By Synthetix

The variety and choice of communication channels in recent years show no means of slowing down and keeping up with customers wanting to interact with you, over every conceivable medium is challenging, even to the biggest brands. To further complicate matters, each channel appears to need its own integration interface to be implemented into legacy or on-premise systems. And by the time a new integration is agreed, purchased, implemented and IT or contact centre staff trained to use it, the next advance in technology makes the realisation of creating ‘a single view of the customer’ seem to be nothing but an ideology.

But for those businesses chasing omni-channel deliverability there are 3 approaches that might help make the dream a reality.

Self-development

This is a great option if your team can maintain the resources necessary to integrate with a specific API of a new contact channel and are able to sustain the code especially when a service deprecates or update its APIs. Developer-savvy businesses can piece together its own omni-channel solution but using a load-balanced network that is fail-over tolerant, and able to auto-scale to as many servers as required is key to maintain brisk performance and keep data safe.

Employing PaaS

Platform as a Service offers a rich palette of technically integrated platform solutions designed to increase agility, lower costs, and reduce IT complexity. Customer service software vendors that offer omni-channel APIs enable businesses to build, deploy, integrate and extend their own online customer service applications in the cloud using flexible RESTful APIs.

Using ready-made integrated tools

Using a complete platform for automated, self-service customer experience and agent assisted channels will ensure you maintain high levels of satisfaction and engagement no matter how customers choose to contact you.  A vendor worth their weight will offer APIs to integrate with your CRM to allow for omni-channel deliverability. Look for a vendor that offers a ROI calculator to prove the impact of savings to be had using a complete online customer service suite, or those that offer risk-free trials.