Today’s customers expect a quality care experience with no exceptions. Slow response times, unhelpful agents, and other shortcomings will drive clients to competitors prepared to serve them better.
But there’s a new form of customer care that’s elevating brands of all sizes to service excellence. It lets companies solve tickets three times faster, with their clients spending 75% less time waiting for agents to respond.
Its name is omnichannel, and it’s taking over customer care.
What Does “Omnichannel” Mean?
In pure definitional terms, “omnichannel” literally means “every channel.” In the context of business, this means being available to clients through every possible communication channel. This means an omnichannel contact center allows call centers to connect with customers over channels like voice, email, text messaging, SMS, web chat, video chat, messenger apps, and more.
Omnichannel shouldn’t be confused with multichannel. Multichannel serves a few select communications channels, while omnichannel serves every possible avenue.
What Is an Omnichannel Contact Center?
An omnichannel contact center is a customer service solution enabling clients to transfer seamlessly between contact channels when getting support. This is possible thanks to dedicated omnichannel contact center software like Bright Pattern.
How Do Contact Centers Function?
So how do contact centers actually work? How’s it possible to seamlessly merge tickets across wildly different platforms into single, uninterrupted experiences for agents?
Omnichannel contact center solutions integrate with CRM, automation tools, unified communications, and other software to centralize massive amounts of data on one platform. It then serves this information to agents who can access it all from a single viewport.
This is fundamentally distinct from traditional contact centers, which rely on clients to regurgitate conversations between channels to agents, who have no ability to track inter-channel interactions.
What Is Omnichannel in a Contact Center?
Omnichannel removes the barriers between communication channels.
Imagine a client opens a ticket via SMS and follows up by phone two days later. In traditional customer care, the client would need to redescribe their issue to the phone agent when they called in.
But with omnichannel, the agent already knows everything about both the client and their issue when they call in. They see the SMS interaction, the client’s purchases, their past issues, and more to form a full picture of the client.
This information isn’t hard for the agent to access either — it appears instantly on the agent’s screen when the client calls in. The agent doesn’t need to waste precious time searching for client information, resulting in massive efficiency gains when scaled to an entire omnichannel call center.
The Advantages of an Omnichannel Contact Center
The seamless unification of all communication channels makes it easy to see how omnichannel contact centers are game-changers. But the benefits go further beyond that:
Maximizing Social Media’s Potential
41% of consumers use social media for customer service every week. But even though 88% of executives agree that social media will become a primary channel for customer service, only 49% of brands use it to provide support.
If you’re not responsive to customer interactions on social media, you’re missing almost half of your audience. Consumers who don’t receive feedback will see your brand as apathetic and turn to competitors without you ever realizing it.
That’s a huge issue, but it’s something that omnichannel contact centers exist to solve. Solutions like Bright Pattern integrate directly with social media, notifying agents of any complaints that occur from their desktops.
This isn’t limited to DMs either — social listening technology enables omnichannel contact center solutions to “listen in” on millions of daily interactions for mentions of your brand so agents can quickly respond.
Mapping Your Customers’ Journey
Customer journey maps let you visualize each interaction the typical customer makes for your brand. Businesses use them to optimize each contact point between the first interaction and repeat business, resulting in higher ROIs across the board.
Because omnichannel contact center solutions observe nearly every interaction clients have with your brand, it functions as an incredibly powerful data aggregator. It provides easily-citable information for all client activity, empowering your marketing team to make more informed decisions than anyone else in your industry.
Enhancing Customer Experience
Perhaps the most tangible benefit of employing an omnichannel service strategy is a complete overhaul of client experiences:
- Conversational interactive voice response (IVR) enables callers to solve issues without waiting for a human agent.
- Agent desktop provides a bird’s-eye view of each client interaction, enabling them to solve problems faster and more effectively than ever before.
- Agents can provide personalized support solutions at any scale, empowering them to make each client feel cared for.
- Customers never need to repeat their problems when transferring between different agents. Omnichannel platforms record each interaction and present relevant data to agents.
Despite these enormous benefits, only 35% of companies feel they’re successfully achieving omnichannel personalization. This means when you adopt an omnichannel platform and use it effectively, you’ll easily outperform almost 7 in 10 competitors.
Unbeatable Quality Assurance
Omnichannel’s data collection doesn’t only benefit customers but managers too. Bright Pattern provides a comprehensive analytics suite for understanding each facet of agent performance, detailing everything from tone of voice to resolution efficiency.
Omnichannel is everything your organization needs to unify its brand voice, ensuring each agent operates in lockstep with your goals, standards, and strategies to serve customers exactly how your brand desires. No other service strategy enables companies to leverage the full power of data aggregation so effectively yet effortlessly.
Choose Bright Pattern for World-Class Omnichannel
Throughout this article, you’ve seen the enormous benefits omnichannel service strategies provide to organizations, no matter their industry. These benefits position omnichannel not only as an optimal solution but the future of customer support.
Consumers are already recognizing omnichannel as the standard in customer support. When they open DM your company’s social media support line, they expect agents to understand that interaction when following up by phone days later.
No service software offers these advantages more extensively than Bright Pattern. We’ve optimized each aspect of our toolkit to enhance customer experience every step of the way.
Conversational IVR, world-class chatbot AI, CRM integrations, predictive dialers, and full-featured mobile apps are just the beginning. Schedule a demo today and learn how Bright Pattern technologies can transform both customer experience and contact center efficiency.
