, and how you can improve the omnichannel experience for your customers.
5. Constantly Assess, Update, and Optimize
Finally, make sure you’re tracking metrics throughout your omnichannel contact center, and constantly looking for ways to improve performance. Customer preferences can change rapidly, which could mean that over time, you need to allocate more resources to live chat and video channels than you do to your phone systems.
Tapping into your data might give you an insight into new processes you can optimize and automate, leveraging advanced call routing, or state-of-the-art AI chatbots. Plus, the right insights will ensure you can build on your omnichannel strategy effectively over time. You’ll be able to remove channels that don’t resonate with your customers, and embrace new ones based on evolving trends.
Take advantage of the comprehensive reporting and analytical tools built into your omnichannel platform to make intelligent decisions for the future of your contact center.
Transform Customer Service with an Omnichannel Strategy
Today, to deliver exceptional customer experiences, you need to do more than deliver quick, personalized service. Companies need to be able to reach and support their customers on multiple channels, delivering a seamless experience from one touchpoint to the next.
With a powerful omnichannel contact center solution, like Enghouse Interactive’s CCaaS platform, you can leverage a huge suite of unified tools that help you consistently delight customers, improve agent performance, and gather critical insights. Make sure you’re prepared for the future of omnichannel service, with the right CCaaS software.
Vince Misfud, Global President at Enghouse Systems says:
“With the digital revolution brought on by Covid, along with the maturing of Gen Z, contact centers are seeing increased demand for non-voice channels – but a surprising number of organizations continue to hold customers to legacy channels rather than offer choice.
Enghouse Interactive is dedicated to helping organizations deliver the optimum customer experience, combining our passion for making a measurable difference with our 30-year industry pedigree in designing, delivering and supporting CX solutions.
We offer our users their choice of solution and deployment to suit their needs, and back that with the most comprehensive CX portfolio in the industry. This includes a secure, integrated video solution that allows organizations to queue video calls into the contact center, or gives participants the option to seamlessly escalate other channels to video to add personalization and transform the interaction into the ultimate omnichannel experience.”
