Customers today will often engage with your business across several different channels – from your website to social media across both desktop and mobile – before making a purchase. This is what it means to provide an omnichannel customer experience.
But with customer expectations changing, how can you ensure your customer experience strategy stays effective? Here are 5 ways to improve your omnichannel customer experience.
Cloud Contact Centre
Cloud-based contact centre solutions enable your agents to engage customers wherever they are most comfortable – phone, email, video chat or even WhatsApp.
Agents can pick up and respond to questions or requests coming from various channels and your customers will get faster responses in a way that’s more convenient for them.
Because these systems sit in the cloud, they are easily scalable. If your business starts growing rapidly or experiences a sudden increase in calls, it’s easy to add more agents in to the system. This makes sure you meet customer demand and customers will get faster responses (without being put on hold!).
Don’t forget social media
Today, most people are connected on some kind of social media – and this is the place where customers want to engage in conversation.
Research shows that almost one-third of people expect companies to reply to their queries on social media within half an hour. Yet the average response time stands at 157 minutes – more than five times higher. People aren’t always able to wait to speak to someone and want an instant response.
Your omnichannel experience needs to take social media seriously and offer a seamless interaction with your customers. Social media accounts can be integrated with a contact centre solution to ensure it doesn’t fall behind, including intelligent agent routing which directs the enquiry to the agent best fit to solve the issue.
Move to self-service
Gone are the days when customers used to prefer calling customer services for an issue. Now it’s all about being able to fix problems on their own – according to Gartner 70% of customers prefer using self-service such as FAQs.
Improve your customer experience by enhancing your self-service capabilities, such as chatbots, IVRs (Interactive Voice Response) and virtual assistants capable of responding to a host of questions. Self-service options need to be as intuitive as possible. Providing more options for people to easily find answers to their questions can cultivate happier, more loyal customers.
Include AI as part of the mix
While many businesses are moving to cloud-based contact centre solutions, most are not yet taking advantage of AI. Artificial Intelligence can go a long way in creating lasting customer relationships and improve the omnichannel experience. It allows you to provide personalised support, better understand customer needs and resolve issues quicker.
AI can analyse usage data, giving you real-time insight into each customer’s preferences, so agents can understand customer needs before they pick up the phone.
Adding AI in to your omnichannel strategy means that employees know the best way to respond to customers and their preferred type of communication.
Invest in the right solution
Our OneContact solutions as part of our OneCloud platform, enables you to manage agent licenses and subscriptions in one single, cloud-based platform.
Investing in CcaaS solutions means they can be customised for your organisation – scale up or down depending on capacity or levels of automation needed and set up a quality call experience on any device.
Speak to our team on 03300 888 999 to see how OneContact could support your omnichannel strategy.