If there’s one universal truth in business today, it’s that companies have to be a little more creative when it comes to giving customers what they want.

No business can say for sure what every customer wants, but consumers have made it abundantly clear that they want multiple means to connect with their companies of choice. They expect that a conversation that begins on one interaction channel can be continued on another, with all the relevant contextual data preserved across channels. 

“Omnichannel service is absolutely what customers want,” says Donna Fluss, founder and president of DMG Consulting. “Customers do not understand organizations not having one standardized view of all their interactions.”

Joe Staples, chief marketing officer at Interactive Intelligence, a provider of contact center systems and software, agrees. “Customers have some level of tolerance, but they’re baffled and driven crazy when they start on the Web and then connect to the contact center and the agent has no clue what they’ve done so far, and they have to start over,” he says. 

Delivering the kind of omnichannel service that today’s customers expect is no simple task, but, luckily, it’s not impossible. “Omnichannel [customer service] is absolutely a viable concept,” Fluss says. “We have the technology. We have the people. We have the know-how.”

Furthermore, current technologies make it possible for companies to be able to see customers as they flip from channel to channel and provide personalized service on each one. It is possible as well for companies to mine those channels and piece them together for one view.

This can be done with the wide variety of contact center analytics products available today, including speech, text, desktop, phone, voice of the customer, and social media analytics. These solutions can log, track, and mine every interaction for the relevant customer information that can—and should—be available to every agent, regardless of the channel.

The Value Proposition

Companies that connect all their customer service channels have much to gain. Those that have already done so report 89 percent customer retention, compared to 33 percent for those that haven’t, according to Aberdeen Group. These organizations also enjoy superior financial results in key measures, such as customer profitability and lifetime value.

The Aberdeen report, titled “Omnichannel Customer Care,” indicated that companies with omnichannel customer service capabilities achieve an 8.5 percent average year-over-year improvement in first contact resolution, a 7.5 percent average year-over-year decrease in average cost per customer contact, and a 9.5 percent increase in year-over-year revenue. 

That was the case at online dating site eHarmony, which incorporated a number of CRM tools from Oracle’s RightNow subsidiary to monitor and track customer contacts across channels. After the implementation, contact center agents could see the last time customers contacted an agent, searched online, or sent an email. They could see what was discussed, what information was being sought, or if there were special circumstances that needed to be addressed in the future. This level of insight enabled them to provide better customer support which, in turn, helped eHarmony double its customer satisfaction ratings. Customer satisfaction with phone interactions, for example, jumped several points to 92 percent. The company also benefited from a 30 percent reduction in email workloads. Plus, conversions from trial memberships to paid subscriptions tripled.

Scott Ackerman, eHarmony’s vice president of customer care, says the use of RightNow has enabled his company to provide “a consistently excellent experience” for customers across all communication channels. This, he adds, “is helping us grow our customer base, maintain our brand dominance, and optimize our operating margins.” 

Not all firms are as advanced in their omnichannel journey as eHarmony is. According to Aberdeen, just 20 percent of companies could be considered top performers in omnichannel customer service, and several traits are common among them. For starters, 85 percent conduct regular training to teach agents how to handle multiple channels, 77 percent store customer contact data across multiple channels, 77 percent route inquiries to agents with specific skills related to the customers’ needs, and 69 percent identify topics repeatedly addressed by customers across channels to find where channels need to be improved.

1. The Multivendor Monster

For the 80 percent that fall outside of the omnichannel elite, the biggest problem is software integration. In an ideal world, all the technologies needed for omnichannel customer service would be plug-and-play, but the reality is far different. 

“The technologies aren’t seamless yet,” laments Syed Hasan, president and CEO of CRM software provider Response-Tek. “Most of the channels have been deployed in silos. Organizations are typically set up around specific channels, and they all do not necessarily have the same goals,” he adds.

To compound the connectivity challenge, most multichannel contact centers are running multivendor systems that have been deployed in such a way that the individual pieces are not integrated. 

That’s why some industry professionals suggest investing in contact center suites from a single vendor. “You’re much better off doing it from a single vendor than trying to piece together multiple solutions from multiple vendors,” states Daniel Ziv, vice president of voice of the customer analytics solutions at Verint Systems. “It’s very costly and time-consuming to bring them together.”

Staples also endorses the single-vendor approach. “If you buy stand-alone systems, it is possible to have them all talk to one another, but it’s difficult to do,” he says. “With an all-in-one system, they are all shared resources, pulling information from a single database and sharing it with all the connected channels.”

That’s not to say that omnichannel capabilities cannot be had with solutions culled from more than one vendor. It does, however, require “some significant customization,” Staples says. “There’s no way around it.”

Hasan suggests investing in middleware as a way to get disparate systems working together. “Companies are starting to look at what their legacy systems can and cannot do, what they can input and output, and are getting creative with middleware to integrate them,” he says.

But because it can get complicated, that kind of work is best left to systems integrators with expertise and offerings in this area, Hasan suggests. It is also important to work with systems integrators who have very specific knowledge of the vendors whose products are already in place. 

2. Mobile Joins the Mix

Emerging contact center technologies are making it possible for companies to tie mobile channels, such as smartphones and tablets, to their existing voice and online customer support channels. Key to this is making it easier for customers to access live agents, even if they’re on a channel other than the phone. 

This has been enabled largely through Web Real-Time Communications (WebRTC), an open-source means to embed real-time voice, text, and video communications capabilities into Web browsers. WebRTC uses JavaScript and HTML5 coding and individual application programming interfaces to embed communications technologies within Web browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. 

“With WebRTC, individuals can start on a Web site and move to the phone without dropping the line,” Fluss explains.

WebRTC is probably the closest thing to an omnichannel industry standard available today, but there are problems with service consistency. “I just don’t see cross-channel consistency in service levels being feasible for many years,” says Paul Stockford, chief analyst at Saddletree Research. “One of the big challenges for omnichannel customer service is consistency in responsiveness,” he adds, noting that response times vary by channel and type of interaction.

“You’re omnichannel when the customer doesn’t notice a difference [between channels],” says Branden Jenkins, general manager of retail solutions at NetSuite. To that end, Andy Lloyd, general manager of commerce products at NetSuite, suggests companies redefine their omnichannel approaches entirely. “Design around the customer, not the channel,” he says. “Build around customers and let them design the interaction around the channels they want to use.”

Beyond that, experts recommend that companies not wait for the industry to adopt a standard interface that will allow all of their multivendor technologies to work together out of the box.

“Standards discussions have pretty much quieted down,” Staples says.

And that’s not likely to change. “Standards are tough because there’s nothing that’s universal,” Verint’s Ziv states. “It’s even more difficult with so much unstructured data out there.”

That’s why companies need to take a full inventory of all their equipment, software, hardware, and data to determine what they can keep, what they should replace, and what they need to add.

3. Employee Engagement

It’s also important to assess the skill sets of all the agents working in the contact center. There are bound to be some agents who are not good at some of the channels or unwilling to work those channels, advises Melissa Kovacevic, a contact center and retail consultant and skills coach based in Charleston, SC. “It’s going to be a balancing act. The manager has to know his people and their openness and willingness to learn and change,” she says.

For example, there are likely to be people—most likely older agents—who might not feel comfortable with the fast pace and lack of structure associated with live chat and social media, she says. Others might excel at written communications but be uncomfortable talking with people over the phone.

Kovacevic points out that roughly 15 percent of the contact center agent pool will be most comfortable on the phone and email, but that doesn’t mean that they should be phased out if and when other channels are added. “If you want to be truly customer-focused, you want your best agents doing the best jobs on the channels where they feel most comfortable. You do not have to have everyone doing everything.”

Perhaps a better approach would be to have a core group of multitaskers combined with a few channel specialists, she adds.

Undoubtedly, younger agents, particularly Millennials, are more likely to be among the multitaskers, but even older employees have proven themselves able to transition to the new channels. “The skill set of the agents is the least of our challenges,” ResponseTek’s Hasan states. “Most agents can handle chat, email, Web, and social. If agents are given the right tools and information, they are quite adaptable.”

Kovacevic agrees, noting that “just because an agent isn’t logged into Facebook, it doesn’t mean she can’t know what a customer did there if she has the right tools.”

Stockford contends that the industry trend seems to be going “down the path to separate-but-equal teams of agents assigned to specific customer channels,” which he says is fine as long as there’s consistency in the interactions.

On the personnel front, where companies are lacking is more likely in the analytics field than the contact center agent pool. “Companies lack the needed data scientists and analysts” to make sense of all the data that comes into the contact center, according to Ziv. Companies, therefore, need to select the right technology for the data they already have and the data they want to keep, he adds.

And then, organizational structures are still very much an issue. Some industry professionals suggest it’s even bigger than the technology challenge. “Organizational alignment really is the biggest hurdle,” Hasan says. “For most firms to become omnichannel, there’s definitely an organizational realignment that needs to take place.”

Experts recommend companies look to name a single person to a senior leadership role—as a chief customer experience officer or a similar title—who is responsible for all customer interactions from end to end. This person would also need to coordinate collaboration with people from other teams, such as marketing and IT, to get the most out of every channel. “This is key, before putting in any technology or strategy,” Ziv says.

4. The Outsourcing Option

For many firms, the emergence of new channels comes at a difficult time. According to research by Ovum, more than 60 percent of companies have either frozen or decreased their contact center budgets, and the firm does not expect this to change for at least the next two or three years. This will make it difficult for companies to invest in the more robust technologies needed to offer omnichannel experiences.

For them, as well as for the companies simply having trouble coping with all of the new channels emerging, there are always outsourcing companies that have both the technology and people needed to offer omnichannel availability. “Outsourcers are very well equipped to handle omnichannel interactions,” says Peter Ryan, Ovum’s principal analyst covering business process outsourcing.   

The benefits of turning over management of an omnichannel contact center to an outsourcer, he adds, “are multidimensional.”

Ryan first points out that most firms do not have the money on hand to invest in multichannel deployments. Outsourcers, he says, already have the technology, management, and delivery expertise and can ensure a seamless operational transition for non-voice consumers. 

These companies can also help strategically guide enterprises across the omnichannel journey, “which is both complex and murky,” Ryan says. “Given the limited resources among firms to invest in CRM, having a third party could prove to be a wise move over the long term,” he concludes.

Of course, handling omnichannel customer service will be different for each company. Regardless of how it’s done, though, experts agree that companies should measure the quality of their customer experience before, during, and after a transition to an omnichannel strategy.

Time, therefore, is the biggest requirement for any project. “It takes a long time to implement correctly. Becoming omnichannel is not a short-term thing,” Hasan cautions. “It’s a two- to four-year [project] rather than a one- or two-year deal.” 

News Editor Leonard Klie can be reached at lklie@infotoday.com.