When businesses begin to look at how they need to create a Omnichannel Customer Experience it can be overwhelming … customers are tweeting, they want to text you, they are asking other customers (in online community forums), and when it really comes down to the wire they call! Whatever the industry, whatever the scenarios, the fact is customers have expectations and businesses are finding it hard to keep up!
- Know (and love) your customer - Do you understand your customer? Have you walked in their shoes? What do they care about? How do they prefer to interact? When? Look, learn, and listen!! Map out the optimal customer journey, understand where you are and aren’t meeting expectations. Are there glaring gaps in your customer journey where you are obviously losing opportunities? This is not necessarily a fast or small effort but will pay off in spades if leveraged in planning and for continuous improvement planning.
- Start with low hanging fruit - How do you know what is the low hanging fruit? Believe it or not, you can impact net promoter score (NPS) more with certain channels. Look at your customer journey created in step 1, identify which channels your customers prefer, and then review the NICE CXone CX Transformation Benchmark to understand which of those channels tend to drive the most satisfaction and highest NPS. Then, leverage that prioritization and determine if there are places you can focus on that will help reduce the customers effort in doing business with you, and drive the most efficiency into the process to drive the fastest possible resolution.
- Don’t forget your agents - When it comes to omnichannel customer experience, your agent experience is potentially one of the biggest success factors. When it comes down to it, and your customer has a need that can’t be resolved without connecting with an agent, are you ensuring your agents have the right tools to finish the job? Are they able to manage contacts of all types, get customer or other information, and take appropriate training all from one interface? Or are you making them hop from place to place, write down information then find it again, manually transfer information? All these things play into agent experience, and a frustrated agent = a dissatisfied customer. Have you thought about how you could empower your agents to put the customer first by reducing the fight it takes to do their job? What tools do they need? What information? How do they know if they are being effective? From context, to collaboration, to performance … a holistic, unified picture matters!
- Measure and manage - Analytics empower you to make decisions as needed to ensure performance and satisfaction – if you use them as part of your process and for the power they provide. It is possible to have insights across all channels in a unified view – and it is also possible to provide that data to the right resources, in real time, across your business. The right analytics will give you insights as to customer behaviors to continually improve your journey as well as give agents direct insights to their own performance empowering and motivating them with continuous feedback.
A true omnichannel approach, which offers a high and consistent level of service and knowledge across each channel, is possible to achieve.
