Today’s customers demand choice when they interact with your organization. And channel of choice is at the top of the list. But having more channels can create more challenges in consistency, interoperability and value recognition. In the past, contact centers under pressure to meet customer demands had limited options for adding channels. This led to the use of separate tools for a “multichannel” approach—creating silos in communications, teams, processes, technology, analytics and invoices. The result was poor, inconsistent and disconnected customer experiences—and expensive and complex contact center operations.

But technology has evolved to support modern, omnichannel experiences. Omnichannel unifies inbound and outbound communications to deliver proactive, contextual interactions to your customers—seamlessly. Customers get personalized engagements across all channels throughout their entire customer journey. And customers, agents, and reps can shift between channels without losing context. Your business can expertly design, launch and monitor even the most complex customer journeys using routing to automatically deliver interactions to the best available resource.

But here’s the secret: Not all cloud contact centers are created equal or omnichannel. While many vendors have adopted the term “omnichannel” to describe their solutions, the technology underneath is still multichannel.

For companies trying to evolve their customer experience with legacy multichannel systems, the struggle is real. According to the Dimension Data 2019 Global CX Benchmarking Report, 58.5% of businesses said channels are managed in silos. And 44.3% said multiple channel adoption is “too difficult” without “a single view of all touchpoints.”

If you’re looking to gain omnichannel capabilities, and you need a technology upgrade or migration to do so, there are four ways to identify a true omnichannel cloud contact center platform.

  1. One routing engine to rule them all: A single, native and intelligent routing engine handles all channels, modes, and media and can move context with a conversation.
  2. Built-in workforce optimization (WFO) capabilities: A single routing engine and native WFO on the same cloud platform enable accurate and consistent agent scheduling and performance management across all channels.
  3. Single-agent desktop/workspace: A common, intuitive agent desktop empowers agents by serving up everything they need in one place.
  4. Single source of truth: With everything on the same platform, you can trust the reliability of your data for reporting, dashboards, and analytics.

Omnichannel Benefits

  • Overcomes limitations on customer experience and impacts on business operations from integration issues.
  • Drives down TCO by reducing integration and other related IT costs.
  • Changes the work lives of the agents. Empowered with new technology, agents are better equipped to create a true relationship with each customer. When agents have a vested interest in the customer experience, engagement skyrockets.
  • Repositions the contact center from supporting individual customer transactions to supporting each customer’s end-to-end journey; the contact center moves from a cost center to a revenue generator.
  • Creates a better and differentiated customer experience that translates to increased customer satisfaction, spend and loyalty.

“This is the best contact center I could have imagined. We’ve been ranked the number one Vodafone contact center worldwide. And with the new innovative channels we’ve developed, we know there’s a lot more to come.”

Jörg Knoop, Head of Contact Center and Telesales Capability, Vodafone Germany

 Learn more about the best options for omnichannel cloud contact center platforms in our eBook.

Follow our CX Migration Secrets blog series here and attend the upcoming webinar CX Migration Secrets revealed.