Many organizations want to provide an omni-channel experience, but few are doing it consistently well. If you’re a contact center leader who’s been challenged with leading the omni-channel charge, you’re probably wondering what it takes to make, or break, a successful program. More importantly, what are the components necessary for getting it right? Achieving true omni-channel success will require a combined focus on people, processes, and technology that’s driving toward a unified management of the customer experience. Fundamentally, omni-channel service is about creating a unified experience that ensures context and clarity on a customer’s past, present, and future.
From the perspective of process improvement, organizations must tear down any silos among business units which prevent making connections between things like customer feedback and agent performance. Additionally, a holistic view of each customer should be accessible and consistent across the organization, along with being integrated through systems that ensure true omni-channel routing and handling of all contacts. The most important part of being able to improve the customer experience is having access to a robust set of data for decision-making on all customer-focused initiatives. It’s not acceptable for a contact center or other business unit leader to make these important decisions on assumption or half-truths. If contact centers want to deliver omni-channel success and great customer experiences, they need to connect the dots between the many touch-points of the customer journey.
To connect these touchpoints in the omnichannel customer experience, organizations need to utilize four sets of systems:
- Systems of Engagement
To manage the contact channels for both self-service and assisted interactions and include omni-channel interaction routing that’s based on a single set of rules.
2. Systems of Operation
To ensure the operational side of interactions runs smoothly and include workforce optimization, agent desktop, and robot process automation.
3. Systems of Record
To manage the transactional data related to customer engagement, which includes customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), knowledge management and customer feedback.
4. Analytics
To process large volumes of structured (CRM, ERP) and unstructured (call recordings, text, scripts, social posts) data. Analytics systems can provide root-cause analysis so that organizations can understand why customers engage. Additionally, they can identify interactions that are handled well and those that are not. These systems should also include predictive capabilities that use historical data to forecast likely customer actions.
While it sounds (and is) incredibly complicated to orchestrate an omni-channel customer experience, by implementing an advanced agent desktop system organizations can place these complex systems beneath the surface and deliver only the most relevant data to an agent’s fingertips. The result is an experience that is delivered to the customer with ease and fluency yet powered by complexity and sophistication.
It’s important to realize, however, that improvements to the agent’s desktop could be difficult to track and justify based exclusively on numbers. That doesn’t make the impact any less real. The intangible benefits, such as improved agent experience, can be found in reduced operational costs that are the result of agents using more efficient processes or decreased employee engagement because of improved system function. Beyond this, the customer experience is also improved and can lead to improved customer retention, up-sales and increases in customer lifetime value.
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