Omni-Channel Customer Engagement Article

Have you ever felt like the company you work for cares more about their customers than they do about you? This is not an uncommon phenomenon as companies throughout the world rely heavily on a satisfied customer base to ensure their ongoing survival. When the care is skewed too far, however, the employee team that they need to keep the customer satisfied may quickly slip away.

In the omni-channel customer engagement environment, the goal is to create the seamless experience regardless of the channel the customer has opted to use. At the same time, the customer should be able to jump from one channel to the next without explaining their issue or who they are to the individual interacting with them on different channels. Calls shouldn’t have to be escalated as the agent responsible for the customer should have the power to deliver results.

But what happens with the agents charged with delivering the omni-channel customer engagement experience aren’t treated as well as the customer base? The desired experience may fall short simply because the agent base doesn’t have the tools or the motivation to deliver on corporate expectations.

A recent Aspect (News - Alert) blog explored this trend, highlighting how sales teams are often referred to as customers by marketing and support personnel who then provide them with services or products as needed. As Aspect caters to companies who operate contact centers to provide the omni-channel customer engagement experience, company leaders understand that the technologies offered must be intuitive so that customers can easily and seamlessly navigate between different interaction methods. At the same time, internal employee engagement can benefit from the same capabilities.

In the contact center world, it wasn’t uncommon to find portal apps in use that were either developed in-house or by a third party to facilitate the scheduling of agents. Requesting a specific schedule, call out for the day or trading schedules with someone else were generally very tedious and cumbersome tasks. Plus, these applications needed to be updated and tended to change from version to version. They often also tended to be built from the designer’s perspective and didn’t use any insight into how a call center was actually run.

The better approach is to offer access to such apps through processes and devices employees are already accustomed to using, such as a smartphone. That’s why Aspect is offering the contact center space Mila, which allows agents and supervisors to easily accomplish the most common workforce tasks with interaction methods they are already using. The result is improved productivity and better agent satisfaction when they see the company investing just as much in them as they do omni-channel customer engagement.