Guiding the Omnichannel Customer Journey
Providing customers with a seamless, unified channel experience boosts business outcomes
Customers expect to be able to communicate with companies through a variety of channels whenever they choose. However, when the rubber meets the road, many companies struggle to meet customers’ omnichannel communications expectations.
A big part of the reason for this disconnect is that while many companies provide customer support in different channels such as voice, chat, mobile, and email, these support functions are often handled separately by different parts of the contact center. As a result, this prevents customers from having a seamless, unified experience, especially when customers attempt to move from one channel to the next.
While providing customers with consistent support experiences across channels is critical to customer satisfaction, omnichannel customer support isn’t about replicating the customer support experience in each individual channel. It’s about optimizing each customer interaction seamlessly across the different channels used in the customer’s journey.
For instance, let’s say a retail customer orders a product online but they’ve misplaced the order number. When the customer calls back for this information, an agent who is able to see the thread of the customer’s interaction thanks to channel support integration is able to send the customer an SMS message with this information for a seamless interaction.
Companies that are able to work through these issues and deliver on customers’ omnichannel support expectations typically generate stronger business results than their peers. According to an Aberdeen Group study, companies that adopt omnichannel customer experience strategies enjoy 91 percent higher year over year customer retention rates than companies that don’t.
Laying the foundation
A good starting point for addressing the omnichannel customer journey is to identify and understand the channels that customers prefer to use for support or would like to use for different types of support interactions. This can be achieved by developing a customer journey map to help plot out how customer segments use different channels for support and to identify and address any obstructions that prevent customers from moving effortlessly from one channel to the next.
Meanwhile, a consolidated agent desktop that provides agents with full system integration across all support channels, CRM, and other relevant customer systems enables associates to have a comprehensive and instantaneous view of a customer’s support history and interactions. By providing each agent with a complete picture of each customer and their channel behaviors, agents are able to provide knowledgeable and timely support. This results in an improved agent-customer experience and enhanced customer satisfaction.
Providing customers with proactive outbound communications is a great way to offer customers helpful reminders on service appointments, online tutorials that can educate new product users and other types of assistance that can improve the customer experience and strengthen the customer-company relationship. By assessing the types of outbound communications customers prefer to receive, contact center leaders can then take steps to ensure that support channels are properly integrated to enable agents to support customers across those channels seamlessly. 
inContact is the cloud contact center software leader, helping organizations around the globe create high quality customer experiences. For more information, visit www.inContact.com or call 1-866-965-SaaS.
