Is an Omnichannel Environment Truly Attainable?
Being truly omnichannel also means supporting multiple devices, browsers, and operating systems—and supporting them through a single queue and routing engine.
“If you want all channels to work together, you need a multichannel ACD at the center of your technology stack,” says Lyn Kramer, founder and managing director of Kramer & Associates, a contact center consulting firm. “And your [computer-telephony] systems need to be connected to the customer record.”
Omnichannel customer service also requires integration of self-service and agent-assisted service, Horn says. “There is no such thing as 100 percent self-serve,” he states, “so you want to provide the ability [for customers] to shift from self-service to assisted service where they don’t have to re-authenticate, log in again, or repeat themselves.”
Making the pieces mesh will also require sophisticated data integration.
Today, that means storing data in a central location, ideally in the cloud. That way, it doesn’t matter what department a customer calls, which agent is involved, or where the agent is located. Everyone across the company can access the same information and pick up the conversation where the previous person left off.
Having a solid web presence will also be key, particularly as companies add more digital channels like web self-service, virtual assistants, or chat.
Moving forward, the “real value” will come when companies are able to integrate business intelligence and more sophisticated analytics into their omnichannel ecosystems, according to Gordon. “Then you’ll be able to predict what the customer wants to do and drive toward that with a prescriptive element,” he states.
The ecosystem approach will also factor into vendor and product selection. Because few vendors can offer all of the necessary pieces on their own, solutions from multiple suppliers need to be able to talk to and share data with one another. “To simplify the process, you need to have companies with a lot of good integration partners,” Horn says.
But vendors don’t always play nicely together. “The multivendor scenario is challenging,” he says. “[24]7 can integrate with a lot of other vendors, and most other companies can too, but not all vendors have worked with us to orchestrate their solutions with ours.”
IT’S A PEOPLE PROCESS
Moving to an omnichannel strategy also has a strong personnel element, as most experts agree that driving the necessary changes requires a senior-level executive to take charge of the initiative.
Abiri suggests creating a position such as chief customer officer, if one doesn’t exist. The official needs to be high-ranking to carry out the budgeting, drafting and formalizing of requirements, assigning of personnel, and allocating of resources.
All company stakeholders need to be on the same page when it comes to delivering integrated quality service from every possible touch point. That means everyone should be involved in building the strategy. Any employee who is directly involved in some customer-facing activity must be on board and in sync or the company could risk falling back into siloed thinking.
Kramer also stresses that omnichannel service requires agents to be properly trained to interact with customers on multiple channels. Ultimately, a single agent should be able to conduct a call, chat with a consumer, reply to an email, and respond to a post on Facebook.
And it can’t end there. “You can do plenty of agent training, but it’s all meaningless unless you can operationalize it,” NICE’s Abiri maintains. “If you can’t bring insight in and translate it into operational information that the agent can use at the time of the interaction, it’s meaningless. You need the information to flow to the agent as she’s on the call, chat, or email so she can bring that insight into the conversation.”
AGREEMENT MUST BE REACHED
Omnichannel customer service hasn’t really taken off yet because a large slice of the contact center segment still doesn’t see the need for it. Omnichannel customer service definitely has its skeptics and detractors. Kolsky, for example, argues that it is better to do one channel really well than to try to service customers on every possible channel. If customers know that they can get great service on the phone, for example, they won’t need to seek out other channels, he says.
Jeff Toister, president of Toister Performance Solutions, shares that belief, to an extent. “Customers do not think in terms of channels. They will use whatever is most convenient for them at the time,” he says.