Omnichannel Contact Center
Monitor Conversations Across all Channels for an Excellent Omnichannel Contact Center Strategy
An omnichannel customer engagement strategy requires omnichannel monitoring simultaneously to deliver consistently excellent customer service.
Do you remember the humble beginnings of Netflix? There was a time when Netflix began by offering DVD rental services before it became the streaming giant of today.
Netflix was one of the pioneers that adapted and transitioned to the streaming space. If Netflix stuck to its initial DVD rental service, it would’ve washed out like its competitor Blockbuster.
Similarly, call centers should be ready to adapt and serve customers wherever they are.
The social media boom has made it mandatory for organizations to build a digital presence for their brand. This means that customers can expect service across brick-and-mortar stores, calls, and social media, to name a few.
Offering seamless and extensive services across all these channels has led to call centers transitioning to omnichannel contact centers.
This has also made the auditing process much more difficult. How do omnichannel contact centers overcome these challenges?
What is an Omnichannel Contact Center?
An omnichannel contact center provides customers with an integrated service strategy that isn’t dependent on the channel the customer is using to reach out to an organization.
Some of the various services and communication channels that an omnichannel contact center caters to include:
- Inbound & outbound voice calls
- Social mediaÂ
- Chats - both with bots and agents
- Integrated CRM capabilities for smooth customer service across channels
Since there are plenty of omnichannel contact center solutions available in the market, it becomes difficult to monitor and evaluate all conversations that happen across these communication channels.
What are Omnichannel Contact Center Benefits?
“42% of contact centers strive to create an omnichannel experience” - Contact Center Week (June 2021)
Organizations that have adopted an omnichannel strategy for customer support have seen unexpected benefits.
1. Readily Available Support
The widespread adoption of omnichannel shopping methods implies that customers aren’t restricted to a single platform. When organizations are available at all touchpoints of the customer journey, customers can easily reach out.
When customers can find easy resolutions to their problems, it can also drive up customer satisfaction levels.
2. Increased Customer Satisfaction
"Every 1% increase in FCR increases the brand's customer satisfaction by 1%" - SQM Group
Omnichannel contact centers are better equipped to resolve queries and problems on the same platform a customer uses to reach out. Such swift resolution can see a boost in customer satisfaction metrics.
3. Easier Customer Retention
Omnichannel contact center strategies can be planned to leverage technology wherever possible. For example, using IVR capabilities and chatbots can engage customers while agents are occupied, to retain them.
Top Omnichannel Contact Center Trends of 2023
Such efficient use of technology can help organizations retain their customers.
Creating an Omnichannel Contact Center Strategy
Delivering consistent customer experience across different channels involves a lot of planning.
1. Mapping the Customer Journey
Customers are using different channels at each touchpoint of the customer journey. Organizations need to track and map a customer journey that points out all the places where customers interact with the brand.
Creating a detailed customer journey helps organizations to understand what are the struggles faced by customers.
2. Creating a User Experience Strategy
Once the customer journey is mapped, it is easier to come up with a plan. These insights can identify what customer satisfaction metrics need to be taken into account and improved.
A detailed omnichannel engagement plan can be made only by considering these metrics and mapping out a measurable goal.
3. Implementing Consistent Experience Delivery
With the strategy in place, agents should be trained to deliver consistent and streamlined support across all communication channels.
When customers receive inconsistent service across channels, it is a failure of omnichannel customer engagement.Â
4. Investing in the Best Software
All omnichannel contact centers need software to complement and help agents reach their performance goals. Organizations should find out which software helps them to achieve goals in their experience strategy.
What are the Best Practices to Follow in an Omnichannel Contact Center?
Deploying an omnichannel contact center strategy requires a lot of effort. There are some methods to ensure that customers receive the best service possible.
1. Streamlined Collection of Customer Data
“One person in an organization might call a customer a prospect, another will call them an existing case, someone will call them a customer, someone will call them a VIP. If we don’t bring all this information together in one place, we’re wasting our money and wasting our time as well as giving them a bad experience.” - Morris Pentel, Founder of Customer Experience Foundation.
Customer data should be collected from each channel and organized in a single CRM. This helps agents to serve customers better.
2. Use Automation Efficiently
Right from agent onboarding to chatbots that interact with customers, automation can be implemented in many places. Contact centers that leverage the power of automation can see processes being streamlined.
3. Keep Agents on Each Communication Channel
While running an omnichannel contact center, it is critical that each communication channel has an adequate number of agents to handle that amount of customers using them.
What are the Hurdles in Operating an Omnichannel Contact Center?
Despite the benefits of providing customer support through an omnichannel contact center, there are some operational hurdles.
1. Inefficient Quality Monitoring Systems
Manual quality monitoring has always been deemed inefficient, even in the days of call centers.
If a team of auditors found it difficult to monitor all calls in a call center, how would they fare if the number of conversations have multiplied with the introduction of extra channels?
Manual vs. Automated Call Monitoring
Unless contact centers can have teams of 2-3 auditors per agent, there’ll always be a backlog of agent-customer conversations that go unaudited.
2. Maintaining Updated CRMs
Customers use different channels to reach out for support depending on what platform they’re using. Providing a seamless experience across all channels can be difficult if the CRM doesn’t stay updated.
Organizations need to look beyond on-premise software solutions and work with cloud-based solutions. This ensures that customer details are made available to all agents and aren’t restricted by limitations of on-premise technology.
3. Inconsistencies in Agent Coaching
"Managers spend 50% of their time preparing for coaching" - McKinsey
If agents don’t receive the right training, their experience delivery lies stagnant, and their performance won’t improve.
And by training, when managers provide the same coaching schedule to all agents, it isn’t effective. Creating such personalized coaching strategies that cater to each individual agent isn’t feasible.
How can QA Software Enhance Omnichannel Contact Center Features?
With these operational hurdles, omnichannel contact centers have begun looking for software solutions that can bypass them.
The integration of AI into cloud-based software has given led to various omnichannel contact center solutions being pushed to the market.
1. 100% Conversation Monitoring
Automated QA refers to tools that can automatically audit conversations as soon as they’re over. They’re connected to the directory, which allows it to access all conversations.
When an omnichannel contact center has all conversations audited, there are a lot of benefits. Some of them include:
- Flagging Compliances - Automated QA can help contact centers to comply with industry standards.
- Detailed Analytics - Since all conversations are being analyzed, these tools can give various kinds of insights. Some of them include detecting patterns in both customer and agent behavior, product sentiment, and speech analysis.
2. Systematic & Personalized Agent Coaching
Every agent can receive a personalized training schedule with the help of automated quality assurance tools.
This is much more effective than a generalized agent coaching program as agents receive feedback that caters to their strengths and weaknesses.
3. Detailed Conversation Analysis
There are various analytics that can be obtained using speech analytics.
At the end of each conversation, valuable details like customer sentiment, customer satisfaction, and product perception are presented.
How Does Convin Enhance Agent Performance in an Omnichannel Contact Center?
Agent performance depends on many factors and Convin’s contact center software can positively affect each of them.
1. Personalized Training
“83% of high-performing service agents say they get the training they need to do their job well compared to only 52% of underperformers.” - Salesforce
Since agents receive personalized training, it becomes easy for them to improve their performance.
Managers can also ensure that no agent is lagging behind on their coaching. This helps bring accountability and ensure agents are keeping up with their coaching schedule.
2. Compliance Flagging
Convin alerts managers and auditors every time a compliance violation occurs.
Since every conversation is monitored, agents know how to reduce such occurrences and are informed on how not to make the same mistakes.
3. Performance Insights
With manual auditing, agents would always get delayed feedback. This is not the case with automated quality assurance software.
Agents get a summary of their feedback as a report at the end of each day. This is based on all conversations audited automatically.
What Does Convin Offer as an Omnichannel Contact Center Solution?
Convin monitors and analyzes 100% of conversations automatically based on your organization’s custom parameters. The conversation analysis offers winning behavior identification and last-mile automated agent coaching.
- Automated Quality Management
Convin’s call center tool automatically reviews 100% of customer interactions across all channels in your omnichannel engagement strategy. This is done with custom auditing templates that spot blockers in agent performance, and unhappy customer conversations. Through automated quality management, managers and QA generate call scores that help establish coaching needs and staff dissatisfaction.Â
Convin also allows auditors to manually audit calls, chats, and emails and leave necessary feedback.Â
- Conversation Behavior Identification
Using customer intelligence and custom-tracking, Convin identifies parameters that drive both positive and negative outcomes for the business. Identifying violations, winning parameters, customer sentiments, and threats can allow proactive measures to be taken before the customer calls.
Evaluate the Best Automated Omnichannel Contact Center Solution
- Automated Agent Coaching
Convin’s system automatically identifies coaching opportunities by reviewing agent performance. Based on the AI-driven call scores, agent coaching sessions are tailored based on the requirement.Â
Coaching instances are extracted from the top performers' conversations and best practices. This method improves call handling quality and reduces supervisor escalations.
Moreover, Convin’s peer-to-peer coaching allows managers and supervisors to add the best-performing agent’s conversations as a module into Convin’s library and assign it to agents who need further coaching. As a result of this automated agent coaching, businesses can reduce ramp-up time significantly and focus more on productivity.Â
- Conversation intelligence
Customer intelligence records, transcribes, and analyzes conversations to generate call insights and transcriptions. The conversation intelligence software discourages manual evaluation and all other non-sales activities by automating notes, action items, and CRM entries.
Access agent performance KPIs and customer experience quality criteria to produce consumable role-based reports pinpointing key challenges and opportunities. These reports are available on the Convin platform and periodically mailed to the managers.
Convin Keeps Customer Data Safe On All Channels
At Convin, we understand that keeping customer data safe is important; that’s why we ensure your data is entirely secure and safe in our in-house transcription and NLP engine. We ensure call data security in the following ways:
- In-house transcription and NLP
- Secure login and monitoring
- Hosted on AWS
- SSL data encryption
- Role-based access control
- Enterprise-grade application monitoring
- GDPR-compliant meeting recording
And before you go, as of now, Convin supports languages beyond English. And it takes only 2-3 weeks to get you onboarded. Take a free demo of our automated quality assurance software.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the Difference between Multichannel and Omnichannel contact center?
Omnichannel contact centers provide a seamless customer experience across customer channels with integrated customer data. Whereas in multichannel contact centers, each communication channel has its own set of separate customer data, which results in a fragmented customer experience.
2. What is Omnichannel Customer Interaction?
An omnichannel customer interaction refers to providing communication channels across all touchpoints of the customer journey.
3. What is Omnichannel Customer Strategy?
An omnichannel customer strategy focuses on providing a seamless experience across all touchpoints of the customer journey.