There’s no doubt that the pandemic has changed the way we live, work, and consume products. With things like lockdown, social distancing, and working from home, it changes how people interact with brands and companies.
For companies today to achieve excellent customer experience, they are required to understand their purpose and re-evaluate the evolving components of their customer journey.
At a time when the customer experience stands out as the reliable way for a business to stand out from its competition, Cloud Omnichannel Customer Engagement Solutions ensure that you can interact with customers with a consistent customer experience regardless of different touchpoints.
Statistics show that businesses that have adopted omnichannel strategies achieved 91% greater year-over-year customer retention rates compared to businesses that don’t (Gartner). Those that maintain a single-channel contact centre environment are definitely missing out on incredible interactions with customers.
We know that migrating to a Cloud Omnichannel Customer Engagement Solution can be an intimidating task. Here is a simple guide to give you a rough idea of things to take note of before selecting and migrating to a Cloud Omnichannel Customer Engagement Solution.
#1: Understanding What is Omnichannel
It is important to first understand what Omnichannel Customer Experience means. Adopting omnichannel doesn’t mean that you just have multiple channels for customer interactions with your business. Having multiple channels is great, but it doesn’t provide your customers with a seamless experience.
Unlike omnichannel, multichannel uses various siloed systems or platforms to connect with clients. Each platform has its own different strategy, user experience and protocol. This causes inconsistency in customer experience, interactions are also tracked individually.
Omnichannel on the other hand, enables you to better align efforts and deliver the best customer experience, by providing your customers with multiple ways to engage and putting them into a universal queue, ensuring a seamless unified customer experience.
Omnichannel should also have a backend environment to track customer interactions and gather information about the customer to deliver a more relevant and personalised experience.
The ultimate goal is to be wherever your customers are at, manage interactions and customer data, centralised into one platform.
#2: Know Your Customer Journey
Back then, businesses only have a few available touchpoints that would affect the customer journey. Today, most customers use up to an average of 6 touchpoints when purchasing from a company. More than 50% of customers say they extensively use more than 4 channels to interact with businesses.
Knowing which are the touchpoints your customers is likely to use is crucial to creating a seamless customer experience with Omnichannel. You should roughly get an idea from customer surveys, polls, and conversations with your sales and marketing team.
When you start implementing new interaction channels, take note for any metrics that can potentially help you with your decision making. For example, what’s the CSAT score of interaction through webchat, compared with interaction over the phone?
#3: Prioritise Backend Processes Alignment
Statistics show that 64% of customers expect to receive real-time assistance on any channel. This means that your agent should be able to quickly pull out the customer’s information, understand their issue and solve it over that one interaction.
An effective omnichannel contact centre should integrate with your backend processes seamlessly. It should be easy to use, flexible, and scalable, accompanied by providing useful actionable insights for supervisors or managers that are required to track the team’s performance. The omnichannel customer engagement solution should also enable your agents to access it from anywhere and remain equally productive when working remotely.
#4: Finding the Right Solution Provider
Once you have an idea of the touchpoints your business wants to be active on, and how your back-end processes should look like, you can finally begin looking for the right solution provider.
It’s worth looking for a solution provider that can provide you with the flexibility you need. This means ensuring that integration is seamless with your software or tools that are already in use. It should also be flexible enough to be able to cater to any of the requirements unique to your business such as compliance and privacy or even extra levels of security in place.
The best suited Cloud Omnichannel Customer Engagement Solution will be the one that can provide the flexible performance you need, without compromising on security, privacy, or compliance. You also need to check on the SLA and uptime promises that your solution provider can make. Software reliability is still the main key for the solution.
#5: Train and Support Agents
The results of your customer engagement and support strategies will ultimately depend on the ability of your agent to deliver excellent customer service, no matter how impressive the Cloud Omnichannel Customer Engagement Solution is. Especially when they represent the face and heart of your company, directly interacting with customers.
Arrange for regular training sessions will definitely help your agents better adapt to the new technology. Consider assessing your agents on which of them need additional help. Create new policies on how they should handle interactions.
Use analytics and reporting within your contact centre environment, ensure that you keep track of your business outcomes and focus on resolving any issues fast.
Conclusion
The move towards Cloud Omnichannel Customer Engagement Solution is no longer just an extra option, it has evolved to a necessary improvement for your business moving forward to stay relevant in the competition. While it may sound intimidating, setting a clear objective and goals for your customer engagement strategy accompanied with the right solution provider, your migration journey can be exciting and enjoyable.
Get Started with Omnichannel Today
Nubitel CX is a fully unified and full-fledged contact centre solution, unifying interactions across Voice, Video, Emails, Chats (WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat & Line) and Social Media (Facebook & Twitter) into a single interface. With WebRTC technology, agents and supervisors can work remotely using a web browser to perform their task. Hosted on AWS, Nubitel CX combines enterprise-class security features and comprehensive system security to ensure data is always protected.
If you want to learn more about how Nubitel as a Cloud Omnichannel Customer Engagement Solution provider can help your customer service team. Click here for more information.
