According to a recent report by Aberdeen Group, companies with extremely strong omnichannel customer engagement retain on average 89% of their customers, compared to 33% for companies with weak omnichannel customer engagement.
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Despite a 3x greater customer retention as a result of having an effective omnichannel strategy, most businesses fall short of achieving it. In fact, recent studies show that the vast majority of consumers feel their experiences are anything but “omni”. Below are three stats that highlight how most companies offer a disconnect cross-channel experience and that impact on consumer experience.
- 61% of customers have not been able to easily switch from one channel to another when interacting with customer service. (Aspect)
- 89% of customers get frustrated at having to repeat their issues to multiple representatives. (Accenture)
- 67% of customers reported hanging up on an automated system out of frustration at not being able to reach a live person. (Glance)
Do you feel like your customers might be experiencing some of these same issues? If so, you are not alone. In fact, here are three more stats about the state of customer experience from businesses:
- 55% of companies reported they have no cross-channel strategy in place. (The CMO Club)
- 43% of contact center leaders believe that establishing a seamless multichannel experience is the biggest challenge to managing multichannel engagement (LiveVox)
- 45s% of contact center leaders believe they will make a moderate increase improving customer experience through digital channels in 2019 (LiveVox)
With customer experience quickly becoming the new competitive differentiator, how can contact centers overcome cross-channel gaps and achieve true omnichannel? This blog will explore the 5 keys capabilities needed to facilitate true omnichannel engagement.
5 Key Tools to Enable True Omnichannel
Unified Consumer Profiles
77% of strong omnichannel companies store customer data across channels, compared to 48% for weak omnichannel companies. (Aberdeen Group). As a result, CRM was cited as the top investment for contact center leaders as reported by several recent reports.
As the number of interactions expand across multiple channels, the ability to centralize those interactions become increasingly critical to maintaining a unified experience. Therefore, one of the most fundamental aspects of creating a unified experience, is having a unified customer profile that automatically updates all interactions and escalations across all channels into a single location.
Integrated Channels
Gartner’s Global contact center study found that 62% of contact center leaders believed that the biggest challenge to evolving is integration with existing systems. This comes as no surprise as most channels have been added as stand-alone applications.
Without heavy investments in integrating all channels, contact centers are often forced to treat each channel as its own operation / workflow. Integrating all channel interactions is key to enabling contact center leaders to create a single workflow. When combined with universal profiles, managers become empowered to manages the consumer’s entire journey at all times.
Digitally-enabled Desktop
In the same report by Gartner, the study showed that as the number of channels expand, so does the complexity of calls that reach an agent. In combination with increasingly impatient consumers, the job of an agent has become more and more difficult.
To solve for this, companies must empower their agents with agent desktops that have a few key capabilities including: multichannel contact history, multichannel functionality, and a simplified GUI. These capabilities will enable agents to know who the consumer is and how they can service them upon connection with a consumer – creating a unified experience as consumers jump across channels.
Seamless Escalations
Not all consumer inquiries or issues can be solved by a single interaction and in today’s digital age, they occur across a growing number of channels. The ability to unify the escalation of these service requests across all touchpoints of a consumer becomes another key capability in achieving true omnichannel. Often times, the greatest disconnect in escalation occurs between agent-less channels and agent-assisted channels – solving for this disconnection point will therefore be a significant improvement in closing cross-channel gaps.
Multichannel Analytics
One of the most difficult challenges contact centers face in driving effective omnichannel engagement is simply the ability to have insight into what is occurring during those interactions. Yet, cross-channel reporting remains one of the most common challenges faced by contact leaders. This also applies to how contact centers approach workforce management. The ability to manage, at scale, how their agent workforce is driving engagement across all channels must be evolved in order to drive areas of improvement and pinpoint areas of disconnect.
Capabilities like multichannel agent score cards and cross-channel analytics is often the most overlooked, yet necessary capabilities in order for businesses to drive a true multichannel experience.
If you find yourself lacking in a few, if not all these aforementioned areas, you once again are not alone. The traditional approach to leveraging these capabilities have often required multi-million, multi-year investments in purchasing, integrating, and implementing different applications.
But cloud is offering a different approach. LiveVox, for example, unifies all three core contact center functionality: modern channels, CRM, and WFO, into a single one-stop-solution that provides a simplified path to obtaining all five of these capabilities out of the box.
To see a 30-second video of the innovation in action, click here.
