According to a recent study, companies with omnichannel engagement strategies retain 89% of their customers. Contrast that with the 33% customer retention rate of organizations with weak omnichannel strategies, and it’s clear that delivering on customer expectations is a business imperative.
Given that many of these interactions occur in the contact center, companies need an modern omnichannel approach geared towards digital channels like Messaging, if they hope to produce a high-quality, engaging customer experience. With that in mind, following are six key steps for becoming an autonomous, omnichannel contact center necessary for today’s digitally-savvy customers:
1. Map Your Online Customer Journeys
The first step to determining customers’ needs and preferences is understanding how they use the internet and other information sources to begin their customer journey. For example, what products or services are they considering? What are their preferred communication channels? How will they make their decision? Answering these and other questions provides vital customer insights that can serve as the foundation of a company’s omnichannel customer engagement strategy.
2. Adopt a Cloud Contact Center Solution
Modernizing your communications and contact center infrastructure to deliver on omnichannel expectations likely sounds like a daunting task. The good news is that it’s also an unnecessary one—if you move your contact center operations to the cloud. With a cloud-based infrastructure, companies can manage data from applications across all service channels and coordinate them with agents, CRM teams, and other departments like billing or sales. With a cloud-based contact center solution, it’s easier than ever to engage customers over the digital channel of their choice.
3. Deploy an Open Approach with APIs to Deliver a 360° Agent Desktop
Another best practice for becoming an omnichannel contact center is creating an open and flexible solution that integrates all of the relevant systems, data and processes using pre-built integrations and APIs. This provides agents with up-to-the minute information about customer interactions, such as order status, payments and other data points that inform a positive customer experience.
4. Tap Into Social Media
To underscore the skyrocketing popularity of social media, 1.3 million new users joined every day in 2020. In this environment, consumers are increasingly turning to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other channels to communicate with companies, making it essential that organizations include social media in their omnichannel contact center strategies. An omnichannel solution can help meet these needs for your company or organization.
5. Harness the Power of Automation and AI
In a similar vein, AI is everywhere and has real potential to improve customer experience by removing and automating manual tasks for customers and contact center agents. With the technology, companies can discover patterns in large data sets and make better decisions based on real-time information and insights to improve and automate common processes, such as change of address, compliance management, payment disputes and product returns – to name a few.
6. Maintain Consistency Across Channels
And finally, it’s also important to set and maintain a universal quality standard so that you are delivering a consistent experience across all channels. Whether it’s a customer calling into the contact center or sending a product question via WhatsApp, ensuring a rapid, helpful – and consistent – response is key to success in the omnichannel age.
To learn more and see a cloud solution up close and personal check out this quick on-demand DEMO video on omnichannel agent desktops.
