In the contact center industry, providing a seamless, effortless customer journey is one of the most important goals for many businesses. The next evolution in contact center technology is omnichannel communications. Omnichannel communications allows contact centers to treat all communication channels on their platform as a part of one conversation. Channels like voice, SMS and texting, messaging apps, video, email, chat bots, and more can be combined into one conversation that moves across all of these channels. For example, a customer that comes into your contact center through chat bot on a website can then be seamlessly transferred to a phone call with an agent. Then, if the customer is on-the-go and wants to switch to SMS and texting, the conversation can be effortlessly shifted to SMS. All of this is happening seamlessly because the history of the conversation is saved, allowing the agent to see the entire journey of the conversation regardless of channel.
An omnichannel platform is the next step toward an effortless customer journey, and here are some of the tips and strategies to ensure a smooth transition to omnichannel.
Understand the Customer Journey and the Channels They Use
The customer journey, from beginning to end, is a collection of interactions between your contact center and the customer. Mapping out the journey and figuring out what channels customers want to use to connect with your business will help you ensure that the channels you’re supporting are the best ones to serve your customers.
In the age of constantly evolving technology, customers are on-the-go now more than ever. Many people are now utilizing channels like social messaging apps and texting to reach the companies that they love. Understanding the need to implement new, emerging channels is crucial to understanding how a customer communicates with your business, and is the important first step to implement an omnichannel strategy in your call center.
You’ll also want to understand how your customers feel about your current customer support, how they feel about your website, how they want to connect with your contact center depending on their issue, and which communication channels may conflict during a specific section of the customer journey. communication channel overlap.
Cloud Implementation
Cloud technology has proven to be a reliable, cheaper alternative to an on-premise solution. By hosting call center technology on the cloud, you get all of the latest features of a fully-capable contact center with none of the maintenance and IT personnel fees involved. A cloud solution can also allow your contact center to support all of the latest technologies and channels quickly, as opposed to an on-premise setup which requires extensive setup time for equipment, personnel, and software.
A cloud solution is the best way to fully take advantage of the benefits of an omnichannel strategy. With a cloud-based solution, your contact center can add new, emerging digital channels in a single and easy to use agent desktop. Adding these new, emerging channels is easy on a cloud solution, oftentimes requiring no downtime to make the channels fully functional.
Agent Training
Finally, ensure a seamless transition to an omnichannel setup with comprehensive agent training. Agents are the crucial, main contact point for customers to interact with your business. Allowing agents to connect with customers with an omnichannel platform is a powerful way to offer effortless customer service.
Through proper training, agents can take full advantage of the features that omnichannel can provide for the contact center. Regular training means navigating agents through what an omnichannel customer journey looks like, utilizing a variety of communication methods to keep your team engaged, and measuring the impact of your training on agent performance.
Another way to properly train agents is through quality assurance. With an AI-powered omnichannel quality assurance system in place, you can ensure that 100% of interactions are measured for quality. When all interactions are measured, you can ensure that interactions on all channels are great, and provide a seamless omnichannel customer experience.
Bright Pattern’s omnichannel platform is perfect for agents because it is easy-to-use, making it easy to train agents and ensure high quality interactions with every conversation. Through things like CRM pop-ups and agent assist, agents can deliver high quality conversations with little effort. To further ensure quality, Bright Pattern has built-in Omni QM, which is our omnichannel quality management software that utilizes best-of-breed AI and analytics to give comprehensive call center reporting to managers and supervisors.
The Bright Pattern Solution
Bright Pattern’s platform is designed to be fully omnichannel capable. With Bright Pattern’s platform, conversations on any channel are treated as one conversation, allowing your agents to keep up with the customer on any number of channels while providing the customer a seamless experience. Bright Pattern is also based on the cloud, has built-in quality assurance, and utilizes best-of-breed AI to make omnichannel conversations even easier.
