Nah, you got that wrong… this is not one of the very many blogs which introduces Omnichannel as a fancy terminology for your contact center. To be true, Omnichannel is no more a buzzword, rather a prerequisite for all contact centers to survive and thrive in a world where customer interactions are at a maximum.
Omnichannel contact center has rapidly become the smartest way to engage with customers by superior management of customer interactions across all mediums. Now, modern businesses can’t hope to exist and prosper without a fully functional Omnichannel contact center.
Present day customers want a steady, high quality experience in all the mediums they choose to interact in. Therefore, they might start looking for a product online, rave about it on social media, and finally choose to buy it in-store. Essentially they want the customer experience to be uniform in all the channels, and Omnichannel helps to bring all of these interactions under a single platform for agents, along with the ability to seamlessly toggle among them.
Customer Data and Analytics for Proactive Support
The aforementioned description only forms the foundation of Omnichannel contact center. There’s a lot more than meets the eye. Essentially Omnichannel handles customer communications across numerous channels such as voice, SMS, web, email, social, chat, and fax. To manage all these interactions requires immense use of data and analytics derived from data.
The modern contact center has the convenience and luxury of access to customer data, something that earlier contact center didn’t have. This acts as a colossal boon for businesses today as customer data can be easily used to gain profound insights into people behaviour and the way their sentiments are shaping up. Thus, this makes an easy way to develop better products and services.
Creating of any product is a job only half done. I know this sounds a bit awry but in a world which beams with population explosion and an ever increasing sharing of ideas and perceptions, this is the firm reality. Organizations worldwide can create top-class products and services but they can never control how people will perceive it. This is why customer data and predictive analytics are crucial for contact centers and businesses at large, as they enable business managers to identify areas of a product that customers likely need assistance for.
How does this Revolutionize an Agent’s Life
Insights derived from can be easily shared with contact center agents to get them prepared for the support that customers are likely to call for. Since a significant number of calls start pouring in during the first month after purchasing a product, having access to insights surely fosters the Net Promoter Score (NPS), along with increasing First Call Resolution (FCR).
Omnichannel Contact Center also includes real time communication with customers over the web. With the help of Web Real Time Communications, or WebRTC as is popularly termed, agents can carry out voice calling, video chat, and file sharing with customers on their systems. WebRTC supports browser-to-browser application without the use of external or internal plugins.
Thereby, customer service would no longer be restricted to the phone. Once customer calls are in routed through the company’s IVR system. From the IVR, the call gets transferred to the rep’s web browser, instead of a phone or the software on the rep’s system. This trend is likely to continue and be commonplace in 2016. Providing this form of customer support in an Omnichannel contact center setup certainly goes a long way to ensure customer loyalty and higher retention.
What do you think will be some key developements in Omnichannel Contact Center in the coming times?
