A Comprehensive Guide on Omnichannel Experiences and What You Should Be Aware of While Choosing an Omnichannel Customer Engagement Platform

What does omnichannel customer engagement platform mean in the context of a contact center?

Let us define it for better understanding.

An omnichannel customer engagement platform lets your customers connect with your business using multiple customer service channels – voice, email, SMS, WhatsApp, mobile, social, chat, and chatbots.

In an omnichannel environment, all of these channels are tightly integrated to provide a single view of your customers to the customer service or support agents.

Besides, your contact center platform will also be tightly integrated with all customer interaction applications like CRM, Helpdesk software, Intelligence, ERP, and other systems. This would facilitate providing a single view of your customers.

An omnichannel experience connects all customer touchpoints, like physical stores, online, social, email, mobile, chats, and calls.

It allows customers to pick up where they left off on one channel and continue the experience on another.

While browsing your website, would your customers be able to place a call and talk to your product expert or a customer success executive?

When interacting with your chatbot, would your customers be able to choose to interact with a human agent seamlessly?

Would your customer be able to add items to their shopping cart and access them at your physical stores?

Imagine having this level of cross-channel coordination, and your customers would love you for that.

Let us look at some statistics that champion the case for an omnichannel strategy:

• According to ClickZ, shoppers who use three or more channels to interact with brands have a purchasing frequency rate 250 percent higher than single-channel users.
• Harvard Business Review reports that customers who use more channels spend an average of 4 percent more in physical stores and 10 percent more online.
• According to a Salesforce report, 67% of customers use multiple channels to complete a single transaction. 40% of customers say that they won’t do business with companies if they can’t use their preferred channels

Do you need to have all the customer service channels mentioned above to provide omnichannel?

Certainly not!

Here are certain home truths about evolving an omnichannel customer engagement platform:

• You can pick and choose the channels based on your customer needs and preferences. The more channels you add, the more bandwidth you will need to service those channels.
• If you don’t know your customer preferences, use default channels like voice, email, SMS, and website chats. Ensure you provide exceptional service in all of these channels. Keep adding channels based on your customer feedback and needs.
• Integrate your contact center platform with all of the channels you want to offer and with enterprise applications like CRM, helpdesk software, and other customer interaction applications.

Understanding Omnichannel Customer Engagement Experiences

Let me give you a couple of examples to appreciate the omnichannel customer experience.

1. Telecommunication

I called my Internet Service Provider, who also provides me with mobility and land telephony services. I wanted to upgrade my Internet connectivity, and I checked with them about the cost of the upgrade.

It was way too high, so I decided against it. However, I left them a request to contact me if the upgrade cost goes down by 30%.

After a couple of months, I visited their experience center to change my SIM card, and they did not check with me about the Internet upgrade that I had earlier inquired about. However, I saw a poster there stating that they provide upgraded connectivity at a 50% lower cost than what was told.

In the experience center, I signed up for the upgraded connectivity, and they activated the upgraded connection.

What if I had not visited the experience center?

There would have been a loss of revenue for many more months.

With an omnichannel customer engagement experience, they would have had access to all my interactions across channels. It would have been natural for them to get in touch with me and ensure that there was very little revenue loss.

2. Banking

Vikram and his wife plan to have a child and want to move out of their cramped apartment in Chennai and move to the suburbs.

They check out different banking websites for available home loans.

They found an offer from a bank that talked about 6.5% interest on home loans.

They decide to check out the offer and set up an appointment for 10 am the next day with a home loan expert by interacting with the web chat option on the bank’s website.

At 10 am the next day, when they reach the local branch, the loan expert greets them. The loan expert gets Vikram and his wife to fill out basic information about themselves on his tablet. This gets sent to their backend, and they create a basic customer profile.

Vikram and his wife get all their doubts clarified, and they leave the bank satisfied. An hour later, they receive an email from the loan expert in the bank summarizing their conversation and all the details related to the home loan offer, including their eligibility to avail of the loan.

The loan expert also leaves them with the customer service number if they need further clarification. 

Vikram and his wife decide to go with this bank for the home loan, and knowing how much loan they can avail themselves of, they start to hunt for a house. Meanwhile, they call customer service and get help filling out the online application for the home loan, and they get it approved. They find a place that fulfills their needs within ten days, and with the pre-approved loan, they do the formalities in the next ten days.

The customer service platform seeks feedback from Vikram using its automated voice messaging system. Vikram responds that he could not be happier. 

After this interaction, Vikram gets an email listing the input provided and instructions on how to reach customer service quickly.

Now, Vikram and his wife are proud homeowners in the suburbs, and they look forward to the baby’s arrival into their family.

What a customer experience, right?

It’s clean and frictionless. Vikram and his wife would likely discuss this experience with all their friends and family members. 

Overall, they interacted with eight touchpoints, and the bank’s omnichannel customer engagement platform and management system allowed them to have a seamless experience.

Omnichannel Customer Engagement Platform Is All About Agent Empowerment

Agents are at the center of every customer interaction, and how do you empower them to provide better customer experiences?

Let me give you a few examples of empowering agents with omnichannel customer engagement platform infrastructure.

Example 1 – Empowered Agents

The fundamental aspect of understanding your customer journey is to provide a single view of the customer. It also has to map the customer across all channels, and the map should be visible for the agents to make suggestions proactively.

Here is the scenario.

You are a customer with a mortgage loan with your bank and have paid the loan for half your term. Currently, you are looking for a personal loan, and you access the loan evaluation tool on the bank’s mobile app.

As a customer experience function, you can access the existing relationship with the customer on the mortgage loan and the recent mobile app interaction on personal loans.

Your outbound loan products division reaches out to the customer with this data. It suggests that the customer can top up the existing mortgage loan itself, and he doesn’t have to go through the application for a personal loan for his financial needs. This does not require additional paperwork besides consent and signing the extended agreement.

This is a classic example of offering a proactive customer experience.

Here, you have converted the customer data into insights and actions. This allows you to move from transactions to offering personalized recommendations to your customers.

Example 2 – Empowered Agents

A customer chats with your website chatbot and is not able to resolve. The customer is provided with the option on the chatbot to seamlessly talk to a live human agent at the call center.

The agent views the conversation that the customer has had with the chatbot. He pulls the information the customer is asking for from the backend and resolves the queries.

Now, he transitions the call to another department to process the approval of a transactional query that the customer had. This also happens seamlessly; the approver accesses all the chat and telephonic conversations and goes ahead with the approval.

In this scenario, if you notice, the customer did not have to repeat himself even once. He did not have to try to reach specific departments by himself – it was all automated. The transition from one channel to another and between departments was seamless, focusing on providing the best customer experience.

This would also allow the contact center agents to work more productively to ensure more complex inquiries get the support, quality, and time they deserve.

Example 3 – Empowered Agents

I was moderating a panel discussion recently, and one of the panelists shared this scenario with us during the session.

He booked a hotel for a 4-night stay in Gurugram using an Online Travel Agency. It was a non-refundable booking. When he checked in, he somehow did not like the hotel and expressed that to the hotel staff. The hotel staff apologized and suggested upgrading him to the suite room.

He wasn’t convinced and decided to shift to a better hotel.

So, he called the Online Travel Agency and told them that he had booked this hotel and wasn’t comfortable staying there. The agent said he would figure out if something could be done while listening to this.

If he had followed the Standard Operating Procedures, the agent would have said, “We are sorry that you don’t like the hotel, but since it is a non-refundable booking, we are not in a position to help you.”

However, this agent took this up with the higher-ups within the online travel agency, made sure that he got the refund, booked him in another hotel, and helped him with the process of checking in. The agent even checked whether he was comfortable with the new place.

What happened here?

The agent had enough data to know that ‘So and So’ has booked more than 500 nights through their portal in the last ten years. The agent knows he is a loyal customer of the portal because of its integrated omnichannel customer engagement platform infrastructure. He was empowered to decide to push for a refund of a non-refundable booking by going against the SOPs.

The agent ensured that the customer’s lifetime value only increased with this phenomenal customer experience.

We have seen what an omnichannel customer engagement experience is, as well as a couple of examples of omnichannel and a few examples of empowered agents delivering omnichannel experiences.

Now, let us spend time figuring out how to choose the right omnichannel customer engagement platform and what you should be aware of before selecting a platform.

• Does your platform provider offer seamless integration across all channels and interfaces?

This is a critical step before choosing a contact center platform. Ensure that your provider offers integration across all the channels, which would allow your agents to have a single view of your customers irrespective of the channels they use.

Besides, check if the provider offers integration with all the customer interaction interfaces so you can access all the interactions, purchase history, and preferences.

For instance, check if the platform has pre-built integrations with industry-leading CRM and helpdesk software.

• Is intelligent routing and automation a part of your omnichannel infrastructure?  

Does your platform provider have the ability to look at the customer information and pull out all the past customer interactions?

Based on past customer interactions, would they be able to route the interactions to the right channel and the right agent with the right skills?

Do they provide the option for you to automate the interactions using chatbots, IVR, and virtual assistants?

• What about the scalability and flexibility of the platform?

Does your provider allow the addition of channels and their integration to be seamless?

Do they integrate with existing CRMs and other best-of-breed IT systems using APIs?

Do they let onboard agents and downsize agents without a huge process of license management, minimal commitments, and contractual agreements?

Do they offer easy scalability to different geographical locations? Do they offer cloud deployment, in which case geography won’t be an issue?

• Does it support analytics and intelligent reporting?

Does the platform provide advanced analytics and customizable reports to track key performance indicators (KPIs)?

Does the platform offer insights on metrics like Average Handling Time (AHT), First Contact Resolution (FCR), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES), and Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

Does it allow you to pull together easy-to-access reports from millions of data points?

• Does it provide enterprise-grade Security and Compliance with industry standards and regulations?

Does the platform comply with industry regulations and standards – HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR, TCPA, FDCPA, Reg-F, SOC2, FedRamp, and ISAE 3402 Type II specifications?

Does the provider have full-time staff monitoring their security operations center round-the-clock against attacks and vulnerabilities?

Does your provider ensure redundancy, failover routes, virtualization, and physical security of your servers?

• Is the platform a preserve of only the enterprise customers, or can it be used for small and mid-sized organizations as well?

Omnichannel has always been the preserve of enterprise contact centers, and many small players did not have the resources to have access to omnichannel customer engagement platform.

With the advent of the cloud, customer experience has become a level-playing field, where even small and mid-sized businesses could have access to omnichannel capabilities.

Does your provider offer cloud deployment of the contact center platform?

• Does your platform support self-service capabilities and automation?

Does your provider offer self-service capabilities like chatbots and IVR for customers to resolve their transactional queries?

For instance, you can inquire about your account balance, reschedule your appointment, cancel subscriptions and payments, etc., using self-service platforms. For the rest, you can access the human agents.

Does your platform offer a seamless transition from self-service platforms to human agents?

As a customer experience function, half your battle is won if you have a single view of all your customer interactions. omnichannel is the beginning of this experience.