It’s easy to forget that call centers are in a unique position. Whether it’s the company-managed contact center customer experience or the customer experience in BPO, it comes as no surprise that a major challenge to providing superior customer service is competing priorities. For a call center to work effectively, customers need to trust that the call center represents the company they are doing business with. At the exact same time, the customer needs to trust that the call center agent can act as an advocate for them.
The Role Of Omnichannel Communications
Omnichannel communication strategies are designed to standardize service and enable customers to navigate between touchpoints easily. Digital communication channels for customer service and assistance remain a non-invasive way to ensure customers can stay connected to the company and maintain control at their convenience. Call center omnichannel strategies then, must look to optimize capabilities and personalization, integrate CRM data and systems, and continue to develop ever-evolving self-serve capabilities in order to create a cohesive outbound and inbound customer experience. In addition, consider strategic omnichannel strategies from a regulatory standpoint. Self-service and payment methods such as text and portals can reduce collections call center operational costs while remaining legally compliant.
The Role Of The Agent
Any time live agents perform a task that can be handled by digital omnichannel, you lose. The role of live agents has transformed radically in the last five, and maybe more importantly, two years. Agents are highly specialized and extremely agile. They can make an immediate impact in dealing with demanding customers. Once you’ve optimized capabilities and personalization, integrated CRM data and systems, and enhanced self-serve capabilities via digital omnichannel technology and development, your WFM and voice AI learning capabilities should ensure that your agents have the knowledge and resources they need to support delivery of a consistent, exceptional customer experience.
The Future Of Contact Center Customer Experience
Real time and responsive omnichannel communications are an ideal place to build customer trust. By synchronizing messaging and priorities, you can easily update your employees in real time while also keeping your customers in the loop. Customers notice when messaging doesn’t align. Digital multichannel communications are ideal for this purpose. Proactive omnichannel management is a sure-fire way to improve customer experience dramatically. Call center omnichannel strategies done correctly improve CX. This deeper, more customized experience consequently leads to better metrics and improved feedback by maintaining a consistent message and driving positive, low stress interactions for customers.
But there will be things that voice ai and omnichannel communications either can’t understand or just can’t answer. The level of interaction and intensity almost always changes once omnichannel technologies have done their job. If your call center omnichannel strategy has been carefully thought through and set up correctly, voice AI will deal with easier queries, while the more complicated questions and complaints are left for live agents. Keep this in mind when training contact center staff to make sure they can deal with these problems efficiently. Once your customer does connect to a live agent, it is imperative that the call center omnichannel strategy your business develops has the capacity to blend and seamlessly integrate inbound/outbound agents with the correct and cohesive messaging. Designing your training and continuing education to emphasize and understand skills-based routing, dynamic scripting functionality, and automation will ensure your live agents, omnichannel, and voice AI technology platforms all sync up.
The Value Of Seamlessness
Customer trust and loyalty are dependent on the alignment of your business and your customer. Intelligent call center omnichannel strategy combined with voice ai and a well-trained, live agent workforce is the missing link to exceptional, reproducible, and consistent CX. When agents and technology converge to deliver a seamless contact center customer experience, priorities align and your customer trusts that your call center can serve not only their needs but provide them with a direct connection to your business as well.
About Author: Zach is a Product Marketing Specialist with Alvaria, Inc. overseeing marketing efforts for premise and cloud self-service and voice solutions. Zach has worked in the Contact Center industry for 8 years and has been with Alvaria since October 2019.
