Imagine being able to provide a consistent customer experience to your clients across any medium or channel.
No longer will you have to deal with customers complaining about having to repeat themselves over and over every time they contact your business. No more headaches for agents trying to put together every piece of information about a particular customer manually.
No more inefficiencies or whole agent workflows being disrupted because a customer who contacted you through a call suddenly decides to continue the conversation on a messaging app.
That’s the draw of the omnichannel contact center. It can unify customer communication and information, increase sales and growth, deliver superior CX, and reduce costs for improved brand consistency.
The state of contact centers in 2023
According to a recent survey by ContactBabel, 55% of contact centers still operate in multichannel environments.
While multichannel contact centers mean that multiple forms of communication like phone, emails, live chat, social media messaging, and video meetings are available, they are not integrated with each other.
This means that if a customer called the business last week and then dropped a message on one of your social media channels today, your agent won’t readily be able to view all details pertaining to this full interaction in one go.
This can cause data silos to form, which can slow down and cause inefficiencies in CX processes.
Another 14% of contact centers had upgraded to a multimodal environment, where partial integration is possible. However, due to its inability to seamlessly switch between all channels and maintain context, it still leaves some functionality to be desired.
In the case of omnichannel contact centers, 31% of businesses have implemented them and are reaping all of the benefits that come with this.
Why are more businesses not in on the omnichannel hype?
The rather steep costs of an omnichannel contact center are of course an obvious bottleneck that holds businesses back from implementing them.
However, according to a survey, there are two more reasons—even more impactful than the budgetary issue. These are:
- 41% of them said the technology at hand not supporting a single view of the customer was an issue
- 21% of them said business processes being confined to silos and not being able to easily integrate was an issue
Considerations to make when switching to an omnichannel contact center
If you want to make the switch to an omnichannel contact center from a multichannel or multimodal environment, here are the considerations you should make.
When moving into an omnichannel environment, you should make sure the platform you are moving to has strong capabilities to integrate data across various channels, platforms, and systems. This allows agents and management to get a better view of the customer journey across all channels.
You should also work on patching existing loopholes and bottlenecks in business processes to prepare for the adoption of an omnichannel mode of communication. This means that you may have to reevaluate all your existing customer touchpoints to make sure the experience is consistent across all channels.
In addition, you should also make sure that customer data is properly integrated and that their interactions continue across platforms seamlessly. This may involve training your agents on the new omnichannel environment, which will give you a good productivity boost.
Streamline your move to an omnichannel contact center with automated discovery
As discussed earlier, one of the biggest challenges with moving to omnichannel contact centers is breaking down data silos. If this is a reason that is putting you off of CCaaS migration and implementing omnichannel solutions that drive objectives, automated discovery solutions can be a massive help.
They can identify valuable configuration IP for migration, eliminate redundant configurations, and identify operational change habits & trends to drive transformation requirements.
Take your contact center toward a fully-fledged CCaaS operation with omnichannel capabilities and reap the rewards today.