For over a decade, omnichannel has been the talk of the CX town.
Why? Because it promises so much.
Consider some of the most significant frustrations within service experiences. These typically include customers having to repeat themselves, perceiving their time isn’t valued, and feeling like they’re just another number within a database.
The rise of omnichannel promised to make these problems of the past. Yet, they persist, irritating customers, annoying agents, and costing the business bucks.
Perhaps the biggest indicator of this comes from a recent PWC study, which found only 10 percent of UK companies are delivering a seamless omnichannel customer experience.
Much of this struggle relates to tech. For instance, some contact centers may have invested in boxed solutions when first implementing a digital channel – such as WhatsApp.
In doing so, they siloed data. That starved agents of customer context and limited the value of AI tools – such as customer journey analytics, personalization engines, and more.
Still this is a problem. Yet, with today’s CCaaS models helping connect all channels with a CRM and unify the agent desktop – contact centers can more easily build an omnichannel contact center.
Moreover, even if a service operation remains on-premise, it may now wrap an API around legacy channels and have the data flow into a CRM – paving the way for an omnichannel operation.
As such, outsiders may question why omnichannel is not yet mainstream.
However, while the tech is moving forwards, many contact center processes are not.
Remember the Early Days of Live Chat?
The beginning of the omnichannel hype came alongside the birth of live chat.
At that time, contact centers hoped to create an omnichannel environment to house the channel alongside voice and email.
In doing so, many aspired to shift telephone contacts from voice to live chat. There, agents could handle multiple conversations simultaneously – driving down costs.
That sounds ideal. Yet, the logic has flaws.
For instance, when a contact center opens up a new engagement channels, it makes itself available to a new subset of customers that previously avoided service interactions at all costs.
As such, many service operations experienced a significant uptick in contact volumes when adding live chat – which pushed service levels and occupancy rates to the brink.
Yet, that is only one example of the problems poor omnichannel process management can create.