5 Best Practices for Omnichannel Contact Center Solution in 2022

Most of the businesses are undergoing digital transformation and implementing omnichannel contact center solutions. With content and engagement going hand-in-hand, customers or potential customers are flocking around all the digital channels. Businesses are taking this opportunity to communicate with customers across different channels. They are improving the quality of conversation and making it convenient. 

For many customers, the first choice of communication is digital. The particular choice of the channel does indeed vary from business to business, but digital channels are in demand. Customers are not just consuming content, but checking out products, reading feedback, and making purchasing decisions on these platforms. While some companies are failing to take advantage of this, others are soaring higher in revenue. 

By going digital, companies are trying to become more customer-centric. They are putting up with the customer trends and expanding their service. This allows businesses to personalize each conversation to the best of their capacity. In return, customer retention is high and so is the advocacy rate. 

Going omnichannel is almost imperative now. But this also means more responsibility. Having agents assigned to multiple channels without streamlining them and having an agenda, is like shooting an arrow in the dark.

Here, I am putting together some omnichannel contact center solution best practices that are relevant in 2022:

Digital channels shouldn’t be your second choice. In fact, in 2022 it should be a priority. If you are running a new-age company, it must be a digital-first approach. However, your sales and marketing team has to work in cohesion. The content and the support should complement each other. In other words, preach only what you practice. Educate your customers on your products and make it convenient for them to avail the resources. Your business should be actively digitally driven.

A customer's experience matters and so does the effort. The lesser your customer has to put effort to get their queries/issues resolved, the better will be their experience. In other words, reducing resolution time and increasing usability improves your customer’s overall experience. Customers will shift towards low-cost, easy-to-use channels. Customers want companies to reduce their effort and provide lower wait times. Companies that cradle customers' needs and comforts, providing effective resolutions on their channel of preference end up not just propelling sales but also loyalty and referrals.

It is sometimes a good idea to start small and see if you can solve your customers' problems on the mediums they already use before expanding to a wider audience. If you provide customer support on social media and people WhatsApp a lot, it makes sense to offer your customer support on WhatsApp. It is good to offer different ways to help customers, so they can choose how they want to get help. In fact, you should go ahead and explore how your customers or atleast similar people are responding to different channels such as live chat, telephony, physical stores, self-service, mobile apps, email or social media.
Many businesses receive customer enquiries over a variety of platforms, and this is a good thing. It is important to give customers the option to engage with your business over their preferred channels. This helps you gain an accurate understanding of customer preferences, and you can use this information to tailor your business to better suit their needs. I would like to clarify that this behavior is not limited to the digital side of the business. If you have more customers in your brick-and-mortar store, then it is important to put your efforts there. 

Your omnichannel contact center solution marketing campaign can reach newer heights with the power of AI. It is almost impossible to avoid AI in important spaces like customer service. A simple chatbot integration can help you become more resourceful and efficient. Autoresponders in social media or chatbots across text-based channels are a rising trend. This reduces the need to immediately assign an agent. The customer might successfully find the resolution through the chatbot itself, reserving the company's resources. In return, the chatbot will offer a human-like engagement. With modern AI solutions, you can analyze the customer's sentiment which helps your team to segment these customers for creating a personalized shopping experience. The data collected by these bots are stored to understand a customer’s economic and emotional status to improve the quality of the service. 

The covid-19 pandemic has forced us all to rapidly go digital and it has been a positive change in the long run. But as the severity of the virus is reduced, offline shops are opening up for business. Moreover, customers are finally out of their homes and want to enjoy the in-shop experience once again. At this prime time, it will be an amateur move to ignore your offline channels.  Customers prefer researching a product and gauging the social presence of a brand before buying from them. It's important to provide connected online and offline experiences to facilitate customer buying and servicing.

As customers are spread across channels, information was traditionally distorted. However, thanks to omnichannel solutions, we can now view the big picture. If a customer is interacting with your agents across two channels, your omnichannel contact center solution should allow you to integrate both the interactions and provide a singular view of the customer. Through this, the agent can evaluate the customer's sentiment, product preferences, channel preferences, response time expectations, and more. 
Hence, customers can engage across all channels, including phone, video, email, SMS, and social media, and the customer journey with the brand is accessible to the agent. Organize customer service data into a central database, so all departments and customer service representatives can access the information they need to help customers.

Conclusion

An omnichannel contact center solution strategy aims at identifying customers’ needs and delivering exactly what they are expecting. Remember, the customer is expecting a seamless experience across all the touch points. So, with the an omnichannel contact center solution, your customer service representatives should be well trained so that their interactions with customers remain similar across channels. With C-Zentrix, Omnichannel contact center solution you can pick and choose the channel that suits your business and you have the flexibility to add any channels when you need them.