Omnichannel customer experience

Most consumers expect a consistent experience when they contact businesses, whether it’s through phone calls, text messaging, or social media channels like WhatsApp.

But with so many different touchpoints and service channels, it can be hard for customer service agents to pull past conversations and data from all these sources quickly enough to answer questions in real time.

So, how can businesses organise all this data and provide truly omnichannel customer service—and a better overall customer experience?

What is an omnichannel customer experience?

An omnichannel customer experience is when customers (and prospects) reach out to a company or organisation and receive seamless service across a variety of different channels.

That seamlessness is the key difference between a “multichannel” and “omnichannel” experience. With multichannel, even though you may be providing customer experience across different communication channels, you aren’t necessarily carrying that context through all those channels.

That means an agent who manages social media messages will not see contextual information about past conversations in other channels—they’ll only see information about past conversations in this social media channel they’re currently managing.

With omnichannel experiences, on the other hand, that agent who’s managing social media is able to see all past conversational context with a customer. That allows them to understand the full scope of the customer’s inquiry and find answers more quickly.

You do need the right tools and contact centre platform to achieve this, but an omnichannel customer experience is by far more advantageous for businesses and organisations today.

Dialpad: A robust, AI-powered omnichannel customer experience solution

What types of features does Dialpad come with to help you provide an excellent omnichannel customer experience? Here are a few.

The benefits of being able to provide an omnichannel customer experience

There are many omnichannel customer experience benefits, for your own business as well as for your customers. Here is just a small selection:

It makes it easier to meet customer needs

It used to be that “customer interactions” meant either an in-store visit, a phone call, or an email. Not anymore. Customer expectations are getting higher and higher. They’re reaching out to businesses through various channels and expecting (seemingly) shorter and shorter response times.

Call centres have transformed into contact centres. All because businesses have realised that if they’re not on their customers’ preferred channels, it directly affects the customer experience—and can lead to lost business.

If you do it well, though, creating an omnichannel customer experience can help you become truly customer-centric, improve customer retention, and ultimately, boost your bottom line.

It gives you access to much more conversational and customer data

On a related note, because customer journeys have taken on so many new forms, it’s also become much harder to keep track of (and organise) customer data.

Can you easily monitor metrics in real time? Can you see which communication channels your customers are using the most when they try to reach you?

If you’re able to harness all that data, you’ll have an incredibly useful source of insights and firsthand feedback that will help you improve your products and your customer experience.

Having a truly unified communications platform isn’t just more convenient (which is the most cited benefit you’ll see), it also removes data silos. When you’re managing one tool instead of four or five different tools, you know that all your customer data is in that one place. No digging around in different windows and accounts to find out what that customer said two weeks ago.

It improves your brand reputation

This one sounds fluffy, but omnichannel customer experience is now an expectation in many industries. That means if your customer support or contact centre can’t keep up with those expectations, you’ll probably start seeing it talked about in channels you can’t control.

Customer reviews. Online communities. Reddit.

Being able to provide a seamless brand experience that doesn’t make people repeat their account information every time they get transferred, that helps support agents find answers quickly—this is no longer a “nice-to-have.” It’s a must for many businesses today.

How to improve omnichannel customer experience: 5 strategies to implement

Now that we’ve looked at what features to look for in an omnichannel customer experience platform, it’s time to move on to some concrete strategies and ways to improve omnichannel customer experience:

1. Monitor your metrics regularly

How is your support team’s response times on different channels like social media and phone calls? What are your latest CSAT (customer satisfaction) scores?

Ideally, you’ll be able to easily access both real-time and post-call metrics without having to jump through too many hoops.

2. Have self-service options…

Whether you’re running an ecommerce contact centre or a regional airline call centre, it’s highly likely that most of the questions your reps get on a daily basis are very simple or straightforward requests.

You know, the type that can be handled by a chatbot. Unless you have unlimited funds to hire a huge support team, this is a great opportunity to be more efficient with how you handle those inquiries.

Use a platform like Dialpad Ai Contact Centre that has self-service functionality—as a starting point, you can look for common questions that come up repeatedly and create dialogue flows to answer them.

3. ... But don’t make it impossible for someone to escalate to a support agent

That being said, the goal isn’t to completely remove humans from your customer experience. Most people don’t like that. It’s also a big reason why chatbots have gotten such a bad rap. You have to recognise that not every single question or issue can be resolved through self-service.

Make sure your chatbot flows include an option for customers (or potential customers) to reach a human—as painlessly as possible.

4. Make sure your customer support agents are on the channels that your customers are on

This is sometimes an overlooked part of putting together omnichannel customer service and support strategies, but your contact centre agents shouldn’t be on every single channel.

They should be on every channel your customers are on. After all, if your customers don’t ever use social media or SMS text messaging to reach out to you and only ever use phone calls, then hiring a social media manager to manage digital channels would probably end up being a waste of money.

On the other hand, if you’re a dentist in a neighbourhood of young families and you know that your clients are glued to their mobile devices, it’s probably a good idea to send them, say, appointment reminders and other notifications via SMS text messaging.

Fun fact: With Dialpad, you can send SMS messages to clients or prospects from the same desktop or mobile app you use to make phone calls and have video meetings:

5. Empower your support team

Agent churn is one of the biggest challenges that every contact centre faces. Apart from gamification and engagement tactics, how are you empowering your support agents or contact centre agents to do their best work while minimising the repetitive low-value tasks that take up large chunks of their day?

Omnichannel customer experience examples

Hopefully, the omnichannel customer experience tips we shared above have given you some inspiration. Sometimes, though, it helps to see some real-life examples to really get your creative juices flowing.

Here are a trio of brands from around the world who have nailed their omnichannel customer experience strategies:

BPI

Portuguese bank, BPI, recently took the decision to transform its service offerings to customers.

Recognizing the trend in the banking industry away from in-branch interactions, BPI switched their focus to offering a unified digital service.

The bank developed a home banking portal and a mobile banking app to help customers achieve more without having to visit a branch in person. Crucially, too, they ensured that the portal and app shared the same UX ensuring a consistent and seamless experience across channels.

Knock Out Recruiting

Knock Out Recruiting specialises in recruitment for the insurance industry. That means that communication both with their clients and with candidates for those clients is crucial.

By adopting Dialpad's customer engagement platform, Knockout Recruiting has been able to make it seamless for their remote staff to interact with clients and candidates over multiple channels. Or, in other words, to deliver omnichannel experiences.

While many interactions are still handled over the phone, Knockout also makes it easy for candidates to reach them by SMS. Or, as Executive Director Amanda Springer puts it:

“Our applicants who apply for positions can just shoot us a text—most people today prefer texting anyway,, and if they get sick or can’t make it to an interview, they can just text us and we’ll reschedule them quickly. It takes 30 seconds, and that way we’re not losing the appointment, and it makes the client happy too because there are fewer no-shows.”

Timberland

Well-known outdoor clothing brand Timberland are strong advocates of omnichannel experiences in the retail sector.

The company combines omnichannel principles—particularly linking in-person and digital interactions—with the adoption of cutting-edge technology to provide shoppers with personalised, streamlined experiences.

When visiting a store, Timberland customers get a tablet for interacting with Near Field Communication (NFC) technology enabled products. That lets them simply tap a product to receive extra information, recommendations, and more on the tablet.

As well as providing that self-service source of information, the tablet also gives customers the chance to create emailable wish lists. Thus, they can experience products in person, then easily complete purchases online at their convenience. A great example of a seamless connection of channels to produce a holistic omnichannel customer experience.

An omnichannel customer experience doesn’t have to be complicated

Want to provide a more personalised experience for your customers across not only digital channels but also voice and video?

With Dialpad's AI-powered customer engagement platform, you can do that—along with communicating internally with your team—in a single, intuitively designed app.

Try it for yourself!