Omni-Channel Customer Engagement Article

When it comes to doing business today, a lot has changed from a few decades or even just a few years ago. New products and services require new approaches, and new technologies present new opportunities and challenges. But processes and technologies aren’t all that have changed. Customers have changed, as well. They still want the best service at the best price, but their patience for errors, delays and indifference has all but disappeared. The days when the average customer had a half hour or more each evening or at lunch time to pick up the phone and patiently await a customer support outcome are long gone, and they’re never coming back.

For starters, customers want to be able to reach a company via the channel of their choosing, and they want it to be fast, efficient and responsive. Did the customer start with a Web chat session on his or her mobile phone and then decide to escalate to a live telephone call? If so, the customer wants the agent who picks up the call what he or she has been trying to accomplish in the mobile app. If a customer has to start the support session all over again, the company has lost. Lost the opportunity, lost the customer and lost the future sale. Multiple channels simply aren’t good enough today: each communications media (phone, chat, text, mobile app, e-mail, etc.) needs to be a path that leads to the same place: an up-to-date, all-around picture of the state of the customer’s relationship to the company.

According to Neldi Rautenbach, Marketing Manager for Synthetix writing for Business2Community, shockingly few companies ever reach this destination of centralized, omnichannel customer support.

“Having a well implemented customer service strategy with a centralized knowledge-base at its core, is key to meeting the following challenges facing companies wanting to deliver exceptional customer experiences,” she wrote. “Multiple contact channels that don’t feed into the same knowledge-base will not serve ‘first contact’ resolution with consistency and continuity across engagement channels.”

The first benefit of such a centralized knowledge base is that, with a few easy-to-use self-service options, customers can often answer their own questions using the very same data that agents use. Most customers want to answer their own questions without having to escalate to a live agent.

“But having an extended knowledge-base into your contact center will ensure that agents give customers consistent, accurate and timely answers to their questions regardless of channel, and that customers receive the same accurate answers whether they’re provided via self-service search, a phone call with an agent, automated email responses, web forms, live chat, SMS, or social media,” wrote Rautenbach.

Piecing together a series of disjointed channels and hoping they “stick” together is a fast way to lose customers to competitors who try harder. It may mean ripping out large elements of the existing contact center infrastructure and starting again. As onerous as that sounds, it’s easier than continually having to replace a company’s entire customer base.