Want to implement personalized omnichannel into your contact center? Would you like it to be effortless and seamless for your customers? How about easy for agents to use?
The Current State of Customer Experience
Although customers want effortless and personal customer service with new and emerging channels like social, SMS, messenger apps, and bots, many companies haven’t implemented a truly innovative experience that includes all emerging channels for customers. Many companies claim to be omnichannel but a lot of them don’t implement a truly omnichannel experience.
With the pandemic, the rise of mobile, messenger apps has been huge. Customers now want to connect with the businesses they love on-the-go, and they want mobility and flexibility in their communication with companies. Companies need to meet their customers on mobile messenger apps, and be able to switch channels on-a-whim.
Where Do Companies Want to Be?
Most companies understand the need for seamless omnichannel communications. Many want to seamlessly integrate new, important channels, like messenger apps, into an omnichannel experience. Mid-size companies want to transition to digital from voice and email only, with chat and messenger apps being the top channel they would like to add. Most larger companies are already multichannel, but they want a truly omnichannel platform. The bottom line is that everyone wants to reduce effort, increase personalization, and add emerging channels.
Tip #1: See the Journey and Act in the Moment
To create an effortless, personal omnichannel journey, you must be able to see the journey. Agents who can see each step in the customer journey are more empowered to act in the moment to make communication effortless and personal. It is important that agents can see each channel with all context from each channel interaction.
Tip #2: Get Your Top Channel Working with Your Voice Channel
For many midsize companies, they are just getting started with multiple channels. It is very important to get your top channels working seamlessly before adding every channel under the sun. Once you have your top channels working together it gets easier to add more channels. The most common use case we hear from our customers is getting web chat working with their voice channel. By that, I mean seamless escalation from the web to a live agent via voice or even video chat. But it doesn’t stop there—true omnichannel will also provide omnichannel reporting and quality management on all channels.
Tip #3: Effortless and Personal for Today and Tomorrow
Once you start adding in more channels, it is important never to create silos. All emerging channels like bots and messengers need to work seamlessly with other channels. In some industries, it may be important to get new channels implemented quickly. But if done in a silo, that quick, siloed implementation will affect customers’ ability to connect with a live agent, in turn wiping out CSAT. Give agents the ability to communicate over traditional and emerging channels. Lastly, ensure that your customer service platform handles all bots of your choice (e.g., IBM Watson, Alterra) and messengers of your choice (e.g., Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, LINE, Viber, etc.), and in-app messengers.
To learn more about staying relevant in this world of digital disruption, see Bright Pattern’s e-book, 5 Keys: Effortless and Personal Omnichannel Customer Service.
