Your customers expect it to be simple to get in contact with you. They just want to complete their purchase or answer their question as quickly as possible. They aren't interested in trying to work out who they need to interact with, regardless of channel. Make it easy.
Enter the omnichannel contact centre - devised to improve the customer experience and make customer support simple.
What is the difference between a multichannel and an omnichannel contact centre?
The names might sound similar, but trust us when we say there's a world of difference between multichannel and omnichannel in the contact centre.
Multichannel supports two or more channels - think calls, emails, faxes, and potentially something newer like chat, SMS or social media (Twitter/Facebook).
Now that's great, except that in a multichannel environment, you find that every channel is working independently. This means what happens in one channel isn't shared to agents supporting the other channels. Information and interaction histories begin to exist in silos - which can lead to frustrating encounters for your customers and your agents.
Imagine this: your customer sends an email and follows up with a call. The agent taking the call has no visibility of the previous request for help, and no idea what actions were taken on their behalf. Your organisation is forced to handle the same issue twice - annoying your customer by requesting information they've already given and costing the business more.
Omnichannel Contact Centres for a Better Customer Experience
In contrast, Omnichannel contact centres build consistently outstanding customer experiences, irrespective of interaction channel. Omnichannel contact centres are built around a universal queue. By intelligently receiving and routing interactions which come in from all channels, organisations can apply business logic and service levels, ensuring all interactions are treated in the best way for the customer.
With an omnichannel contact centre, those silos of information and interaction history are a thing of the past. Replaced, instead with a single unified lens into your business systems and complete end-to-end visibility of a customer’s interaction history. This includes full visibility of how your customer has attempted to self-serve before they reach you. Your customers are happier as you've made it easy for them, and your agents are happy as they can be more effective, and don't have to trawl through 3 different applications just to find the right piece of information.
All of this leads to a reduction in handle times enabling your organisation to reduce cost to service and improve efficiency.
To learn more about how an omnichannel contact centre could improve your customer support, and how Route 101 could help, visit our omnichannel solutions page.
