So once your multi-channel contact center foundation is built – what additional tips should be considered to ensure business success? Here are two guiding principles to keep in mind when deploying a multi-channel services strategy:
#1 Guide Customers to the Right Channel
You first want to determine what channels your customers need and find successful. Maybe your multi-channel approach doesn’t need to support every channel. From there, guide your customers to the channel that is best to resolve their issue or is their preferred channel. For example, if you have a customer who has chosen to start on web chat to address an issue and it becomes more effective to video chat so the agent can see the problem – you need to provide that seamless channel migration experience. Knowing your customers preferences and the best channel to resolve a particular issue is the first step. Implementing a strategy that can quickly sort incoming requests based off of customer channel preference, historical CRM data and issue complexity will go far in delivering a rewarding customer experience.
#2 Align Communication Channels With the Right Agent Skill
Contact centers need to play the game of matchmaker ensuring that they’re playing to the strengths of their agents. Do you have agents that excel at chat vs phone? Then enable a rule to route all chat requests to those individuals. To do this, you have to invest in technologies that can quickly and effectively route and align multiple channels to the best agent skill. The benefit of this approach is you will have happier customers and happier agents who will grow with your company long-term.
So once your multi-channel contact center foundation is built – what additional tips should be considered to ensure business success? Here are two guiding principles to keep in mind when deploying a multi-channel services strategy:
#1 Guide Customers to the Right Channel
You first want to determine what channels your customers need and find successful. Maybe your multi-channel approach doesn’t need to support every channel. From there, guide your customers to the channel that is best to resolve their issue or is their preferred channel. For example, if you have a customer who has chosen to start on web chat to address an issue and it becomes more effective to video chat so the agent can see the problem – you need to provide that seamless channel migration experience. Knowing your customers preferences and the best channel to resolve a particular issue is the first step. Implementing a strategy that can quickly sort incoming requests based off of customer channel preference, historical CRM data and issue complexity will go far in delivering a rewarding customer experience.
#2 Align Communication Channels With the Right Agent Skill
Contact centers need to play the game of matchmaker ensuring that they’re playing to the strengths of their agents. Do you have agents that excel at chat vs phone? Then enable a rule to route all chat requests to those individuals. To do this, you have to invest in technologies that can quickly and effectively route and align multiple channels to the best agent skill. The benefit of this approach is you will have happier customers and happier agents who will grow with your company long-term.
By Matt Jones, SVP DevOps, NewVoiceMedia
Businesses know that happy customers equate to success. Yet, they’re failing to follow through on this guiding principle as they struggle to keep up with rapidly evolving customer demands. In fact according to a recent Serial Switchers report, sponsored by NewVoiceMedia, 44 percent of consumers are taking their business elsewhere because they’re unhappy with the service they’re experiencing. Even more disturbing, many customers feel that the process of resolving an issue is so cumbersome that they prefer to switch brands without notifying or attempting to resolve their issue with the company. So how can your business retain more customers while decreasing the effort it takes for them to do business with you?
To do this successfully, let’s first start with identifying your contact center goals. For many it is to satisfy, retain and develop rewarding connections with every customer. So how are rewarding connections developed in the contact center ecosystem today? While voice continues to be the primary communication channel used by all demographics, channel usage rates are quickly changing as customers look to also solve their issues through email, chat, social and even online communities. So organizations that successfully embrace this multi-channel demand will not only deliver a winning customer experience but also improve their agent efficiency and happiness.
The challenge is implementing a successful multi-channel approach isn’t done overnight. It requires a contact center ecosystem that can automatically aggregate communication channels into a universal queue to ensure your business can manage and prioritize customers needs to the appropriate skilled agent - every time. To do this quickly and effectively your contact center platform should seamlessly integrate with your CRM data so your customers historical data (cases, demographics, spend, etc) can define their queue priority and also ensures the best agent and channel skill is aligned to handle that inquiry.
Overall, today’s customers are more informed and tech-savvy than ever before and they want to work with companies that address their questions and issues quickly and deliver superior levels of service through the channel of their choice. Once organizations master the art of effectively routing customer queries and prioritizing them based off the incoming channel and the customers’ history, they’ll set a strong foundation for multichannel success. By optimizing a multichannel strategy, organizations can further differentiate their customer service experience to retain and grow their revenue and brand advocates. 
Learn more at NewVoiceMedia.com/multichannel.