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Omnichannel

Let’s talk about Omnichannel and… UNICORNS

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Sesui’s CTO Manveer Mangat discusses omnichannel strategies – and unicorns…

Yes, that’s correct… unicorns. Or better still… mermaids and centaurs. Or for that matter, omniagents. Yes, omniagents; the most mythical creature of all. That one contact centre agent with the linguistic ability to be a gifted email writer, snappy Tweeter, capable call agent and vibrant video agent – all at the same time. You’d be correct in thinking they’re not just rare; they’re fictitious. And I’m afraid we’d have to agree.

Omnichannel has been a buzzword for a few years now, but in asking agents to do it all, we’re asking for the impossible – omniagents. We’re seeking unicorns. The reality is that contact centres need to evolve into customer experience hubs where no one agent is expected to do it all. Instead, specialised agents work together sharing data and insights, often remotely, to provide a more personalised 24-7 customer experience.

Here are our top five tips to ensure you’re not relying on a mythical workforce to deliver your omnichannel strategy:

Know your customers
Pursuing omnichannel isn’t as simple as adding more channels. You need to understand the profile of your customers and their communications preference; this will change depending on the type of interaction. Too few, or digital only channels, and you risk isolating segments of your customer base. Too many channels and you create confusion, not just in the customer journey, but for your teams trying to manage the many and varied complex interactions. It pays to get the balance right.

Know your business
This isn’t about offering the longest list of ‘contact us’ options – it’s about offering channels that are a practical fit for the nature of your business. Don’t feel pressured into introducing channels that you don’t need, or that don’t make sense to your operation. For instance, in healthcare, patients aren’t going to contact you to discuss their concerns over Facebook, but webchat or a video call provide secure alternatives

Know your agents
Customer service agents are your brand representatives; their job revolves around that vital first contact resolution. But that doesn’t translate as getting the customer off the phone as quickly as possible. Understanding where your agents shine – their skills or specialism – is a great way to build those personalised, positive customer interactions. Skills-based routing means that calls are split by agent skills so you can safeguard the customer experience. That way your agents won’t find themselves managing things they haven’t been trained to, or handling queries outside their specialism.

Be flexible
The words contact centre make you think of a large, centralised building. But that doesn’t have to be the case. Our Virtual Contact Centres in the cloud not only offers greater workforce flexibility, but greater flexibility in the operational design of your business. With a distributed approach, your agents can deliver the same level of service from home or elsewhere; securely using any device they choose. By not tethering your people to a fixed location, it means you operate in a more flexible 24/7 way, accessing specialist agents outside office hours. It also increases the likelihood of finding agents willing to work nights, or split shifts as you can draw from a wider talent pool.

See the big picture
For omnichannel to work you need a holistic view of the customer experience. While the customer journey might begin on one channel, valuable insight and feedback from the customer is likely taking place on a completely different channel. Help your team to work better together using shared data and insights. Our Virtual Contact Centre provides that holistic view – all of your customer conversations in a single stream. Channel tabs show the client/customer interaction for voice, email, SMS and video. And we’re one of just a handful of cloud communications providers able to provide LIVE reporting, so you can see what’s working well (or isn’t) at any given moment.

So remember…
Forcing your team to be omniagents is tantamount to chasing unicorns. Instead match your channels with the agent – your customers will thank you. And above all else, remember, if your customers are calling, it’s probably important. Make sure that call gets through.

Sesui creates contact management software. This year is the company’s 15th birthday, and to celebrate, it is offering a free consultation to anyone who’s read this article and wants to talk. You can contact Manveer Mangat on 03445 600 600.

Ventrica expands contact centre to meet omnichannel service demands…

 800 450 Jack Wynn
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Continuing an ‘impressive growth period’, Ventrica will be introducing a new contact centre ‘penthouse suite’ due to the increased demand for its omnichannel customer service offerings. 

The Southend-on-Sea based outsourced centre will open a roof-top wing, 19,000 sq ft site in 2017, expanding its current workforce of 280 agents to 480 full and part-time staff within the next year, and plans for an additional site at another location is part of the company’s future strategy for the next 12-18 months. 

Dino Forte, managing director and founder of Ventrica said: “We have attracted a number of new high profile B2C and B2B brands this year who are part of a wider trend of organisations that are looking to outsource non-core services. The investment in our new penthouse suite is to meet both the increased demand from existing clients but also to accommodate our future expansion.  

“The whole area of customer experience and sales is becoming more complex and companies now recognise that using a specialist third party makes perfect sense, as they often do not have the expertise, capacity or infrastructure in-house.”  

Ventrica has been shortlisted twice in the upcoming European Contact Centre & Customer Service Awards 2016 (ECCCSA) in the categories of ‘Best Outsourcing Partnership’ and ‘Medium Contact Centre of the Year’, with winners to be announced at a ceremony held at the Hilton Park Lane Hotel in London on November 21.  

Capstone: Building sophisticated systems to provide maximum results…

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Capstone Intelligent Solutions specialise in contact centre optimisation across all channels including managing your workforce. Our solutions are designed to help your contact centres accelerate business impact, deliver consistent outcomes and innovate the customer and agent experience.

The Challenge

The technology sector is fast-paced, with many businesses expanding rapidly. Add to that, the complex nature of many technology companies’ product or service and providing customer support in this sector can be a challenge. The biggest challenge the organisations are facing today within the contact centre world is the transition from your ordinary voice channel to a multichannel/omnichannel environment. Managing the customer experience across multiple channels is a key challenge for contact centre managers, and our recent research flagged just how vital this experience is when it comes to converting customer experience into sales.

Given the number of ways that we use to communicate with one another these days, it’s not all that surprising that we have high expectations when it comes to dealing with companies across multiple channels, be it via instant chat, telephone, email or social media.

The solution

We build and support sophisticated communication systems that deliver results for our clients.  By creating fast and effective communications we increase your customer interaction, productivity and business performance. Capstone Intelligent Solutions acts as your single systems integrator.  We provide physical and virtual client support across three continents, meaning you have direct and local contact with a Capstone engineer at all times.

If you or your organisation are facing any challenges then, please do get in touch for a free consultation with one of our contact centre experts.          

 

Contact Bobby Rampal
e: bobby.rampal@capstoneconnects.com
w: www.capstoneconnects.com
t: +44 7568 108 131 / d: +44 203 727 3343 

Guest Blog, Steven Robertson: Using omnichannel as a direct route to customer engagement success…

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It’s no secret that smart use of the right contact channel and judicious use of customer data is the foundation of the sort of responsive customer service today’s digital consumer demands. Let’s look at the best ways of getting to that destination and how you can ensure you are rightly supporting your customer base…

Being smart on timing

Our company has a database of millions of UK mobile users and their pick-up patterns. In fact, we’ve touched 75 per cent of the UK population through all our client work. And we’ve seen a big pattern emerge; one of the oversights companies are guilty of is running an expensive contact centre that doesn’t make phone calls at the right times during the day. That is a missed opportunity. I’m personally a blur of motion in the morning as I get to work, but I have a couple of calmer times in the day, and by 8pm, I’m halfway through a new episode of GBBO. In other words, work with me and my schedule and don’t expect me to take a sales call before I get to the office, or try and conduct a market research questionnaire for 30 minutes while my favourite programme is on. Sounds simple, but it’s amazing how many companies get this wrong – the data is out there.

One size does not fit all

Too often, the contact centre relies on one contact channel, albeit calling or emailing, web chat or dialler and so on, which is just too inflexible. It turns out that how you engage matters as much as timing. That means brands need to apply thought to what will work for different customer demographics. For people in arrears and younger people in general, voice calls don’t appeal. But switching to SMS (and two-way SMS conversations in particular) means response rates can be phenomenally high. Making contact through a channel that customers are not comfortable with means they will block you, but if the initial outreach is via a channel they prefer, there may be a wide-open door.

Don’t just blast out the company propaganda endlessly via different communication mediums. Instead be proactive, as proactive is what all good customer contact centres should be practicing right now. A great place to start is using proactive outbound communications that notify customers of key relevant events, such as delivery schedule changes; in-store or online promotions; or the availability of their latest bills. These interactions will be a requisite to further useful conversations you then need to go on and have. According to Forrester, “Proactive engagements anticipate the what, when, where, and how for customers, and prioritise information and functionality to speed customer time-to-completion.”

To navigate our complex world as a brand, you have to work with the reality of how people are operating, so you need to keep abreast of all the communication channels. You also need to offer choice; people like choice, different channels, and you need to ensure the transition between them is seamless.

Creating an effective engagement strategy is a question of using the right blend of communications technology at the right time in a helpful and conversational way, to help you and your customers achieve omnichannel success.

 

Steven brings over 25 years’ of strategic sales and management experience to the role of sales and marketing director at VoiceSage, including 15 years in leadership roles in the contact centre, telephony and professional services space. His track record includes success at market leaders BT, Cable & Wireless, PSS Help, Empirix Inc. and Protocall One, where he spearheaded successful growth programmes, as well as building complete sales ecosystems across Europe and beyond.

VoiceSage improves its SMS messaging service to overcome ‘channel complexity’…

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The customer contact services provider VoiceSage, has announced the launch of the latest improved version of its SMS messaging and cloud-based voice suite.
The company claims that improved solution will help organisations across multiple sectors to meet customer communications challenges; as well as optimising the potential to incorporate ‘smart’ ways to connect with the modern digital customer.

Sales and marketing director at VoiceSage, Steven Robertson, said: “We have implemented a large number of improvements to the core VoiceSage platform. The main theme of the new version is scalability, and that means it will help our customers better meet the challenges of the modern B2C comms world, where large scale, complex customer data requirements are now the norm.”

He continued: “The omnichannel contact challenge is to meet channel complexity and huge volumes of customer data. Our new re-architected solution is continuously expandable, so will help bridge from where customers are to where they need to be when it comes to omnichannel innovation. We think our new suite is the essential messaging service to meet any enterprise’s omnichannel and big data demands.”

Find out more about the improvements here

Report highlights ‘telephony’ self-service status in the UK market…

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In the ninth installment of its ‘Inner Circle’ series focusing on subjects including; cloud-based contact centres, self-service, outbound & call blending, customer interaction analytics and PCI DSS compliance, findings of ContactBabel‘s ‘The Inner Circle Guide to Omnichannel Customer Contact’ report indicated that 32 per cent are currently offering a full ‘telephony’ self-service channel in the UK; with the platform becoming more prevalent in the utilities and finance sectors.

Retail & distribution and insurance sectors were least likely to be doing so, and the report found a distinct pattern in full self-service regarding contact centre size, with 63 per cent of respondents from large contact centre operations (200+ agents) implementing this; compared with 27 per cent in the mid-sized sector (51-200 agents); and only 15 per cent of small contact centres (50 or less agents).

Download the full report here

Guest Blog, Gail Partridge: Making self-service work for your call centre…

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The idea that customers can manage their own customer queries almost sounds like a contradiction. However, self-service has become a growing trend in the call centre industry for some time now, and is set further increase its status as consumers look to adopt convenient customer experience solutions. Gail Partridge, consultant at PeopleTECH, examines how the introduction of self-service in your call centre will benefit the business and, in time, become commonplace across the industry

When used to its full potential, self-service can result in a win-win situation for both the customer and the agent, allowing customers to proactively find solutions to customer queries and granting agents the opportunity to pin-point the queries that will need to be resolved over the phone. But how can a company effectively introduce the forward-thinking approach of self-service?

Remember your customer demographics

When implementing a self-service strategy, it is crucial to always have the target demographic at the forefront of your thinking. While self-service is portrayed as an invaluable option that allows agents to prioritise and manage their workload, for many customers, however, they will always want to directly speak with an agent to resolve an issue.

If this traditional method is ignored, your call centre could potentially lose a majority of customers. Therefore, it is important to make sure that contact details are easily accessible and clearly displayed alongside your self-service content. You can and should encourage self-service where possible and align self-servicing routes/journeys to call drivers is an important part of this.

Keep it simple

Simplicity and clarity are essential tools to the development of any successful self-service channel. All relevant information, such as what personal or transactional detail is required for a customer to self-serve – or where to go if a query cannot be resolved via self-service –  should be presented in a clear and easy manner to understand; managing customer expectations from the outset with the inclusion of the benefits of self-service.

These benefits include the round-the-clock availability, the speed of resolution, the lack of call queuing times and the sheer convenience to the customer. In addition, some interactions are simply not suitable for self-service – often for reasons of sensitivity and the depth of each query – therefore, a company should identify the queries that can be moved to and successfully handled via a self-service channel.

Self-service and omnichannel

A modern customer experience journey should always be about omnichannel, delivering to consumers a contextual experience. With this said, an organisation’s self-service channels should be completely connected and joined-up, allowing customers to effortlessly move between channels, retaining the context of that particular interaction as well as their prior history with the company.

This means they should be able to start an interaction in one channel and move to another without having to start the whole process again, and even use two or more channels simultaneously, allowing a company to meet customer requirements and not appearing to steer customers from the traditional voice channel. Any agent interaction following a self-service transaction should not require the customer to re-tell the story of their query as this can greatly impact on their choice to return.

 

Gail Partridge is a consultant at PeopleTECH, a customer experience management consultancy that advises organisations on how to deliver the right customer experience via people, processes and technology. Gail has previously worked with brands such as Sky, Standard Life and British Airways, advising on all elements of call centre strategy.

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