Omnichannel Customer Service

A customer-centric brand, personalized customer experience, building connections, and reducing customer friction while maximizing revenue are critical objectives for contact center in the digital age. As contact centers evolve to offer omnichannel customer service, there remains commonly reported customer and agent complaints on how omnichannel still has not performed to expectation. Organizations must work to overcome these challenges as they impede more than an organization’s ability to implement a seamless customer experience, they quite simply, damage the overall health of an organization’s contact center operation. Below we highlight customer and agent omnichannel challenges and provide insight on how to deliver a seamless customer experience.

Personalization

First and foremost is data. An organization must implement an omnichannel analytics solution at all touch points, including self-service, to capture insight into the quality of the individuals who are engaging. Leveraging your data to deploy chatbots can personalize self-service to the individual customer through natural conversation resulting in a quick, convenient, accurate and customized digital customer service experience. Keep in mind that chatbots are not their own contact channel. They are tools for enhancing the experience offered at touch points that either exist or already exist in the customer journey. To ensure that they are tools for improving the customer experience instead of hindering, organizations need a real-time, detailed map of their customer’s journey.

Unified/Integrated systems

A pressing need that organizations face when deploying omnichannel communication is connecting desperate systems and contact channels. In a CCW survey, customers (38%) and agents (36%) largest complaint was system unification and integration, causing inconsistent communication for both parties. Multiple communication silos keep customers from having a seamless experience across channels and can cause frustration with the inconsistency and choppiness of the communication. Integrating multiple channels can be costly which can hinder companies from providing a smooth and consumer-centric omnichannel experience. Finding the right outsource partner can help with connecting all of your consumer communications into one seamless strategy that will allow your consumers to start their journey through any channel such as talk, text, or chat and complete it on another.

Training

The typical customer service role has undergone a tectonic shift, and as phone-based support is becoming a coveted rarity, better agent training is needed to communicate with customers on various channels. With self-service tools in place, customers are coming to agents with more complex questions and problems. Train your agents beyond the script and encourage them to become human brand experts.

The customer experience is connected to brand reputation and a brands reputation impacts the organization's ability to attract customers and grow revenue. Organizations need to evaluate the entire customer experience across technology, people and communication to see what hindrances are affecting your consumer’s communication experience with your brand.

The CMI Group delivers one-to-one customer service in a relationship-focused way to increase revenue and improve the customer experience and loyalty for our clients through innovative Omni-Channel solutions.