For decades, brands have interacted with consumers in a linear fashion unlike omnichannel strategy, having a single type of touchpoint to address their issues. But today, customer service is not limited within the spheres of support phone lines. Consumers reach out to brands through various channels: email, web, text, voice, message, and social media. Rather, we can say omnichannel is now the new buzzword in the contact center industry. Despite its growing popularity, many organizations still hesitate to integrate new applications into their business operations. But, why?
There have been underlying reasons behind this lack of adoption. Most contact centers are still hesitant due to the sheer volume of digital channels available as they don’t find it realistic to deliver consistent quality of support across all channels simultaneously.
However, while stacking the expenses and advantages of chatbots versus agent conversations, the allure of the bots is really clear: as you can resolve redundant client inquiries with AI-powered chatbots round-the-clock without involving any agent, your agents can dedicate their focus on resolving complex customer queries. It saves 30-40% of your customer support costs.
Why do businesses struggle with omni-channel roadblocks?
One should look no farther than industry leaders to comprehend what such organizations got off-base in their omnichannel procedures. Amazon, for example, enabled self-service, however, with a key distinction. As customers often prefer assistance from live agents over call, self-service is inadequate. Amazon steers clients to the stations that are most appropriate to their inclinations while additionally offering live chat / voice support. Despite being a global leader, Amazon stressed delivering omnichannel customer support to boost CSAT. It has also helped live agents to manage complex requests and resolve them.
Regardless of your best efforts, you might be running into certain difficulties that keep you from delivering exceptional quality of service across channels – particularly with rapidly changing market conditions and stringent regulations.
These challenges include:
• Growing difficulties in providing a consistent experience with every new channel
• Customers need to invest too much of effort and long issue resolution cycles
• Agents flipping between different applications and UIs with the development of new channels
• Agents struggling to get 360-degree visibility into customer interactions and information
If you are encountering any of the above, you are experiencing roadblocks in the omni-channel approach. Consistency is a brilliant start. However, it’s anything but enough. As a general rule, there is significantly more to it than offering assistance on all channels, or in any event, offering a steady client experience that is tough to fulfill. You should consistently focus on customer journeys rather than dedicating your time to enriching individual channel experiences. Ultimately it’s about boosting efficiency, delivering higher quality service, and making every interaction seamless and meaningful.
How is multichannel & Cross-channel support different from omnichannel support?
Customers can get multichannel support through an assortment of channels. Yet, each channel works like stand-alone storehouses and doesn’t offer interconnection. Presently, this is the place where omnichannel experience unmistakably starts to lead the pack. In omnichannel support, user data is accessible on all channels and interwoven to deliver an all-encompassing experience to users.
From the users’ perspective, cross-channel support can have the option to contact their favored retailer on different channels; however, it is increasingly harder to maintain a balance between the online and offline world over the long run. For what reason shouldn’t the thing requested from the online store additionally be paid for in the store?
An omnichannel approach means various cohesive channels working as a team to deliver an integrated brand experience, ensuring users get the same quality of assistance regardless of how they communicate with the brand.
Make Omnichannel Engagement a Success
Focus on Customer Journey
Imagine channels being simply mediums of customer communication, so you can zero in on providing an exceptional customer experience. As you adopt a channel-less strategy, you no longer invest your energy pondering on every individual channel and focus on delivering simple, effective CX throughout every customer journey. So, quit stressing over channels and rather dedicate all your attention to customer journeys.
With a centralized repository to all customer communications, you get a 360-degree view of all interactions and information that will help you craft an integrated customer experience instead of embedding siloed logic into each channel. From digital self-service to agent assistance, it will help you minimize wait time, accelerate query resolution, and boost customer satisfaction.
Conduct a content analysis
It’s critical to maintain consistency across your site, application, blog section, and social channels. In general, a few organizations will zero in on creating keyword-stuffed blogs or web page content so that it improves their SEO ranks, regardless of writing being clunky. Be that as it may, regardless of how incredible they look, they will not get you far without intuitive content. Instead, you should perform a thorough analysis of your content on websites and other platforms to ensure whether you are rightly representing your brand or not.
Improve your response times
How soon do you respond to user queries usually? It might astound you to realize that 60% of consumers expect to hear from a brand within 60 minutes. Furthermore, in case you’re not responding to user enquiries at all you’re giving your image an incredible raw deal. With regards to your site, ensure you’re making a move to draw in and address guests. You can utilize correspondence channels like live chat support or AI chatbots to make each user feel valued.
Slash Customer Effort
At the focal point of your customer service strategy ought to consistently be your customers and their happiness. You should never leave them to do the truly difficult work. Eventually, time and again, they are forced to do the heavy-lifting due to the poor quality of service they receive – from swimming through data to rehashing the same thing until they sound like a broken record. The experience changes based on which channel they pick and as a result they develop a resistance in switching channels. It’s an ideal opportunity to leave the truly difficult work to the chatbots.
Leverage the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to get actionable insights and eliminate any point of friction in customer communications. With AI & NLP-powered chatbots, you can better utilize customer insights to analyze customer intent with advanced sentiment analysis, and cut down the level of effort required from their end. This also helps to accelerate the issue resolution rate and accuracy.
Deliver Personalized experience
AI-powered virtual assistants help you with user profiling based on their risk scoring and behavioral patterns. This helps to map the next best action for every customer and create personalized experience. Providing tailored experiences to a user’s particular needs at that moment, you can ramp up personalized service. It not only results in greater customer retention but also increases cross-sell or upsell opportunities. Keep your customers first and deliver consistent quality of service across all channels – this will help you build exceptional CX despite which medium users select to contact your brand.
Streamline Your Agent Experience
While users are at the core of all that you do in customer service, your workforce are the spine that upholds genuinely amazing client care. As critical as the 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 representatives to manage, often manually, which increases the room for error.
Almost certainly, it’s imperative to map the simplicity of your user experience. However, remember validating your agent experience. The expected advantages of adding more channels for users can be immediately counterbalanced by the disadvantages it will bring in for the agent. They wind up investing more energy into wrapping up tickets, working in separated frameworks, and flipping between numerous UIs and applications just to assist their customers.
About Enterprise Bot
We offer cutting-edge conversational AI solutions powered by hyperautomation to revamp customer service and sales interactions for enterprises. Our AI-powered assistants enhance digital engagement for businesses by delivering omnichannel, personalized experiences. Powered by advanced NLP and effective intent analysis, our technological solutions map the entire customer journey to send automated responses in seconds and create an exceptional customer experience (CX).
