6 Best Practices for Omnichannel Customer Engagement

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The New-Normal

In the modern customer service landscape, consumers engage with businesses across a variety of channels and devices.

As they navigate from digital channels like online self-service and chat to email and phone formats, they expect seamless transitions and a personalized, contextual experience at every touchpoint.

The key to understanding omnichannel customer engagement is to visualize these points of contact as steppingstones in a single contiguous journey.

Understanding Omnichannel Engagement

True omnichannel customer engagement integrates multiple contact channels. Rather than managing each channel as a separate platform, an omnichannel approach manages them all from a single, unified console.

By mitigating technological gaps between communication channels, businesses reduce customer effort and provide intelligence to optimize agent performance.

Several challenges stand in the way of strong omnichannel performance. Lack of personalization, repeat information, and disjointed omnichannel experiences can impact customer retention.

The best way to overcome these challenges and eliminate communication channel boundaries is with the right technology solution.

Conversation intelligence platforms can capture 100% of customer contact at every touch point and convert that data into functional insights.

Additional benefits of conversation intelligence for omnichannel customer experience include:

Developing a single view of the customer journey
Easily navigating to previous or subsequent interactions from the same customer
Determining root cause of repeat contacts and poor first contact resolution
Capturing information across a multitude of platforms

6 Best Practices for Omnichannel Engagement

1. Meet Customers in Their Channel of Choice

The easiest way to provide top-notch service is to meet your customers where they are already. By checking the length of response times across channels you can balance your agents accordingly.

2. Offer Robust Self-Help with an “Out”

FAQs, tutorial videos and other self-service information can take the weight off call centres and provide customers easy solutions. Just remember to offer a path forward when self-help fails.

3. Creatively Mitigate Your Technology Siloes

Legacy systems with insufficient integration capabilities force customers to explain their problem again and again when moving between contact channels.

Arm your contact centre with improved knowledge management such as rigorous dispositioning coding to enable smooth transitions and ensure agents have access to past communications.

4. Address Every Channel

Process changes, instructional guidance and agent coaching can reduce the gaps customers experience when moving between channels.

Manually tracking disposition codes or preparing agents with scripts designed for emotionally charged customers can resolve challenges created by legacy communication channel silos.

5. Correlate Analytics Without Channel Boundaries

When utilizing a conversation intelligence platform, ensure text and speech analytics are consistently scored and presented, even when they are derived from channels yet to undergo integration.

6. Apply Continuous Improvement

Before implementing these best practices, test the four metrics listed below. Re-test after you’ve worked to improve your omnichannel customer experience to ensure everything is working as intended.