How Does An Omnichannel Approach Impact Customer Service?

Ideally, every contact center works on satisfying the customer service needs of 100% of the target base. As in any other case, keeping the reality close to the ideal target for the contact center is a tough nut to crack. If you look at the customer preference statistics, here’s what they say:

• 77% of brands consider customer experience as a key competitive differentiator (IDC)
• 49% of consumers leave a brand due to poor customer experience. (Statistics source)
• Consumers base their buying decisions on their previous customer experience with a brand. (Statistics Source)

Pair these key takeaways with the studies that say nine out of ten customers want brands to provide an omnichannel experience. If you still do not have an omnichannel communication strategy for your contact center in place, you must know how this prospect affects the customer service you deliver. So, let’s uncover the basics first.

More About Omnichannel Contact Center

An omnichannel contact center, at its core, is a customer service function that is based on cloud-hosted contact center software to handle customer interactions. It encompasses multiple channels, including chat, phone, text, email, or social media, to deliver a unified, seamless customer experience as they switch back and forth across channels.

Businesses can realize the importance of an omnichannel approach for their contact center can be realized from the fact that customers usually take a non-linear path when interacting with a brand of their choice. For example, they might use the brand’s app to add products to the cart, send an email or make a phone call to ask for customer service and buy in person from the local brand store nearby during the course of a single transaction. Any break in consistency across different customer interaction channels can lead to a loss of customers.

An omnichannel solution can help you address these customer expectations. Also, note that call center software and omnichannel contact center solutions are different. While the former may only imply a telephone-first customer interaction strategy, the latter usually offers many different communication channels.

Let’s dig deeper into the connection between an omnichannel strategy for a contact center and customer service efficiency.

An omnichannel Approach Means Enhanced Customer Service 

Implementing an omnichannel approach will not only benefit your customers but also make your agents’ lives easier. Here’s what you can expect:

1. Improved customer retention rate

Recent stats show that the customer retention rates of companies using omnichannel communication strategies are 91% higher than those that do not.  This is quite obvious given the improvements in customer service quality supported by omnichannel tools.

Using an omnichannel contact center solution, you can communicate with your customers on their preferred channel. This prevents them from having repeated conversations on the same query with different agents, reduces the hold time, and even increases the first-call resolution rate.

This is quite useful in the current time and age when most consumers prefer digital-first customer services via self-service options, messaging apps, or social media.

2. Better alignment of the remote workforce

Given that 75% of global workers consider remote working as the new normal (Source), the business communication tool you select must align with the needs of a remote workforce. It should be compatible with smartphones and tablets to allow your agents to access customer history on the go at any time. Most omnichannel contact center solutions are designed to cater to such needs.

Besides this, their advanced omnichannel routing features ensure that an agent will be available whenever a customer raises a service request. Similarly, their remote call forwarding function sends the inbound calls from the agent’s desk phone to their smartphone (or to any other defined path). 

3. Faster first-call resolution

What’s the expected delay or tolerance level of end customers related to getting the required customer support?

The quantitative analysis says that 82% of customers now expect an immediate response to the queries they raise for customer service. With an omnichannel approach to deliver the best-in-class customer service, you can increase the likelihood of customers getting connected to an agent on the very first contact via any channel. It also ensures that the selected agent will be adequately qualified to provide assistance to prevent multiple call transfers.

You can also benefit from the multi-level IVR capabilities of an omnichannel contact center solution to provide self-service functionalities to customers.

4. Better customer relationships resulting from personalized response

A sure-shot way to improve brand-customer relationships is to deliver a personalized experience while resolving their support queries. While this may sound tedious with call center solutions, an omnichannel contact center can make things better.

Having an omnichannel strategy makes personalization easy as your agents can tap into the details of the entire customer history and current interaction to be better prepared for the calls. They can also utilize automated text messages, emails, or social media messages to make product recommendations or resolve first-level customer queries that are easy to handle.

Now that you know the advantages of an omnichannel contact center solution, you should also know how to select the right one.

5 Features to Look for in an Omnichannel Contact Center Solution

a) Comprehensive monitoring

This aspect of an omnichannel solution helps track live as well as historical KPIs so that your team can better understand the customers. Based on the insights obtained, you can measure individual agent or team efficiency and identify the most active communication channels.

b) CRM integrations

Your contact center solution must allow integrations with third-party CRMs, marketing, and project management tools. This will help you and your team transition between different platforms smoothly.

c) Control over automation rules

The contact center software you select should allow you to configure and set automation rules based on time-related triggers and other events to streamline business workflows.

d) Omnichannel routing

Contact center solutions with omnichannel routing features allow the admin (you) to set rules about the right agent selection to respond to customer queries irrespective of the communication channel.

e) Customer sentiment analysis

With the help of automated AI, businesses can perform customer sentiment analysis to detect phrases, words, and patterns of speech during an interaction.

How Exotel Can Help?

Exotel’s omnichannel solution is used by thousands of clients across the globe to improve their customer service quality. It is a unified suite of contact center solutions that you need to run your contact center operations seamlessly.