How to develop an omnichannel strategy to improve your CX
With the proliferation of new channels emerging and customer expectations changing rapidly if you haven’t thought about your omnichannel strategy, there has never been a better time to start.
With 89% of customers getting frustrated with their need to repeat issues to multiple representatives, there is a lot of opportunities for businesses to get this right.
In fact, the Aberdeen Group claims that companies with the strongest omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, as compared to 33% for companies with weak omnichannel strategies.
With a Walker study claiming that by 2020 customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator, your omnichannel strategy will be central to your success.
Three tips if you are looking to develop an omnichannel strategy for your business:
1. Focus on where your customer are
Understanding your businesses and carrying out extensive surveys on what channels and devices customers use is important.
This information can then be used to put together a prioritised list of channels to use in order to optimise customer interactions, along with an associated rollout plan.
By simply opening up all channels to all people, businesses risk creating a drop in customer experience.
Consequences include inconsistency from one channel to another and a customer base frustrated by having to spend more time than necessary on the interaction process.
2. Channel-Spanning can be seamless by standardising service levels
The most compelling challenge is to standardise service levels across an omnichannel support environment.
This assures a high level of customer satisfaction is consistently maintained even as incidents are moved across multiple channels within a resolution workflow process.
Service levels traditionally for calls, emails and chat are very different when it comes to Average Speed of Answer and Service Level response times, which will result in inconsistent customer satisfaction ratings for specific channels.
The key to this –and to a successful omnichannel support environment is to create a seamless and transparent incident management process for the end users regardless of which channel is initiated and transferred to during the resolution process.
Call centre businesses will need to implement the required tools, provide the necessary agent training, and modify standard service levels and associated staffing levels to accommodate such a model.
3. Make data available across channels to establish a 360-degree customer view in a moment.
We have the data, but we still don’t do a very good job making it available or sharing and integrating it from one spot or location to other places.
Nobody wants to call the contact centre, explain the problem to one agent, be told they can’t help but can put you in touch with the right person, only to have your call transferred and the new agent has to ask the same questions and gather the same information you gave to the previous agent.
Recommended further reading: Why an omnichannel contact centre is crucial to business success
Find a list of suppliers who can help bring your omnichannel strategy to life including consultants, technology suppliers and more in our CX Directory >>>
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