Today customers have many ways to engage with the brands they love, but they rarely do so through only one channel. Creating seamless, integrated customer journeys that deliver differentiated experiences across touchpoints requires a holistic, data-driven understanding of where your brand promise may be out of alignment with the reality of what is being delivered.
An omnichannel contact center strategy requires connecting the data from customer touchpoints across multiple communication channels to understand how customers engage with your brand. All the data from channels like voice, email, chat, virtual assistants, text messaging, and social media are analyzed together, essentially breaking the silos and allowing for seamless, more effortless experiences.
The benefits of an omnichannel contact center strategy go way beyond channel integration and increased agent productivity. CX Today welcomed Kate Jones, Senior Director, CX Journey Consulting & Analytics at Concentrix, to discuss the three steps CX leaders can take to evolve their omnichannel data strategies to facilitate deeper customer engagement.
Step 1: Break Down CX Channel Data Silos
One of the problems with traditional contact centers is that they are channel siloed. To execute proper data analysis, it's crucial to have the ability to extract data from all channels, preferably at the same time and without much hassle.
An omnichannel approach enables organizations to discover how much available data there is, both structured and unstructured, and whether it can be used to fuel any CX transformation engine. The omnichannel approach coupled with journey analytics offers a unified data view of every customer interaction, shedding light on the actual state of the customer journey. More data allows for more personalized and intimate customer interactions. Building on this, Jones explains:
"Having all of the data associated with customers across multiple channels allows for much greater customer understanding. You know exactly what is going on at each point in their journey. You can see the quality of those experiences, which can be measured with sentiment, derived from unstructured data using AI, as well as with insights from structured data, like time to resolution."
"Omnichannel data coupled with journey analytics helps us visualize at scale the end-to-end journey, which allows us to understand the most common customer friction points and uncover areas for focus improvement efforts."
Omnichannel data also helps with understanding which channels are best for which scenarios. "Aside from allowing customers to engage with us in a channel of their choice, we also want to guide them to the lowest effort experience and identify that in a data-driven way", says Jones.
When done right, organizations can detect situations where customers should be guided to another channel that is lower effort and offers a better experience for them depending on the customer's issue. In the end, customers are looking for a fast and seamless experience regardless of the channel.
Step 2: Leverage Insights Across Channels to Accelerate Transformation
The key to accelerating CX transformation is focusing efforts on the areas that will have the most significant and rapid impacts: those that balance quick wins to build momentum with larger strategic differentiators. Jones thinks CX leaders often overlook the power and scope of omnichannel data and risk focusing on aspects of the customer journey that are not the most important or impactful.
Kate explained that one of her clients wanted to improve its IVR experience and only looked at IVR data to identify improvement opportunities. They needed a whole new perspective. She says: