That may come as a surprise. After all, the concept is not new; brands have been striving to build an omnichannel contact center for over a decade.
Yet, many are stuck in the multichannel mud, which negatively impacts customer, employee, and – ultimately – business outcomes.
Omnichannel vs. Multichannel: What’s the Difference?
Both multichannel and omnichannel contact centers provide a set of channels for customer service. But that’s where the similarity ends.
Indeed, in a multichannel contact center, channels sit in siloes. Meanwhile, in omnichannel operations, every channel is integrated.
Diving deeper, Gurpreet Kohli, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Telecom & Networks at HCLTech, told CX Today:
“When all channels are integrated, the contact center can pick up new information about the customer at each stage of the journey – and that context follows them.”
As a result, customers don’t need to repeat themselves when switching channels, and agents may answer their queries quicker, as all the necessary information is at their fingertips.
Moreover, omnichannel benefits the business, as with a pool of centralized customer data, they create new, sophisticated customer experience strategies where AI can flourish.
Yet, that’s not all there is to an omnichannel contact center. In such an environment, agents can also switch between channels during an interaction.
For instance, they may send a confirmation email, attachment, or survey via email or message as they talk over the phone.
Alternatively, agents could quickly escalate to voice from a live chat conversation. Multichannel users don’t have such capabilities.
4 Steps to an Omnichannel Contact Center
As noted, upgrading to omnichannel has significant customer, employee, and business benefits. Here are four steps to get there.
Step 1 – Connect Every Channel Within a Central CRM and Unified Desktop
Having every contact center channel connect with a CRM and unified agent desktop is a critical first step for any omnichannel contact center.
With a connected CRM, the customer’s conversation history appears in one thread, regardless of how often they have shifted channels.
From there, Kohli suggests:
“The contact center can also plug ERP, document management, customer feedback, and various other tools to create a 360-degree view of the customer.”
Meanwhile, with a unified desktop, agents can follow the customer across channels while keeping ahold of that all-important customer context.
For large enterprises, having the support of a global system integrator (GSI) with strategic partnerships with OEMs and ecosystem providers is incredibly helpful here.
After all, GSIs – such as HCLTech – leverage these partnerships to pull cutting-edge technology into the environment and integrate these solutions seamlessly.
Step 2 – Purposely Design Channel Shifts and Agent Transfers
Following a conversation, the live or virtual agent adds post-contact notes to the CRM. These then become available to the next agent who interacts with the customer.
However, such context must also move with the customer when they switch channels mid-interaction or when the agent transfers it to a colleague.
For the former, making click-to-call or click-to-chat links available to the customer can ensure that the data follows them, even if they escalate from a bot or self-service portal.
Meanwhile, when an agent shifts the contact to a colleague, generative AI (GenAI) provides the solution, auto-summarizing the conversation so far and storing that in the CRM. For instance, Verint has a Transfer Bot for such incidents.
Previously, contact centers had the original agent brief their colleague or pass the transcript to them. Yet, both added precious seconds to every contact.
Step 3 – Find New Ways to Preserve Customer Context
While a business connects with customers via voice and digital channels, there are more touchpoints in their journey. For example, they have in-store experiences, visit third-party review sites or attend branded events.
Such touchpoints offer new customer context. Yet, retaining this without an easy way to collect a digital record is tricky.
Some brands may get around this by finding ways for customers to use their apps or scan QR codes at these touchpoints. However, they will likely require an incentive.
Step 4 – Layer Over Customer Journey Analytics
By this stage, the contact center is omnichannel. But, it can go further and apply customer journey analytics and monitoring to track the progress of a query.
Adding to this, Kohli stated:
“With customer journey analytics, the contact center may monitor changing customer intent, so the agent has updated context, which also filters through to the CRM.”
With analytics, omnichannel contact centers can also run many more initiatives to bolster performance.
For example, they may spot which channels are typically best-suited for particular queries – based on customer sentiment and efficiency-based metrics.
From there, they may triage the customer in their channel of choice, learn the intent, and offer a seamless shift to the channel they’re likely to enjoy the best customer service experience.
HCLTech has a deep, worldwide pool of experts that understand how to leverage conversational AI and other technologies to bring such visions of omnichannel to life.
Challenges to Achieving Omnichannel (And How to Overcome Them!)
Contact centers still stuck in multichannel mayhem have likely struggled to overcome one or more of the following blockers.
1. Omnichannel Confusion: What Does It Look Like?
Contact centers often mistake multichannel or multimodal for omnichannel and may misunderstand the cross-channel orchestration that comes with the latter.
Indeed, some may have upgraded to multimodal, where agents and customers may shift between channels, but the context doesn’t follow them.
While that’s an upgrade, it does little to stop customers from customers having to repeat themselves and the contact center struggling with siloed data.
2. The Existing Tech Infrastructure Lacks Flexibility
Businesses have often implemented boxed solutions when adding channels to the contact center – such as live chat, SMS, and WhatsApp. Unfortunately, buying such solutions does not mean they will integrate seamlessly with the rest of the contact center, and companies have ended up with a fragmented customer view.
In these scenarios, contact centers often need to engage in expensive custom development projects or migrate to an alternative offering to achieve omnichannel.
3. Perceived Security Risks
Integrations are central to omnichannel. Yet, some brands see these as vulnerabilities, raising concerns over API security attacks.
Thankfully, these businesses may leverage an API gateway or service mesh to safeguard against such attacks while embracing techniques such as rate limiting and throttling.
Other risks include cyber threats – such as phishing, hacking, and malware – that come as businesses expand their digital channel portfolio.
However, these risks are more prominent in a multichannel operation. In an omnichannel environment, contact centers can pass customers between channels to complete a more robust authentication process.
5 Best Practices to Bolster the Omnichannel Contact Center
The following best practices will help contact centers augment the above framework and ensure they extract maximum benefit from their transition to omnichannel.
- Be Clear on What Omnichannel Looks Like – Create a distinct, all-encompassing vision guiding an implementation plan that happens in distinct phases that proves ROI.
- Set Measurable Objectives – Track customer, employee, and business outcomes as the omnichannel transformation rolls out to manage the implementation better.
- Ensure Cross-Function Collaboration – An omnichannel contact center tracks sales, commerce, and marketing engagements. As such, it is crucial that their interactions also filter through to the CRM.
- Map Out the Customer Journey & Test – Use the analytics and journey mapping to identify customer touchpoints and intents. Then, test the journey by tracking contacts across the channels, into the back office, and back towards the customer. Identify and address any friction points within the omnichannel environment. Make this a continuous exercise to spot new and emerging breaks in the experience.
- Orchestrate the Experience – Again, with the analytics, spot the customer’s intent, the optimal channel to service that intent and use conversational AI to triage them in their channel of choice.
Get More Advice from HCLTech on Going Omnichannel
With a global community of expert consultants, extensive industry expertise, and myriad strategic partnerships, HCLTech supports contact centers transitioning to omnichannel.
In doing so, the business helps inform and optimize their tech choices, implementations, and orchestration strategy.
“We streamline the entire transformation, from engaging with vendors to building out an implementation plan that looks six to eight months ahead,” concluded Kohli.
To learn more about HCLTech’s transformation services, visit: https://www.hcltech.com/digital-foundation/contact-center
