Omnichannel Contact Center: A Ultimate Guide For 2022

There is one apparent reality about creating a fantastic customer experience: if consumers have to discover you, they'll find someone else. Customers expect you to utilize their preferred channels, such as phone calls, online chat, SMS, email, and social media. They anticipate a unified experience across all of them. An omnichannel contact center consolidates all your communication channels into one user-friendly interface. Customers adore it.

According to Aberdeen Group, organizations that employ an omnichannel strategy have a 91% yearly improvement in customer retention over those that do not! Setup, staffing, and maintenance of an omnichannel contact center are all topics covered in this blog, from the essentials to best practices and insider knowledge. Let’s discuss this in brief,

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An omnichannel contact center enables agents to manage requests and provide information across numerous channels, including phone calls, webchat, email, SMS, WhatsApp, Viber, and social media messengers like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. These contact center solutions, however, are much more than just a location to answer tickets. An actual omnichannel strategy delivers a seamless experience as interactions progress across channels by sharing context and offering more consumer data.

That's a lot to take in.

So, here's an example of how an omnichannel contact center operates.

Assume a client is experiencing a technical problem. They've read some self-service help documents but have reached the stage where they need assistance.

• Their first port of call is your website's chat to describe the problem.
• They interact with the chatbot but still feel the need to speak to a live agent.
• After considerable deliberation, they decide to phone in to "speak to a real person."
• This issue is solved by providing an omnichannel customer experience.

When a customer calls customer service, the agent already has such information like:

• The customer's history and vital information
• A record of their prior chat interactions
• A log of critical touchpoints, such as help documentation
• Instead of forcing clients to repeat themselves, your agents begin with a comprehensive snapshot of each customer they encounter and may take up where their colleagues left off, maybe in another shift
• This kind of unified communication is difficult to achieve.
• However, it is what your consumers anticipate.

According to McKinsey's research, most consumers interact with three to five distinct channels in their approach to addressing a request. Furthermore, 86% of consumers want discussions to flow effortlessly across service channels.

Multichannel alternatives, such as online chat, SMS, and social media, are progressively adding to contact centers. However, having additional channels does not imply having an omnichannel experience. And the fact is that most contact centers are still not there. The integration is what distinguishes a multichannel contact center from an omnichannel strategy.

Contact centers often assign agents to one channel—phone calls or digital channels such as email, SMS, and social media messaging—and want them to address problems in a vacuum while adding channels swiftly. Because agents do not have entire historical histories of client encounters, this technique does not provide seamless customer experiences. Contact centers become fully omnichannel contact centers when all client contacts are linked across channels, with all necessary historical information and personal background accessible to agents in every customer interaction.
 

A successful omnichannel customer experience is consistent across all channels including voice and digital channels. When done effectively, it fosters long-term client loyalty by resolving concerns swiftly and thoroughly.
The four cornerstones of successful omnichannel customer service are as follows:

1. Seamlessly Linked Channels: 

When clients call, send an email, text a message, or interact via any other inbound digital channel, omnichannel allows agents to observe the whole customer service journey and react and solve the problem appropriately.

2. Unified Interface:

Think from an agent’s perspective. She has been asked to login to different channels – voice, chat, CRM, email, social and they are in different windows or tabs. How inconvenient it can be. With single sign on, she can not only log to all the channels but interact with customers without moving into another screen, even for the CRM. Then you know it’s a true Omnichannel platform. 

3. Channel Utilisation:

After deploying your agents on different channels, it is imperative to know how your channels are utilized and how much is the waiting time for your customers in different channels. Can you have an eagle’s eye view of your entire Omnichannel customer service and shift the agents to the channel that are running busy. With Omnichannel supervisor panel, you should be able to monitor each channel and shift agents to the busy channels to reduce the wait time of customers and properly distribute the agents.

4. Continuous Data Collection:

Because they follow the consumer from channel to channel, gathering data along the way, omnichannel service engagements are easier, leading to a better customer experience, higher customer ratings, and a more substantial brand reputation. People's entire histories and account data are transferred when they go from social media to chat with a live representative. They are not required to restart at each stage.

A contact center can accomplish a lot, from putting all customer contacts under one roof to minimizing disconnected communication within the customer service organization.

The following are some of the advantages of an omnichannel contact center:

Adopting an omnichannel approach entails developing a unified vision to improve the customer service experience. This process necessitates a review of technologies, workflow automation, and customer touchpoints.

Let's start with some tactics and best practices for transitioning to a multichannel environment.

1. Create a More Customized Experiences:

• Personalization is essential to the omnichannel strategy.
• According to a Microsoft study, 72% of customers want your customer care personnel to know who they are, what they've bought, and information about their previous contacts.
• A unified contact center platform consolidates all of this information and makes it available to your agents. It boosts agent productivity and lets you use personalization to keep consumers returning.

2. Determine the Best Communication Channels:

• Though the purpose of omnichannel contact centers is to provide consumers with several channels through which to contact your support staff, your unique client base will favor some channels over others.
• Optimizing your customer service means allocating the right amount of resources to each channel depending on how popular it is with your target audience.
• Use historical data to determine where your consumers are most likely to connect and which channels seem to get similar requests. You may discover that you have far too many agents dedicated to phone assistance, but live internet chat help is severely insufficient.

3. Create a Map of Typical Client Journeys:

• When interacting with your firm, customers seldom travel a straight route.
• Before contacting your support staff, they may study a self-service knowledge base article or write a tweet. The more you understand your customers' journeys — the channels they utilize and the pathways they take — the more effective your omnichannel strategy will be.

4. Enhance Self-Service Options:

• According to Gartner's research, nearly 85% of all customer support engagements will begin with self-service by 2022.
• Better self-service alternatives allow agents to deal with more critical customer support issues, allowing consumers to resolve their issues more quickly. Providing self-service alternatives via an interactive contact center IVR menu, internet chatbots, or even an online support base/tutorial videos significantly boosts overall customer satisfaction ratings.

5. Be proactive in your data collection efforts:

The omnichannel strategy is only as good as the data you provide to your agents. This includes, at a minimum, all past discussions the consumer has had across channels.

You may, however, further empower your support staff by using real-time data and insights from your customer service CRM, such as:

• Pages already seen
• Abandoned Carts
• Survey findings
• Future anniversaries or renewals
• Customer satisfaction
• Instead of independent data silos, aim to combine fragmented customer data into a consolidated CRM.

6. Don't Ignore Social Media:

• Social media customer service is on the rise, with more than half of customers seeking assistance via social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. On the other hand, customers are more likely to be neglected on social media.
• According to studies, over 28% of customers report they never got a response when contacting customer care through social media. Increased time and effort spent on social media support pays out in spades in the long term. 
• In addition to sending an automated message to all social media customers with an estimated response time, ensure you have agents monitoring social media messages at all times. Configure omnichannel alerts to cover social media networks. Finally, ensure that your automated answers contain a link to the customer's online knowledge database and information about alternative ways to contact (phone number, email address, etc.) and support hours.
• Omnichannel social media ensures that customers who are posting social posts can be diverted to Direct Messages (DMs) for one-on-one engagement.

7. Monitor Changes in Consumer Preferences:

COVID has taught firms that marketplaces and whole sectors may shift suddenly. You can quickly adjust to customers shifting demands by using an omnichannel contact center. It is important to monitor whether there is an increase in social media outreach or diminishing client satisfaction on specific platforms. If clients are unhappy with an automated chatbot's restriction, provide a simple option for them to contact a human representative.

• A representative will then take over for a more personalized and smoother experience.
• Brands should use web chat to obtain phone numbers.
• This enables agents to conduct an outbound call to address any lingering issues.
• It also gives cloud contact centers another way to identify and monitor accounts.

8. Maintain a Consistent Cross-Channel Experience:

It is critical in customer service and sales to give customers a consistent experience across all communication platforms. Customers must recognize that they are in the appropriate location, be comfortable with the user interface, and understand how to get to what they need. If they can't, consider if your contact center is genuinely omnichannel.
While the experience may start with the look and feel of the channel they are using – your queue music is similar to your brand tune or chat interface tally with your brand logo, but the experience is deeper when they engage with the brand. Whether it is chatting, phone call, or video call the engagement with customers should be similar and provide a one-brand experience. It is key to verify that all channels have the same functionality, automate real-time omnichannel conversation synchronization, and perform tests to confirm that the experience is consistent across devices.

9. Find a Happy Medium Between People and Technology:

Some of the greatest customer support technology is used in omnichannel contact centers. However, the quality of assistance is still determined by human connection. It's encouraging to see calls become shorter and representatives dealing with more concerns. However, none of it matters if your clients are dissatisfied.

Your omnichannel approach should include critical human components such as:

• Maintain consistency across channels
• An omnichannel strategy implies that the channel's reaction time and quality are constantly benchmarked
• Give equal weight to all channels
• Make 'customer-centricity' the foundation of your strategy
• Agent efficacy and client attention must be well-balanced
• Speed should never take precedence over exceptional service

Before opening a new channel, integrate:

Before going live, consider how any new platform will integrate into your current omnichannel strategy and agent desktops. The best is to go for an Omnichannel platform that provides all the channels in a plug-and-play mode.

10. Automate Customer Generated Reports:

Use the pre-made and customizable statistics and reports provided by omnichannel contact centers, both real-time and historical. Key performance indicators (KPIs) like average wait time, first call resolution rate, call duration, customer churn rate, and customer satisfaction ratings provide great insight into the efficiency and quality of your customer service.
Agent activity reports reveal which agents may need more training, training gaps, productivity levels, and top performers. Contact center software makes it simple to set up automatic reports sent to your mailbox at the frequency you want.

11. Make It Simple to Contact a Live Agent:

Nearly 90% of customers prefer dealing with a live professional to engaging with a pre-recorded IVR menu. As much as you'd want to be able to connect a caller with a "real person" right away, it's not always practical, particularly in high-volume contact centers. You can make your IVR system menus brief and to the point and provide clients with a simple, clear option to connect to a live person when necessary. Introducing call deflections is a great way to reduce loads on live call agents and move it to self-service channels like Visual IVR or Bots.
Set up warm transfers to keep things moving by connecting customers to live agents only after getting basic information about the nature of their requests and contact information. The advantage of an omnichannel center is that you can provide live service across various channels, including chat messaging, SMS texting, phone, and even video conferencing.
You should be able to manage the number of live agent inquiries, especially when combined with suitable internal knowledge bases and automation (two topics we'll cover momentarily).

12. Utilize Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Automation:

AI and automation save customers and agents time — and may help business owners save up to 30% on customer service costs. NLP (Natural Language Processing) analyses client sentiment and routes call to the most appropriate and relevant available agent. Predictive analytics like call forecasting analyses past consumer behavior data to estimate future trends such as busiest times of day/year for improved staff utilization.
AI and contact center automation also assist in fraud and consumer protection by canceling account access quickly in the event of suspicious conduct. Finally, the power of AI is best used for in call analytics (analyzing a live call) or post-call analysis (for the purpose of QA)

13. Integrate CRM And Third-Party Communication Tools:

Integrating CRM with Omnichannel lets your team access customer history, contact information, past orders, and even notes from previous interactions with agents. Agents require a consistent and synchronized conversation history, particularly in omnichannel communication, where a conversation may start with SMS messaging and end with a social network chat message.
Customers are prevented from having to repeat their complaints with many staff, which expedites the whole settlement process. Your CRM helpdesk system link will provide enhanced customer data within the omnichannel, removing the need for agents to switch tools while making or receiving client calls. Instead, all necessary information will show quickly on the agent's screen, resulting in a more simplified customer support engagement for everyone.

Omnichannel contact centers create improved customer service experiences that keep consumers coming back. Customers may obtain help whenever they need it by using their communication channels, whether a live agent or real-time self-service choices.
Genuinely successful, integrated omnichannel customer care is a customer service approach that may give organizations the momentum they need to be ahead of their competitors today and remain ahead in the future. Agents will require contact center software that allows them to effortlessly switch between channels and touchpoints so they can support customers regardless of channel. When done correctly, omnichannel contact centers raise the customer service experience and engagement by providing extraordinary experiences across the customer journey