Call Recording Featured Article

An omnichannel customer experience has long been the goal of forward-thinking companies worldwide. The ability to reach customers over customers' desired point of contact is hard to pass up and can mean huge bottom line impact. Getting that experience has proven tougher than expected, and new reports suggest that the key may be a matter of fundamentally changing the workforce.

With technological changes already striking, and the culture adapting itself around these changes, the expectations of customers are altered from the ground up, making it that much tougher to deliver a positive customer experience that doesn't look like everyone else's. The old business model of taking goods from one place to another is increasingly out, replaced with new models of making points of contact along an entire long-term experience.

One big change comes with the workforce itself; customers used to gauge the quality of a brand by an in-store experience. With brick-and-mortar stores starting to wane in popularity, though, other measures are stepping in like the most convenient overall source. Brick-and-mortar plays a role in that determination, but so too does online options, or even social media options using a “buy button.”

One great example of a company changing its operations to fit is Under Armour, which focuses on personalization and information delivery. To accomplish this, Under Armour has taken a lot of the “low-value” tasks out of employee hands and instead focuses the workforce on higher-level tasks that even major machine intelligences can't yet handle.

It's not alone here; Brookshire Grocery Company also served as a quality example, focusing on digital operations to better gather information about the customers. That also serves as the necessary fodder to personalize an experience and deliver more relevant information, driving greater customer loyalty overall.

Here we see common threads emerge: both companies focused on information dispersal, and a personalized customer experience that connected with the customer at the most comfortable point. These required not only information gathering mechanisms—and probably a little help from analytics tools—but also a workforce that had been modified to work accordingly. These aren't call center reps who know nothing about the product line beyond the basics; these are people who likely know a product so well they know just how best to fit it into a user's everyday activities. Not just features, but applications as well. These aren't people who are forced to check account balances or tell people store hours or even intercept complaints from people who want free everything; these are valued professionals handling high-level tasks.

Valued professionals—likely paid better than average too—are delivering useful information at several points of contact. That's the biggest push toward an omnichannel experience, and at the end, it's also what's making businesses better in an age where there's more than one way to buy a product. It all starts with an altered workforce with a whole new focus.