Businesses must adapt and enhance their operations in the Internet and technology era. As customer communication is a critical factor to consider, businesses have started to operate on futuristic technologies. Omnichannel Contact Center is the new savior for enterprises that make use of VoIP(Voice over Internet Protocol) technology to simplify business activities.

VoIP technology is one that uses an internet connection to manage customer calls. Like a call center, these cloud contact centers handle customer queries in different channels, such as calls, chats, emails, social media requests, etc. They operate with the internet as a medium instead of dealing with wires and cables in the traditional systems.

This blog discusses the importance of Omnichannel Contact Center and how it impacts various industry verticals in the present world.

Traditional contact centers handle conversations individually from different channels. These contact centers are designed to handle calls and other conversations in different channels. In this case, an agent must switch between various platforms to ensure the customer is engaged.

When it comes to cloud-based software, there are two basic contact centers:

• Omnichannel Contact Centers and

• Multichannel Contact Centers

In the case of Omnichannel, contact centers combine these individual channels, such as voice calls, video conferencing, emails, chats, web inquiries, etc., in a single unified platform. This contact center benefits both the agent and the customer since agents can have conversations without missing any customer in the single platform. At the same time, it enables customers to engage with businesses seamlessly and resolve their queries instantly. All the information is synced in a single dashboard for uninterrupted communication.

While in the case of Multichannel Contact Center, it also has the same functionality as the Omnichannel Contact Center, with the difference that the data is not synched directly to the dashboard, and agents have to switch between platforms to speak with customers.

Omnichannel Contact Center has numerous benefits more than managing customer interactions across multiple channels. This technology can connect and synchronize data from various support channels, which helps you deliver a personalized experience for every customer interacting with the brand.

It also allows businesses to gain complete insight into every customer journey, such as their preferences, previous interactions, old orders, payment records, etc. It offers your agents a holistic customer view that empowers them to provide solutions accordingly. This can result in greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.

An Omnichannel contact center also plays a crucial role in simplifying your operational efficiency. When all customer communications are unified in a single platform, it helps to streamline business operations. When all customer communications are brought together, businesses can work quickly and reduce extra effort, enhancing agent productivity.

An effective Omnichannel Contact Center consists of the following components:

An Omnichannel Contact Center integrates different support channels to enhance customer experience. All business software can be integrated quickly, so agents don’t need to switch between multiple channels for customer interactions.

Here are a few such business tools that you can integrate:

• Salesforce

• Zendesk

• Zoho CRM

• Freshdesk

• Trello

• Mailchimp

• Slack and other messaging alternatives

• Zoom

It can also be expanded to include online business purchases such as transactions, reservations, websites, mobile app data, in-store purchases, and much more to create a delightful purchasing experience for the customer.

With Omnichannel Contact Center, businesses can extract customer expectations and other data. This data can help in providing a personalized experience. Also, it uses Artificial Intelligence to detect words, phrases, and different patterns of their customer conversation.

For instance, with voice calls, AI uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to determine customer service keywords such as ‘order,’ ‘payment,’ ‘billing,’ ‘refund,’ ‘return,’ ‘exchange,’ etc. This strategy helps managers see the most common reasons why customers contact support and what needs work. With text messages and team chats, customer sentimental analysis also identifies essential words and phrases for sentimental analysis. It can also use this analysis to automatically direct agents to specific customer service departments to provide better help.

Omnichannel Routing allows admins to set rules for which agents respond to customer inquiries. For example, if a customer sends a website chat message asking about a particular product, the call will be automatically redirected to the respective team effectively. This interaction will happen within the agent’s dashboard, and the agent can respond to the chat message without switching to the website from their dashboard to answer back.

Routing can be skill-based, round-robin, most idle, and much more. Admins can also set automation messages to help customers know their message has been received, include links to self-help guides, or even provide an estimated wait time. On the other hand, chatbots can also be activated to respond to customer queries. For phone calls, inbound callers would be directed to the IVR menu that would guide the agent to respond appropriately or allow them to complete their interaction using chatbots.

Tracking and historical communication center KPIs help supervisors and agents learn more about customers and expectations. Additionally, one can also identify painpoint of their customers as well as measure individual agent’s productivity.

Additionally, this extracted information can also be converted to reports for future usage. Reports can also be customized so that they can extract only the information they need. Here are a few such metrics which can be downloaded with Omnichannel Contact Center solutions:

• Average phone/call duration

• Number of interactions in each channel

• Cost per contact

• Call quality

• Customer engagement rates

• Average hold time

• Average number of interactions in a time period (days/weeks/months)

In addition to customer experience enhancement, Omnichannel call centers have also paved the way to detect agents’ productivity as well as business performance. Here are the metrics which can be used to create a productive team:

• Split the workloads equivalently between the teams.

• Enable agents to choose a shift of their choice.

• Streamline agent responsibilities.

• Predict future trends.

• Investigate current agent availability and their activity.

• Outline agent skills so that an agent is always available to pick up customer calls.

Omnichannel Contact Center services have the following benefits:

Most surveys state companies using an Omnichannel Contact Center system have higher retention rates than those not using them. Omnichannel contact center software allows customers to communicate on the channel they prefer and prevents them from having to repeat their queries & wait for a long time.

The Omnichannel Contact Center platform ensures that customers are instantly connected to the agents or provided a quick solution with the efficient IVR strategy. It increases customer satisfaction as well as enhances agent productivity.

Small businesses that have teams across the world can easily collaborate and work remotely with the Omnichannel Contact Center. Multiple features such as Call Forwarding, Integrations, Analytics, and reporting will allow agents to access and engage the customers.

With the IVR strategy, callers can choose the respective choice and get a self-service option rather than waiting and speaking with an agent, which is time-consuming. It also works wonders for the marketing team as they can grab customer's expectations and provide a solution accordingly.

Switching to the Omnichannel Contact Center platform is simple and hassle-free. Most companies with existing call centers or contact centers can smoothly transition within 4 to 8 weeks. If in case you have a complicated contact center, the process will take a bit more time.

Here are the five important stages during the transition:

Right off the bat, it is essential to integrate the best technology stack and implement them in the Omnichannel Contact Center system to ensure team communication into the tools and technology platforms. We at TeleCMI provide importance to this and offer the best omnichannel contact center software with high-end benefits for businesses.

You can start hiring agents and supervisors who will be managing the application. They can help you with taking your brand to the next level.

Once they are hired, agents and supervisors should be trained to get knowledge of the application. This can help them to service your brand better to the customers, increasing sales and enhancing user experience.

Once the above steps are done, we will be responsible for transitioning your existing contact center management and helping you to set up a cloud-based Omnichannel Contact Center software to enhance customer communication. Your team can now get started with managing customer conversations across various channels effectively.

Finally, you can start measuring your business performance and also identify the agent’s productivity together. With these metrics, you can make the necessary changes for the future and empower both business and customer satisfaction.

If you want to adopt AI-based Omnichannel communication for your business, TeleCMI can help you implement it. We have an experienced set of team who can customize the software based on your business needs. You can check our free trial and explore various features in it.  Get in touch with us right away if you need one for your business.