Omni-Channel Customer Engagement Article

If you run or manage a contact center, here’s a question to ask yourself: if a customer is viewing your Web site on a smartphone and decides to place a call to you through the website, what will that customer hear when an agent picks up? Will the agent know this is a customer originating from a mobile browsing experience? If that customer is chatting with a support representative and needs the more in-depth communications that a phone call can offer, does the customer have to start the call by explaining the problem all over again from scratch, or can she pick up where she left off in the chat?

The answers to questions like these are what make or break the customer experience today. Customers have several major pet peeves: they don’t like to be kept on hold, they don’t like to lay their issue out on someone who no power to resolve it, and they don’t like to repeat themselves. For some unprepared organizations, omnichannel customer support simply means that you are ready to fail customers in every channel they use to communicate with you.

“Today’s customer, empowered by a plethora of digital devices, can choose when, where and how they want to interact with brands and they expect a seamless omni-channel shopping experience,” wrote Paige O’Neill for the website Fourth Source. In order to drive lasting engagement brands need to deploy the right information, in the right place, at the right time on the right channel to begin and sustain a dialogue in the modern marketing landscape.”

Too many organizations approach customers not as a single individual, but as a series of random transactions that are unrelated to one another. The result is a disjointed, piecemeal customer experience that is likely to drive a customer away for good. Instead, smart companies need to strive for a “continuous consumer, brand relationship,” according to O’Neill. This starts with a contact center’s ability to use both data and content in a contextual manner to elevate the customer experience. Some might call it a “contextual delivery model.”

“Help the brand speak with one voice, no matter how, when or with whom the conversation is happening,” wrote O’Neill, who also recommends that companies use channels in concert to mutually reinforce each other, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

A true omni-channel experience requires drawing a map of all possible journeys a customer might make, factoring in telephone and desktop Web, mobile Web, mobile app, social media, self-service and more. If you can’t start in one channel and draw an easy path from there to any other channel, chances are you’ve got real-life roadblocks in your customer experience. Customers won’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out a detour: they’ll likely just abandon the journey.