Phone, email, live chat, and social media: these are now stalwart contact center channels.
Yet, despite all the innovation that has swept across the customer experience space, how service teams manage these channels has changed very little in the past decade.
Indeed, that is perhaps the most striking takeaway from a new survey of 100+ UK service operations by ContactBabel - the contact center research firm.
It found that 55 percent of contact centers still work from multichannel environments, where conversation history and context change each time the customer switches channels.
That’s why the customer frustration: “I keep having to repeat myself!”, remains so rife.
Thankfully, 14 percent have upgraded to a multimodel environment, where agents can switch between channels as part of the same interaction.
So, for instance, an agent may send an SMS or email to the customer while engaging with them over the voice channel. That’s a positive step in the right direction.
Yet, omnichannel is the golden goose, which only 31 percent of contact centers have nailed down – as evident in the chart below.
When contact centers establish such an environment, customers can use more than one channel over numerous conversations while maintaining the history and context of the original query.
Indeed, all the context follows them as they move between voice and digital channels.
That is ideal for the modern customer who doesn’t always default to the phone. Instead, they switch channels as they see fit, choosing based on their intent, experiences, and personality.
In this reality, omnichannel is not only best practice but a necessary step to reducing customer effort, satisfaction, and often loyalty.
Yet, it’s not easy to achieve – as that small 31 percent of contact centers may attest to.
Where the Omnichannel Dream Turns Into a Nightmare
Of course, budget is a persistent spanner in the omnichannel works for many organizations. Yet, survey participants spotlighted two even more significant stumbling blocks:
- The technology platform does not support a single view of the customer.
- Business processes are siloed and separate.
These are particularly bothersome as establishing a single integrated platform capable of carrying context across channels is the foundation of omnichannel.
As such, businesses must often rethink their entire environment, move away from channel-focused point solutions, and enable an extendable service architecture.
Also, the business must pull together operational, product, and experience data into a “single source of truth” that customers and agents can leverage across any channel.
Yet, there are several additional considerations, as the study suggests:
“A key aim of omnichannel is to provide a consistency of customer experience, and this requires access not only to the same master dataset but also the same knowledge bases, and business logic must be applied equally.”
Add to that the requirement for real-time data flows and synchronous updates across channels and databases, and achieving an omnichannel contact center appears to be an immense task. Yet, not an impossible one.
The Route Out of Omnichannel Trauma
There are many steps to establishing an omnichannel contact center. It doesn’t happen overnight.
The ContactBabel report dives deeper into these, yet the following five actions offer an excellent starting point for contact centers before they consider evaluating various tech providers.
Step 1 - Start with Customer Research
Honing in on the critical issues within the current environment helps prove the omnichannel concept to the CTO and uncover customer perspectives to build into the new contact center design.