For decades, brands have interacted with consumers in a linear fashion, as opposed to a multi-channel strategy, having a single point of contact to solve their problems. However, customer service today is not limited to service phone lines. Consumers engage with brands in a variety of ways: email, web, text, voice, messaging and social media. Rather, we can say that omnichannel is now the new buzzword in the contact center industry. Despite its growing popularity, many organizations are still hesitant to integrate new applications into their business operations. But why?
There were reasons behind this lack of adoption. Many contact centers are still reeling from the sheer volume of digital channels because they don’t see it as realistic to provide a consistent quality of support across all channels at the same time.
However, by grouping the costs and benefits of chatbots across agent conversations, the appeal of bots is really clear. because you can handle redundant customer queries with AI-powered chatbots 24/7 without involving any agents, your agents can dedicate themselves to solving complex customer queries. It saves 30-40% of your customer support costs.
Why do businesses struggle with omnichannel roadblocks?
You don’t have to look any further than industry leaders to understand what such organizations have got in their multi-channel procedures. Amazon, for example, enabled self-service, but with a key difference. Since customers often prefer the help of live agents over a call, self-service is insufficient. Amazon directs customers to stations that best match their preferences, additionally offering live chat/voice support. Despite being a global leader, Amazon has emphasized omnichannel customer support to drive CSAT. It also helped live agents manage and resolve complex queries.
Despite your best efforts, you may encounter certain challenges that prevent you from providing exceptional quality services across channels, especially in the face of rapidly changing market conditions and stringent regulations.
These challenges include:
• Increasing difficulty in providing a consistent experience with each new channel
• Customers have to invest too much effort and long problem solving cycles
• Agents that cycle between different applications and UIs with new channel development
• Agents struggling to gain 360-degree visibility into customer interactions and information
If you’re facing any of the above, you’re running into obstacles in your omni-channel approach. Consistency is a brilliant start. It’s anything but enough, though. As a general rule, it’s significantly more than offering omni-channel support, or at least offering a consistent customer experience, which is difficult to accomplish. You need to consistently focus on customer journeys, rather than devoting your time to enriching individual channel experiences. Ultimately, it’s about increasing efficiency, delivering higher quality services, and making every interaction seamless and meaningful.
How does multi-channel and cross-channel support differ from multi-channel support?
Customers can get multi-channel support through a range of channels. However, each channel operates as separate repositories and does not offer interconnection. Currently, this is where the omnichannel experience is unmistakably starting to lead the pack. With multi-channel support, user data is available across all channels and interwoven to deliver a comprehensive user experience.
From the users’ perspective, cross-channel support can connect with their favorite retailer across multiple channels; However, in the long run, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a balance between the online and offline worlds. Why shouldn’t an item ordered from an online store be paid extra in the store?
An omnichannel approach means different integrated channels work as a team to provide an integrated brand experience, ensuring users receive the same quality of support no matter how they interact with the brand.
Make omnichannel engagement successful
Focus on the customer journey
Imagine that channels are just ways to communicate with customers, so you can zero in on an exceptional customer experience. When you adopt a zero-channel strategy, you no longer invest your energy thinking about each individual channel and focus on delivering simple, effective CX throughout each customer journey. So stop stressing over channels and focus on customer journeys.
With a centralized repository of all customer communications, you get a 360-degree view of all interactions and information to help you create an integrated customer experience instead of logic built into each channel. From digital self-service to agent assistance, we’ll help you minimize wait times, speed up inquiry resolution and increase customer satisfaction.
Perform content analysis
It’s important to maintain consistency across your website, app, blog section, and social channels. Generally, several organizations will zero in on creating keyword-stuffed blog or web page content to improve their SEO rankings regardless of the writing. Whatever it is, no matter how incredible they look, they won’t get you far without intuitive content. Instead, you should conduct a thorough analysis of your content on websites and other platforms to ensure that you are representing your brand correctly or not.
Improve your response times
How quickly do you typically respond to user inquiries? It may surprise you to realize that 60% of consumers expect to hear from a brand within 60 minutes. Furthermore, if you don’t respond to user queries at all, you’re giving your image an incredibly raw deal. When it comes to your website, make sure you take steps to invite and refer guests. You can use communication channels like live chat support or AI chatbots to make every user feel valued.
Reduce customer effort
Your customers and their happiness should always be at the heart of your customer service strategy. You should never leave them to do the really hard work. After all, time and time again they have to deal with the workload due to the poor quality of service they receive, from swimming through data to repeating the same thing over and over again until they sound like a broken record. The experience changes based on the channel they choose, and as a result they develop a resistance to switching channels. It’s the perfect opportunity to leave the really hard work to chatbots.
Harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to gain actionable insights and eliminate any friction points in customer communications. With AI and NLP-powered chatbots, you can better leverage customer insights to analyze customer intent through advanced sentiment analysis and reduce the level of effort required on their end. This also helps speed up the speed and accuracy of problem solving.
Provide a personalized experience
AI-powered virtual assistants help you profile users based on their risk assessment and behavior patterns. This helps map the next best course of action for each customer and create a personalized experience. By providing customized experiences to the specific needs of the user in the moment, you can enhance personalized service. Not only does it lead to greater customer retention, but it also increases opportunities for cross-selling or up-selling. Keep your customers first and deliver consistent service quality across all channels. this will help you create an exceptional CX despite the fact that average users choose to connect with your brand.
Streamline your agent experience
While users are at the heart of everything you do in customer service, your workforce is the backbone that supports truly amazing customer care. As important as CX is, you need to pay special attention to your agent experience. Under the conventional omni-channel approach, every time you add another channel, it adds another interface for your reps to manage, often manually, which increases the potential for error.
It is almost certainly imperative to map the simplicity of your user experience. However, remember to verify your agent’s experience. The expected benefits of adding more channels to users can be immediately counterbalanced by the disadvantages it would bring to the agent. They put more energy into packaging tickets, working in separate frameworks, and moving between multiple UIs and apps just to help their customers.
We offer cutting-edge conversational AI solutions powered by hyper-automation to improve customer service and sales interactions for enterprises. Our AI-powered assistants increase digital engagement for businesses by delivering omnichannel, personalized experiences. With advanced NLP and powerful intent analytics, our technology solutions map the entire customer journey to send automated responses within seconds and create an exceptional customer experience (CX).