Omnichannel Contact Centre: Explained, with Examples

“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

You may have come across this saying quite often and it makes sense in certain scenarios, but when it comes to managing customer expectations and delivering delightful experiences it falls flat on its face.  

(Tch, we see you shaking your head)

Believe it or not, your customers are all over the place. Literally. Alright, let’s get a bird’s-eye view of how customers usually go about their purchase process.  

While this may not apply to all cases, it pretty much sums up a buyer’s path to success in today’s age.  

Coming back to the point we were trying to make - Your customers are all over the place.

So, how can you reach such distributed audience? Your teams are going to have a field day if they continue chasing your customers by jumping across these multiple mediums and channels. This is where omnichannel contact centre comes into play.  

What is an Omnichannel Contact Centre?

An omnichannel contact centre is a comprehensive solution that unifies identities, conversations, data, systems, and experiences, and enables agents to handle enquiries, as well as share necessary information with customers across multiple channels, including web calls, Live chat, email, SMS, social media apps, and video calls. It bridges the gap between telecom and digital mediums to create frictionless and relevant experiences.

An omnichannel contact centre brings all your communication channels under one roof.

Benefits of Setting Up an Omnichannel Contact Centre?

Most businesses fail to tie back the benefits derived from setting up an omnichannel contact centre to a tangible business value or goal. Let’s clear the air around this, shall we?  

An omnichannel contact centre’s role is not just limited to managing customer enquiries and providing support services. That’s what traditional call centres are here for. A modernistic contact centre delivers benefits not just for agents and customers, but also contributes directly to the business growth and stability.

1. Elevates CX and EX

An omnichannel contact centre functions on the concept of convergence. A truly convergent solution not only bridges the gap between channels and mediums, but also unifies, customer identities, data from disparate systems, and conversations from multiple channels both, digital and telephony onto a single, cohesive interface.  

It gives your customers the flexibility to engage with your business through any channels of their choosing, viz., phone, email, live chat, or social media channels. Similarly, it gives your agents productivity a boost by presenting all inbound customer enquiries on a single dashboard. A unified system presents one view of the customer journey and behaviour that empowers businesses to craft personalised experiences for customers that in turn leads to increased revenue.

An omnichannel solution can directly elevate customer experience by:

• Creating consistent experiences across every channel
• Intelligently routing customer enquiries to the right experts and ensuring first-time resolution
• Reducing customer wait time through predictive analysis
• Providing 24/7 accessibility by automating common enquiries using AI-powered Chatbot

Likewise, it augments agent experience by:

• Automating repetitive tasks, leaving more time for employees to focus on core competencies
• Drawing on expertise from different teams to solve complex problems through internal chatrooms
• Saving time and energy by integrating multiple business tools and apps into one system
• Improving team’s performance by applying learned patterns to recommend next best actions
• Giving 360-degree perspective of customer intent, behaviour, and sentiment

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2. Better Data Insights

Omnichannel contact centre enables businesses to collect and analyse customer data from multiple channels and systems, providing a comprehensive view of customer behaviour and preferences. This data can be used to improve the customer experience by understanding their needs, preferences, and pain points.

For example, hotels and resorts can boost their revenue from room service by analysing call data over a certain period of time to determine the most requested service and then work towards improving its accessibility or improve the offering.  

Similarly, a banking institution can study labelled interaction data to automate frequently asked questions by deploying chatbot and train it to answer common questions.

Additionally, data from all channels can be analysed to identify trends and patterns in customer behaviour, allowing the contact centres to proactively address potential issues and improve the overall customer experience.

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3. Increased Sales and Revenue

Armed with a comprehensive view of the customer across all channels, agents can provide personalised experience, addressing the customer's needs and preferences. This can improve customer satisfaction and increase the likelihood of repeat business.

Let’s look at how an omnichannel contact centre can directly contribute to increasing sales and revenue.

A customer visits a retail store and tries on a pair of shoes but decides not to purchase them. Later, the customer receives a personalised email from the retailer, offering an exclusive discount on the shoes if a purchase is made within the next 24 hours. The customer appreciates the personalised offer and decides to make the purchase through the retailer's website.

A business can analyse and act on the data from the customer's in-store visit to create a targeted and personalised offer, leading to an increase in revenue. Without an omnichannel contact centre, the customer could have decided not to make the purchase, and the revenue opportunity would have been lost.

In this scenario, the omnichannel contact centre’s ability to collect and analyse data from multiple channels, in-store, email, website, and use it to provide a personalised and convenient customer experience resulted in increased sales and revenue for the retailer.

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4. Reduce Expenditure

By having a single view of the customer across all channels, omnichannel contact centre can consolidate multiple systems and processes into one centralised platform. This can reduce the need for multiple systems, licenses, and maintenance costs, leading to reduced capital expenses (CAPEX).  

A connected ecosystem can lead to managing enquiries from multiple channels more efficiently, reducing the number of resources required to support customers. This can lead to reduced operating expenses (OPEX) by lowering staffing costs, automating menial tasks, leaving more time on hand for employees to focus high-value work, and improving the overall efficiency.  

Earlier, traditional call centres would spend heavily on hardware like Private Branch Exchange (PBX) systems and Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) or Voice Over Internet protocol (VoIP) phone systems. These legacy systems resulted in increased operational expenses of maintenance and upkeep.

Unlike a traditional call centre, implementing a cloud-based contact centre solution like CINNOX can directly reduce infrastructure costs and simplify maintenance and upgrades.

Omnichannel Contact Centre Use Cases

1. Retail and E-commerce

In retail and e-commerce industry, customers expect seamless and integrated experiences across multiple channels. A significant number of your e-commerce purchases come from repeat customers, making it important to find ways of keeping customers around.

Retail and e-commerce players should ensure their customers can reach them through any channel of their choosing. Since the avenue for omnichannel shopping is only rising, it makes sense to improve accessibility as well.  

For example, if customers receive defective items in the shipment, they shouldn’t have to go through multiple channels in order to flag the item and exchange it. Businesses can place a QR code on the packaging box, upon scanning which the customers can immediately be connected to a customer support personnel who can help expedite the return or exchange process.  

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2. Financial Services

Businesses operating within the financial services space are often plagued with complex enquiries that require expert support.

Unlike earlier, customers today needn’t wait for days to receive a response from customer support team of the bank. Instead, omnichannel banking has made it possible for them to seek assistance on the channel of their choosing, be it WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Live chat, or via Call; and they expect response within seconds, not minutes, not hours, but seconds.

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3. Hospitality

Customers expect high level of personalised support and services in Hospitality industry.  

Let’s comeback to our earlier example of managing room service in hotels and resorts. As you may know every hotel room comes equipped with a landline wherein dialling specific numbers connects the guests to a dedicated service. For example, Dialling 0 would get you front desk, 2 would connect you to the restaurant, 3 might get you the concierge, so on and so forth. But, with only one line of communication and possibly hundreds of occupied rooms to cater to, it would be a bit much to expect prompt service, don’t you think?  

Most hotels have done away with the traditional method already and embrace digitisation more than others and benefited from it. A guest only needs to scan a QR code to interact with an AI-powered Chatbot to order room service, book a spa therapy, or ask for additional “complementary” water bottles (we’ve all done it). Thus, taking away the burden of managing these mundane tasks from the staff, leaving them to create delightful experiences for the customers.

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4. Proptech

Customers expect a seamless and integrated experience when it comes to buying, selling, or renting properties.  

Let’s see how real estate consultants can benefit from adapting an omnichannel approach.  

When customers browse through your listings on your website, you can prompt them to connect with you by placing a click-to-call button in a prominent section of the listing, upon clicking which they can speak with you and arrange for a virtual tour via WhatsApp video before committing to come down for a physical viewing.

These examples are just scratching at the surface. As you may have guessed already, the possibilities of setting up an omnichannel contact centre goes beyond just answering and responding to customer enquiries. It is not just useful to the customer support team, but to multiple business units like marketing, product, logistics, IT, finance, and human resources teams as well.

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CINNOX is the only platform to truly integrate telephony and digital channels, which is of utmost importance to businesses looking to transform their operations or are in the midst of it. You can set up your very own omnichannel contact centre within minutes and handle all customer interactions from a single customer-oriented dashboard combining phone, chat, email channels and more.