An omnichannel contact center brings together interactions across communication channels like voice calls, social media, email, chats in real-time, WhatsApp, etc., in one space.
An omnichannel software empowers the agents to revert to customers from a single view, maintaining consistency in supporting customers across channels. Such cloud contact centers assigned with omnichannel capabilities allow customers to reach out to brands and businesses using their preferred communication channel and expect a swift response.
Today, times have changed, and the way customers want to interact with brands has altered. As a result, facilitating a unified customer service is vital regardless of their chosen channel.
Responding to customer questions keeping the previous interaction context in mind across channels is essential. With an omnichannel contact center in place, it is easy to address this as it bridges the gap entrusting customers and agents with ease of access.
Whether they make a phone call to the call center or shoot their queries on web chat, they expect quick resolutions seamlessly.
Is An Omnichannel Contact Center A Bare Necessity In 2022?
Almost 5 out of every ten customers use multiple (3-5) communication channels to connect with customer support.
We all know that the Covid-19 pandemic has brought about a new wave of digital-first customer service. Walking into a store has become obsolete, and customers have been forced to get comfortable with digital channels overnight to access support and make purchase decisions.
Digital channels have provided customers with a fluid interaction because no one channel of communication can be given importance over others.
Omnichannel contact centers solve this issue perfectly and offer a great customer experience helping businesses and brands transform their support and operations.
Omnichannel contact center comes with some very pertinent benefits, and these are vital to gain a competitive edge for your business.
- A single screen for all customer conversations
- Easy to scale support interface
- Easy Third-party integrations within the omnichannel software
- Automatic routing of customer queries
- A comprehensive timeline of customer journeys
- Cross-team collaboration to resolve issues swiftly.
6 Steps To Create An Omnichannel Contact Center
Outline The Customer Journey
The customer journey is an amalgamation of touchpoints and interactions that all customers go through when purchasing your product or services.
Mapping your customer’s journey is exceptionally vital for your business, as this is the only way to understand and capitalize on customer needs and behavior.
As and when businesses can understand how customers are experiencing their product/service, you will be able to comprehend customers’ better-preferred communication channels and their opinion of your brand and identify areas of improvement to enhance customer retention.
It is also crucial for businesses to understand how customers interact with specific touchpoints to open the door to customize customer interactions and make an informed decision about when is the best time to implement conversational ai services like chatbots and voice bots.
Fuse Your CX Strategies
Implementation of an omnichannel CX strategy is not possible in a silo. Instead, this requires teams like sales and marketing to coordinate with each other and work together towards achieving a common goal.
Mandatory Important Discussions:
- Voice and Messaging of your brand – Your customer service agents and your marketing team must be saying the same thing to your customers. Businesses must ensure that their messaging is consistent and aligned across teams and channels. Coming up with brand guidelines might be helpful.
- Optimum Utilization Of Communication Channels – Both your marketing team and your contact center would be active in responding to social media posts. It is vital to build a strategy that sketches an outline distinguishing who responds to what and strategizing to reduce the response time.
- Aligning Customer Service Goals – It is essential to ensure that you as a brand are clear-headed about what success means to you. Whether upselling, net retention or KPIs, always keep your company CX goals and KPIs in mind.
Train Your Agents
You might have state-of-the-art technology, but outstanding customer service still hinged on the agents. Your agents are essentially the face of your company since they directly interact with your brand’s customers.
Training your customer service agents is vital. This helps employees navigate the software, understand omnichannel communication better, and guide the agents to facilitate an impeccable customer service experience.
Deploy Cloud Technology
Being on the cloud is a must for an omnichannel contact center to run smoothly. Cloud technology has the power to unify multiple communication channels ranging from phone calls to live chat and social media, facilitating a user-friendly and impeccable customer experience.
Using cloud technology, customers can connect with your brand representatives utilizing any mode of communication and shift to another channel directly without having to restart the entire process or start from scratch.
This reduces customer frustration dramatically and, at the same time, sets the agents up for success by giving them quick access to crucial information for lightning-fast query resolution.
When your contact center agents have all the necessary tools to perform outstandingly, the chances of those who contact your brand will leave pleased and feel like their issues were solved.
Choose The Right Omnichannel Software
There are several omnichannel contact center software, and choosing the right one can be tricky. So then, how can you tell which is the right one for your business?
Here are some questions you must ask yourself to make an informed choice.
- What problem should the software solve?
- What are the functions that are important to your team?
- What are the most frequent requests that your brand receives?
- How to implement it, and how long would it take?
Omnichannel contact center software is meant to make the lives of your customers and agents easier. But, with that said, there will always be a learning curve.
Make A Smooth Transition
Let’s say you have a great tech lined up followed by a fantastic strategy; a certain amount of time is natural in the transition period when opting for an omnichannel approach.
Even the agents would require some time to get the hang of fielding multiple chats, social media customer service requests, video calls, and voice calls.
So then, how do you manage a smooth transition to make it convenient for your team?
- List Down Your Teams Responsibilities and Duties – Allocate communication channels to multiple teams. Let one team take care of social media while another manages live chat, and so on. The rotational approach is a great idea.
- Allow New Agents To Learn From Veterans – When you transition to an omnichannel technology, it will be new to most agents. But having said that, this might not be the case for all agents. Make the most of your experienced agents.
- Set Goals And Monitor Them – Know why you are making the transition and what you should expect out of this. Make sure that you check in with agents from time to time throughout the process and make sure they aren’t facing any significant hurdles.
Final Thoughts – Customer Opinion Is The Right Opinion
For an omnichannel strategy to work, it must be aligned with your customer needs. The room for improvement in the CX industry will always be there as customer needs and technology keep evolving.
Once you start getting your customer insights, make sure you analyze your data and make mends in your CX strategy as per your needs.
If you aim to grow your business and have a technology partner that stands with you throughout your journey, Ameyo would be lucky to have you.
