Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Omnichannel Customer Support Requires Workforces to Transverse Channels
While a great deal of business today has gone digital, making the assumption that we now live in a digital business world is erroneous. Countless processes are still manual and on paper, and many of these old-fashioned processes run parallel to digital operations, but they never actually meet. For many companies, it feels like they’re keeping a dark, shadowy relic alongside their new, shiny digital processes. Because of a lack of integration with the digital world, many business processes need to be duplicated: one on paper with manual tasks, and another in the company’s digital realm. It leads to unnecessary work, duplicate efforts, errors and a lack of insight into business processes.
In the realm of customer support, digital processes and manual work are often expected to coexist. Customers like the shiny digital support channels, but they also expect that humans will be available to them when they’re required, and humans can’t be digitized…yet. According to U.S Census Bureau data, 92 percent of retail sales still take place in person, in stores. This leaves the onus on companies that may be investing all their resources on digital channels to figure out a way to blend the online and offline world. There is evidence that few companies are doing a great job of it.
A recent analysis of market research by McKinsey & Company (News - Alert) found that many customers (including large majorities in some markets and industries) want to move freely from channel to channel in an omnichannel experience. This means that responsive companies need to do a better job of joining digital and human processes.
“Accordingly, the digital end-to-end offerings and internal capabilities that companies are building are important not only in themselves but also in the way they support the other channels,” wrote McKinsey’s Raffaella Bianchi, Michal Cermak and Ondrej Dusek.
The contact center is often the place where digital and non-digital channels meet, so the idea of omnichannel integration is more important here than anywhere else. Ultimately, it’s often the destination of customers, regardless of which channel they chose to get there. Many companies make the mistake of dedicating agents or workers to offline channels, and dedicating another group to digital channels. The drawback is that customers who expect to travel across channels in their customer journey wind up facing roadblocks.
Building a truly omnichannel workforce means that the customer journey is what’s most important…not the channel. All customer support and sales personnel must be able to follow customers across all channels. It’s a tall order on a number of fronts, but it can be particularly challenging when it comes to scheduling and managing the workforce. Without this critical integration of not only channels but the entire workforce, companies simply won’t be able to grow.
“Getting these steps right provides new opportunities to make customers happy—for instance, by letting them start a loan application on their phone before bed and finish it at a branch the next day after asking a few questions via the call center,” wrote the McKinsey analysts. “Capturing moments such as these turns omnichannel into a major growth platform.”
Next-generation workforce management and scheduling tools ensure that your company is well-placed to be able to follow customers anywhere they need to go: online or offline.
Edited by Alicia Young