Omni-Channel Customer Engagement Article

Multichannel engagement is the name of the game in the call center industry if you want to stay ahead of the competition. But saying you offer multiple ways to connect doesn’t mean that you’re offering the right channels and the right service on those channels. The point is to create the omni-channel customer engagement experience that is seamless – something much easier said than done.

The point to the omni-channel customer engagement experience is to keep track of what customers are doing across your various channels so they don’t have to repeat themselves to different agents or when transitioning to a live agent from a self-service channel. According to Aspect (News - Alert) in a recent blog, this requires the use of context cookies.

Similar to browser cookies, context cookies are small data bits that will remember session state. These bits must then be stored in a central repository. In Aspect’s case, this is the Continuity Server within CXP, a self-service platform. As a result, if a customer is interacting with the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and the call drops halfway through the process, a simple redial allows the caller to continue at the exact point they left off.

Context cookies enhance the omni-channel customer engagement experience in other ways as well, including storing business tasks that weren’t completed on the last call; the last transaction completed within the mobile app; the last live interaction between the customer and an agent; the last issue that was discussed with the agent; the most recent page of the website the customer visited; and more.

The key to making this work well within the call center environment is to enhance SMS, the mobile app, agent desktop, website, IVR, etc. to perform write operations through an API into the Continuity Server. Once you have the information in cookies, you need to determine what to do with it – what is important to remember from your most recent transactions? In a nutshell, you should capture what the customer did last, when they last made contact and the channel they used.

Knowing this information in the omni-channel customer engagement environment helps you best determine how to start interacting with a customer the next time they make contact. It not only streamlines the experience, it also communicates to the customer that you care enough to remember their most recent activities with you, demonstrating how much you value their business. That alone will set you apart from the competition.