Call centers have gone through an unimaginable evolution over the last couple of years. Companies have embraced the idea of omnichannel call center so that they can engage with customers on their terms. And digital channel – in the form of social media, live chat, email, and self-service channels continues its expanding evolution as a popular customer interaction model.
According to a few reliable reports, digital will surpass voice-based contact in a year or two. This means more and more contact center customers no longer wish to communicate with organizations over the phone. With the new generation of tech-savvy customers in the market (Generation Y) the spread of digital channels has had a positive impact on every part of communication. They would turn back to phone as a medium only when all others have failed to resolve their query.
This demand artificial call centers to integrate digital channels into their customer engagement model, or become irrelevant. This transformation or revolution, as some would like to call it, has started an increasing need for an integrated experience in an omnichannel environment.
With the logical move from mass service to mass personalization, the traditional telephone-centric call centers are no longer relevant. Businesses have begun grasping this and are now investing in call center ai technologies that provide True Omnichannel presence in the market that offers the most opportunity.
Customer interactions are going digital. Can your business keep up? Overall, almost half of call centers predict a decrease in voice contacts, and most expect an upsurge in non-voice contacts. And with digital opportuneness, giving out mobile phones to customers, call centers expect an increase in additional digital engagements by 73.8% in a year or two.
Most call centers will soon implement multichannel engagement containing eight channels of communication. Seven of these being digital. A key test will be integrating all the channels to provide a reliable level of service across channel offerings.
To stay ahead of other rivals, call centers should remove isolated channel provision for service, and offer omnichannel experience, i.e. to employ different media to solve a single customer inquiry. And furthermore, these engagements should be seamless.
So what can call centers do to avoid lagging behind? They should change to:
#1. “Digital First Proposition” where call centers remove forced channel switching causing frictional engagements.
#2. A conclusive span of KPIs comprising the entire customer journey rather than concentrating on the voice component.
#3. Skillful agents to manage more than voice engagements
#4. Omnichannel integration designed to offer steady level of customer experience across channel offering
Employ These Omnichannel Strategies to Digitally Transform Your Call Center
We live in the age of digital revolution, but are companies really ready to cater the needs of tech savvy consumers?
Picture this – you have a few questions concerning the mobile services plan, so you initiated a live chat session using the ‘click to chat’ option on your service provider’s ‘Help and Support’ web page. However, you didn’t find the necessary info after interacting for a few minutes, and hence you give a customer service representative (CSR) a call. The CSR relays the exact questions that the robot call center agent had already asked prior. And we all know rest of the story – as we’ve been there numerous times, ending up being upset.
So, it won’t be wide of the mark to say that companies are presently suffering from a ‘multichannel syndrome’. All of them are offering multiple channels for their consumers to contact them, but sadly – all these channels are managed in silos, thus increasing consumer hassles, instead of offer a hassle-free customer experience. And on the other hand, companies also suffer in terms of lesser profits and augmented support calls.
The only way to get out of such a scenario is to provide a perfect omnichannel customer experience to ensure steady, swift and personalized engagements. True omnichannel customer experience indicates strong alignment among numerous touch points, to offer the consumers a sense of engaging with a brand rather than siloed channels.
To guarantee this, companies have to revamp their call centers and formulate their core customer experience vision around the following omnichannel strategies.
360 Degree View of the Customer
The 360-degree view of the customer translates into an integrated presentation, view and access to customer info and engagements across numerous channels. Information about a single customer tends to be kept in siloed systems with several departments, resulting into manifold data sets or customer profiles. The first step towards creating continuous customer journeys across numerous touchpoints is to have an amalgamated customer view which assists businesses to give continuous and personalized engagements, which will eventually result in improved customer interaction and great CX memories.
Strong Front-office & Back-office Accountability
One of the main challenges for call centers is to incorporate the front-office and back-office processes. This is crucial for a great end-to-end customer journey. The emphasis on end-to-end customer journeys requires bridging the gap between multiple business units and functions. Integration between the current telephony setup of the call center, CRM, and the concurrent back-office processes ensure that all conversations are managed and routed, without any troubles and on a priority basis. Hence, consumers can easily complete a multitouch transaction without any delay or interruption.
Agent Empowerment
The definitive goal of delivering greater customer experience depends upon a basic agent experience, to a great extent. If an ai call center agent has to dig in to find essential info across multiple systems and views, it’s not only the time that goes to waste, but efficiency also gets affected. All this ultimately leads to stalled customer experience. Likewise, agents should be able to switch between the channels quickly, without losing the context of customer engagements. The simpler and more rapidly the agent experience, the better and unified customer engagements would become.
Omnichannel experience is the only way to survive in the age of digital transformation and it’s better to start at the right time to give Unified, Integrated and Current Customer Experience.