What Is an Omnichannel Contact Center?

Read Time: 7 minutes

Table of Contents

Introduction

Omnichannel contact centers have many advantages that make them an attractive option for seamless customer communication for many businesses. Today, let’s take an in-depth look at the distinguishing features of omnichannel contact centers, the best practices that optimize their performance, and the major benefits of incorporating one into your company’s growth strategy.

Key takeaways

• Omnichannel vs multichannel: Omnichannel contact centers provide more seamless communication across channels in comparison to multichannel contact centers. While both provide many channels of communication, omnichannel allows conversations to seamlessly transition between channels without siloing each experience.
• Benefits of omnichannel: In addition to smooth communication across channels, omnichannel also provides efficient routing based on customer data and compatibility with a variety of powerful systems like CRMs and IVR.
• Best practices: Omnichannel contact centers can optimize their performance by collecting and using relevant customer data, streamlining the management of data, providing support in mobile-friendly platforms, and automating simpler tasks.

What is an omnichannel contact center?

Omnichannel contact centers are customer service operations that allow you and your customers to connect over various different communication channels, from standard phone calls to SMS texts, email, online chat, and social media.

What’s more, is that omnichannel contact centers are able to seamlessly switch between those different channels to provide a consistent customer experience and frictionless transitions. With a well-integrated customer relationship management (CRM) system, omnichannel contact center agents can pick up conversations right where they last left off, communicating through each customer’s preferred channels.

Omnichannel vs. multichannel contact centers

To some, “omnichannel” might seem like a fancier term for “multichannel”. However, the difference between the two approaches is more than just an arbitrary semantic word choice. The key distinction between omnichannel and multichannel is in the consistency of the customer experience.

A multichannel contact center is a contact center that offers a wide variety of channels for customers to interact with, but the problem is that each of those channels is siloed. If a customer starts a conversation with an agent on the phone but wants to follow up later with a question over email, the contact center won’t automatically know it’s the same conversation, so the transition will be messier.

In an omnichannel contact center, the same situation would play out much more smoothly. Because the contact center has a central CRM that displays all relevant information about the customer and their history with the company, agents have all the context they need to pick up seamlessly when the conversation moves to a different channel.

Why use an omnichannel contact center?

Prompt, quality customer service is one of the most powerful tools for ensuring customer retention. When a customer knows they will get quick answers and excellent, personalized service, they are more likely to stick around, and that’s precisely what your customers get when partner with an omnichannel contact center.

Seamless connections

It’s difficult for a customer to truly feel heard and understood when they have to start from square one every time they change communication channels. Modern conversations often span more than one channel, so why not meet customers where they are? With built-in context and history on every interaction, agents can keep the conversation progressing naturally no matter which channel it moves to.

Quick and efficient routing

The built-in CRM functionalities in an omnichannel contact center catalog a wide a lot of helpful information about each customer, making it much easier to program automatic routing systems to send customers to the agent best suited to help them.

Compatible with integrations

Omnichannel contact centers integrate nicely with a variety of powerful systems like CRMs, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, speech analytics, and more, giving them greater utility and making customer communications more effective.

Ongoing monitoring and improvements

By monitoring each customer interaction, and creating new data each time, omnichannel contact centers not only make each conversation more actionable with valuable context, but they also are able to continuously analyze and improve the agent performance. All of this contributes beautifully to a better customer experience.

Explore omnichannel contact centers with us!

ROI CX Solutions has years of experience in providing effective omnichannel contact center solutions to businesses like yours. Get your free quote today to see how you can leverage omnichannel services!

Omnichannel contact center features

Omnichannel contact centers are feature-rich operations that provide a lot of utility to the companies that work with them. Some major features to look for include:

Omnichannel routing

With a wealth of customer data to help categorize each interaction, omnichannel contact centers can easily and intelligently route customer calls and other interactions to the agent or department best equipped to help.

Customer sentiment analysis

Through speech analytics and natural language processing, omnichannel contact centers can interpret not only what a customer says, but how they say it. This provides a high-level view of the tone and mood of customer interactions, providing insights at both the micro and macro levels.

Business software integration

By integrating various essential systems from CRMs to product management tools, omnichannel contact centers can view all of the important data in one centralized hub allowing more efficient and informed decision-making.

Analytics and reporting

With continuous monitoring and analytics, omnichannel contact centers can pull data from a variety of sources at all times. This provides real-time tracking of customer sentiment and agent performance, as well as the ability to generate up-to-date reports regarding key performance indicators (KPIs).

Workforce management

Omnichannel setups are also excellent at giving managers more tools to supervise customer interactions and provide coaching to help improve performance. Managers can even step in to de-escalate more difficult situations.

Best practices for your omnichannel contact center

To get the most out of your resources as an omnichannel contact center, it’s important to use your tech in a way that works with you and not against you. To optimize your omnichannel services and provide the best possible customer experience, here are a few best practices to keep in mind.

Gather customer data on all channels

As they interact with customers, your agents should be gathering information and data from every encounter, regardless of the communication channel. This doesn’t mean that your agents are collecting unnecessary and intrusive data about every aspect of the customer’s life, but it does mean that your agents and the technology they use are paying attention to the encounters. Which channels do users prefer? How do they engage with each channel? What was the customer’s general mood and sentiment during the interaction? What circumstances and actions most often lead to success?

When agents and the tech they use can reliably gather this data from interaction to interaction, there is more information available for you to make important business decisions.

Streamline customer data

When the gathering, management, and analytics of your data are not standardized, organized, and purposeful, then the data you’re left with is likely to feel like meaningless noise. That’s why it’s vital to be cognizant of what each metric you monitor truly means. Be certain that each piece of data is not only measurable but also relevant to your stated goals and mission. You should also ensure that methods of data collection, the way the data is managed, and the ways you interpret the data are all standardized to prevent the data from becoming muddied and unreliable.

Enable mobile customer support

More than half of all internet traffic occurs on mobile devices, so it makes sense to grant customers the ability to conveniently interact with customer support through their mobile devices, whether through a dedicated mobile app or a mobile-friendly web portal.

Use automation tools to boost productivity

Omnichannel contact centers can often benefit from automating parts of the customer experience, giving agents the ability to save their energy and focus on more complex customer issues. Various tools, like AI chatbots, IVR systems, self-service options, and automatic responses, can act as a first line of service, where customers can get quick solutions to more common, simple problems or answers to frequently asked questions. That leaves agents ready and able to handle the calls that require expertise and a finer touch.

How to train your agents for omnichannel customer service

Like any other contact center, omnichannel contact centers need to be staffed with agents who are well-trained, both in the products and services they provide, and in the technology they use to provide excellent customer service. A few things to remember when training agents in an omnichannel contact center include:

• Technical training: All agents in an omnichannel contact center should have a firm grasp of the software and technical tools that they use on a daily basis. In addition to thorough onboarding training, each agent should receive regular refreshers. This will help them stay up to date with any upgrades, as well as reinforce any skills that may have slipped.
• Expertise in products and services: If they want to be able to provide useful support, agents should be experts on the core offerings of the business. Agents should be regularly instructed and updated on the features, common problems, and fixes for all products or services that the company provides, as that inside knowledge can be instrumental in supporting customers.
• Soft skills: Excellent support is more than just technical know-how. It also comes from how each agent conducts themselves, both in their problem-solving and their communication skills. Teach agents to be empathetic to each customer, approaching each interaction with patience and attention to detail, since each of these skills is instrumental in demonstrating to customers that they are heard and respected.

Using customer feedback to your advantage

Communication is the specialty of omnichannel contact centers, so it should go without saying that the communication should flow both ways. Whether or not an agent or the customer themselves realize it, customers are constantly providing feedback. The question is, are you paying attention to it?

With tools like natural language processing, contact centers can comb through mountains of conversations to pull out the suggestions, criticisms, and requests that customers have and compile them for easy review. You can also take a more active approach and ask customers directly for feedback through surveys. The insights and ratings that you can glean from customer feedback can go a long way toward showing you where you need improvement and which successes you need to double down on.

How to craft a winning omnichannel strategy

No two customers are exactly alike, and that’s precisely why the strategies you use for customer engagement in an omnichannel contact center should be customized. To create an awesome omnichannel strategy that gives every customer an amazing experience, keep the following tips in mind.

Know your customers’ preferences

The path your customer takes through various interactions with your brand before finally making a purchase will depend heavily on the types of products or services you provide. For that reason, it pays to understand exactly how your customers interact with your brand.

By knowing your audience and the typical paths they tend to follow on the way to purchasing, you can more easily replicate successful conversions. Pay attention to the communication channels and patterns that your target market is uniquely fond of and be sure to emphasize them in your strategy.

Brand consistency

Be sure to keep your customer experience strategy consistent from channel to channel. By providing all your teams (from sales and marketing to CX) with training on brand guidelines, you can create greater consistency of experience for your customers.

The right tools for the job

There is no shortage of CX tools on the market, so it’s extra important that each omnichannel contact center uses the tools and software that are best for the job.

To pick the right software for your contact center you should consider precisely which problems need to be solved by the software. Each omnichannel contact center software has its strengths and weaknesses, so try to choose one that excels at what you need it to do.

If you are considering an omnichannel contact center to grow your business, ROI CX Solutions has the tools and resources to make that happen for you! Get a free quote today to start exploring your options for effective, affordable omnichannel solutions!