How to Choose the Right Omnichannel Contact Service Provider for Your Business

As businesses continue to compete in an increasingly crowded marketplace, the need to identify innovative ways to connect with customers has only increased. One of the most effective methods is to adopt an omnichannel strategy to customer service.  

Omnichannel customers spend 10% more online as well as 4% more in-store than single-channel customers.

In today’s channel-rich ecosystem, omnichannel capabilities drive the engagement of customers with businesses and even draws them to the physical stores as well. Synchronising the traditional and digital channels to provide customers with a seamless, omnichannel experience is clearly no longer a ‘good to have’, but a ‘must have’.

‍What is an Omnichannel Contact Centre Solution?‍

An omnichannel contact centre solution enables businesses to manage customer engagement across multiple channels seamlessly. The platform integrates traditional and digital channels, consolidates data from multiple systems into a central dashboard, unifies identities, reports, and analytics for enhance business intelligence. This convergence creates a cohesive environment aid to boost your team’s productivity and enhance your customer experience.

How Can Your Business Adopt an Omnichannel Strategy?‍

Businesses with strong omnichannel strategies retain an average of 89% customers, compared to 33% businesses with weak omnichannel strategies. Furthermore, businesses that adopt an omnichannel customer service approach have experienced a 91% year-over-year increase in customer retention rates.

Here’s how you can get started with an Omnichannel Contact Centre Solution:‍

1. Understand Customer Personas

As a thriving business, thousands of customers would interact with your business across multiple touchpoints every day. To be able to understand their needs, preferences, expectations, and interests at a granular level, businesses need to segment their customer profiles in several pre-determined buckets. It helps businesses in comprehending pain points and behaviour of prospects and customers.  

When your team is poorly equipped with insufficient data and works on disjointed systems it becomes increasingly difficult to view customer journey as a whole. To be able to understand customer expectations and personalise their engagement experience a business needs to adopt omnichannel customer strategy.  

In today’s era, an average customer uses 10 separate channels to engage with a business. By adopting an omnichannel contact centre solution, you can enhance your chances of reaching your customers on the right channel, at the right time, and with the right message. ‍

2. Define Your Business Objectives

Before you start evaluating different omnichannel contact centre solutions, you need to define your business objectives. What are the goals you want to achieve with an omnichannel contact centre solution? Are you looking to improve customer satisfaction, reduce response times, or increase customer retention rates? Defining your business objectives will help you to identify the features and functionalities you need in an omnichannel contact centre solution. ‍

3. Audit Your Existing Channels of Communication

Take stock of your existing channels of communication. Look at the channels that your customers are using to interact with your business. Which channels are most effective, and which are not? Conducting an audit of your existing channels of communication will help you to identify gaps in your customer service strategy and determine the channels you need to add to your communication strategy mix. ‍

4. Determine the Types of Enquiries Your Business Handles Currently

Every business is unique, and so are the types of enquiries they receive from customers. Before you choose an omnichannel contact centre solution, you need to identify the types of enquiries your business handles currently. Are they product-related enquiries, technical support, or billing-related enquiries? Understanding the types of enquiries your business handles will help you to choose an omnichannel contact centre solution that meets your specific needs. ‍

5. Analyse the Volume of Enquiries

It's important to analyse the volume of enquiries your business receives on each channel. This analysis will help you to identify the busiest channels and determine the number of agents you need to handle customer enquiries effectively. An omnichannel contact centre solution can help in identifying and automating frequent enquiries with the help of an AI-powered Chatbot or even IVR.  ‍

6. Define a Budget

Choosing an omnichannel contact centre solution does not need to be an expensive proposition. You can set up an omnichannel contact centre for as little as US$50. It's essential to define a budget upfront and stick to it. Make sure you choose a solution that meets your needs without exceeding your budget. Look for solutions that offer capabilities and flexibility that matches your requirement.

How Does a Powerful Omnichannel Contact Centre Solution Look Like?‍‍

1. All-in-One Cloud-Based Communication Suite

A powerful omnichannel contact centre solution bridges the gap between digital and traditional channels, such as social media messaging apps, live chat, SMS, email, calls, and video calls. By unifying all channels, a business is left with one view of the customer across, instead of having disjointed profile of the customer spread across multiple apps. Also, it helps your team in engaging with customers without needing to jump between multiple tabs. This convergence of channels creates a consistent experience for customers across all channels, improving customer satisfaction and engagement, while enhancing employee experience and productivity. ‍

2. A Cohesive Ecosystem

A powerful omnichannel contact centre solution enables your team to work collaboratively by creating a cohesive ecosystem. It offers variety of features that help in automating workflows and streamline processes. Thus, reducing the time taken to resolve customer issues and creating delightful experiences for customers. Modern contact centres equip your team with smart routing features that direct customers to the most appropriate agents, based on their needs, preferences, and history. This leads to faster resolution times, improved customer satisfaction, and better agent productivity. ‍

3. Convergent Interface

A powerful omnichannel contact centre solution not only bridges the gap between digital and traditional channels, but also brings together the essential business tools used by various internal teams onto one interface, along with customer data, identities, and reports and analytics. This interface helps in providing a single view of the customer, enabling your agents to have a comprehensive understanding of the customer's needs, preferences, and history.  ‍

4. Provides Real-time Data & Reports

A powerful omnichannel contact centre solution doesn’t provide an analysis in retrospect, but in real-time. Interactions with customers are logged, tracked, and analysed on-the-go. This data helps you in measuring the effectiveness of your omnichannel strategy and identify areas for improvement. Additionally, it comes loaded with analytics dashboard that enables you to extract insights from customer data, identify trends, make informed decisions, train your staff, and even monitor their performance in real-time.

5. Safe, Secure, and Highly Compliant

It goes without saying that a powerful omnichannel contact centre solution is backed with the enterprise-grade safety measures and is highly compliant to government regulations. From data retention and data encryption to access controls and audit trails, it protects customer data from unauthorised access, breaches, and cyber-attacks. Additionally, it is also compliant with regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA, and more. Thus, ensuring that your customer data are not exposed to legal and financial risks.

Easily Set-up Your Omnichannel Contact Centre Solution with CINNOX

CINNOX’s Omnichannel Contact Centre solution comes packed with comprehensive capabilities. It enables businesses to deliver exceptional customer experiences across all channels. Its unified interface provides an all-in-one suite for businesses to bring together their essential apps, data, identities, and communication channels under one roof. Its lightweight CRM makes connecting with customers on-the-go a breeze. Your team can share all communications and files with confidence, secured by CINNOX’s high security and compliance standards.