A Sponsored Article by inContact
In today’s digital battleground, consumers expect you to interact with them in every channel from email to chat, from 1-800 to SMS text. Combined with ever-increasing consumer choice and expectations around customer service, it means achieving your business goals all comes down to how well you win each and every interaction.
Many companies experience issues trying to tie together their customer service channels into a unified experience. However, there’s great value to it: The Aberdeen Group found that adopting an omnichannel strategy benefited businesses with a 91% year-over-year increase in client retention rates. It’s clear that reducing the confusion of different messages across multiple engagement channels helps to retain customers and increase profits.
Technology is an important aspect of effectively supporting omnichannel, but for many contact centers, this is a sore point as their solution only supports disparate channels. For example, with old-fashioned solutions, voice is the most common communication method and is routed by an Automatic Call Distributor (ACD). Email typically isn’t routed by the ACD, and chat is often routed in yet another way. Email and Chat contacts are often routed with separate, sometimes even best-of-breed point solutions. However, that approach makes it difficult to monitor what’s happening, and also ensure maximum productivity, with disparate channels that can’t be easily monitored in a universal queue, and reported on in a consolidated system.
CRM Systems Track Omnichannel Interactions
Customer relationship management systems, like Salesforce, are foundational tools for aggregating customer data compiled from interactions across all channels. Integration between your CRM system and contact center omnichannel routing solution is helpful, as it enables agents to deliver personalized and consistent experiences across channels. A cloud contact center solution that supports CRM integration, either out-of-the-box or custom-built through APIs, makes it easy to quickly implement this type of functionality.
Manage Interactions with a Universal Queue
One universal queue for voice, email, chat, text/SMS, social media and more is also critical to help agents keep track of customer interactions without logging in and out of multiple systems. Multichannel routing lets customers choose how they want to interact with you and ensures different types of interactions are routed to the correct agents. For example, some agents are better at taking voice calls and others possess the necessary writing skills for answering chats.
Omnichannel: Made Possible with the Cloud
If your contact center is using disconnected on-premises systems, omnichannel is difficult—if not impossible—to achieve. Cloud technology offers a flexible and agile environment that enables rapid response as well as a test-and-refine approach.
A cloud contact center solution helps you get a complete picture of your customers by connecting the full spectrum of technologies, including your CRM system and supporting universal queues, to support and manage their relationships. It also gives you the flexibility and agility to keep pace with customer requests by synthesizing, analyzing and acting on customer insights across a variety of channels.
inContact Customer Interaction Cloud is the most complete, easiest and most reliable-cloud contact center solution on the market today. Omnichannel Routing and Voice as a Service offers the agility to connect across every channel—even when customers want to switch channels. Analytics provide insights into the performance of your contact center operations. Plus with our award-winning Workforce Optimization and Workforce Management, you can optimize efficiency and transform your team into customer experience pros.
Recognized as a market leader by Gartner, IDC, Frost & Sullivan, Ovum and DMG, inContact supports over 6 billion interactions per year for enterprise, midmarket, government organizations and business process outsourcers (BPOs) who operate in multiple divisions, locations and global regions.