Omnichannel Contact Center: 5 Best Practices for 2024

Omnichannel Contact Center is the need of the hour. Let’s understand this further by exploring three different examples of a customer’s complaint and how three different businesses handle the situation when they have access to a traditional call center, a multichannel contact center, and an omnichannel contact center.

Context: A customer receives his new credit card from the bank, but upon checking the customer discovers his name has been misspelled on the card and wishes to get it corrected.

Now let’s look at three instances of this customer approaching his bank for resolution.

As we can deduce from the above scenarios, the customer’s quickest path to resolution was through omnichannel customer care.  

Many leaders erroneously believe that maintaining an Omnichannel Contact Center can be quite a cumbersome task. Let’s break the myth, and look at some of the most recommended, but seldom followed best practices that can give your business the edge to march ahead of your competitors, with your valued employees and satisfied customers in tow.  

1. Unify All Touchpoints and Experiences

As we can see from the above example, merely maintaining presence across multiple mediums and channels is not enough to deliver satisfactory customer service. While you are providing your customers the flexibility to connect with your business across any channel of their choosing, are you doing justice to your agents, who are expected to manage provide consistent experience across mediums and channels to the customers?  

Empower your employees with the right omnichannel communication solution that not just brings together all communication touchpoints, but also unifies essential customer data, integrates seamlessly with productivity tools and systems, so that your team can predict what the customer wants before they ask for it and engage with them proactively.

2. Cross-functional Ownership

Gone are the days when only customer support team was responsible to engage with the customers, note the complaints, pass it on relevant internal teams, and get back to the customers with the resolution or response suggested by the said teams. This is process was long, unwieldy, and costly. Not to mention, it also didn’t help with increasing he customer satisfaction (CSAT) for score.  

Onboarding an omnichannel contact center can give various teams context of ongoing conversations with customers. By applying smart routing rules, a business can direct a product enquiry to the respective product team, a deals/coupons enquiry to the marketing team, or a business enquiry to the sales team within moments, without changing multiple hands.  

To thrive in 2024 and beyond, every department within a business will need to take ownership driving customer experience through a unified system.

‍3. Improve Customer’s Self-Service Accessibility

Reduce the load on your agents but empowering customers to find answers on their own. This can easily be achieved by expanding your FAQ section and deploying AI-powered Chatbots to guide the customers to the right destinations.  

2024 is touted to be the year of self-service contact centers, with 81% customers opting to find resolution on their own, without wishing human interaction.  

From automating mundane processes to lowering operational costs, gathering relevant customer data, and automating up-selling and cross-selling opportunities, the choice of self-service leaves the onus of interaction on the customer, on their time, as per their choice.

‍4. Understand Your Customers

Customer’s needs inspire their decisions. Customers’ desire is what drives them to purchase a product or services form a business. In order to study customers' needs to provide top-notch products and services, offer better deals and discounts, and shape your customer support, and marketing strategies, businesses use multiple apps and tools to identify personas, engage with customers and various stakeholders, store their data securely, etc.  

When a business manages communication, data, and knowledge assets on disjointed ecosystem, it becomes impossible to see a customer’s identity as a whole.  

Instead, a contact center should be powered by a unified communication solution that can bring together identities, data, tools, and teams on one platform to provide a panoramic view of the customer’s journey across various touchpoints, while empowering the business to interact with them on any channel, digital or traditional from a single dashboard.

5. Transcend Digital-Physical Barrier

Don’t break your head over deciding which medium takes more precedence when it comes to delivering excellent customer experience. In-store or physical experiences are equally important to (sometimes more than) digital experiences.  

An omnichannel contact center should bridge the gap between digital and traditional channels to create an indistinguishable experience for the customers.  

This is applicable to almost every industry, be it hospitality, retail, or even real estate.  

For example, a shoe store can leverage past interest from interaction data and shopping data to launch targeted SMS and or email campaign.  

Arming in-store personnel with essential past purchase data, historical browsing data from the business’s website, enables them to deliver an informed, personalised experience to the customers that makes them feel unique, special, and instils a sense of loyalty towards the business.