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Everything you need to know about an omnichannel contact center

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The Team at CallMiner

August 28, 2023

Omnichannel contact center customer experience
Omnichannel contact center customer experience

An omnichannel contact center synchronizes customer conversations across multiple channels, including email, phone calls, and social media. By implementing an omnichannel strategy, organizations can ensure they meet their customers wherever they are to gather important feedback that shapes products and services.

Understanding Omnichannel Customer Experience: Analyzing Every Touchpoint
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Understanding Omnichannel CX: Analyzing Every Customer Touchpoint
Learn how to connect the dots of your customer interactions across channels
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Read this blog to learn:

  • What is an omnichannel contact center?
  • What does an omnichannel contact center do?
  • Creating an omnichannel contact center strategy
  • How CallMiner is transforming the omnichannel contact center experience
  • Frequently asked questions

What is an omnichannel contact center?

An omnichannel contact center tracks customer interactions across multiple channels. Omnichannel contact center software acts as a hub between those channels, allowing customer service agents to respond to customers efficiently.

Although phone calls are typically thought of as the primary form of customer contact, today’s customer conversations are broadly scattered between live chats, emails, Facebook messages, Tweets, and more. Omnichannel contact center software pulls conversations and feedback from all the channels a business’s customers use to give customer service representatives and decision-makers the information they need to improve customer experience.

What does an omnichannel contact center do?

Omnichannel contact centers take on multiple responsibilities, but the following are their primary tasks that allow businesses to serve their customers better.

Collects and organizes data in one place

Feedback collection is the bread and butter of an omnichannel contact center. From pulling tweets mentioning the company’s name to curating emails and live chat transcripts into a customer service representative’s inbox, omnichannel contact center software brings customer contacts into one place.

Furthermore, feedback gets categorized and organized according to the business’s needs. The best omnichannel contact center software offers plenty of rules and tagging systems for initial setup while continuing to learn the organization’s routine to automate future categorization.

Automates tasks to save time

In addition to automating the customer feedback organization process, omnichannel contact center software completes other tasks automatically. For example, it can identify when customers are at risk of turning away from the company based on sentiment analysis data and alert agents immediately to the problem. It can also remove sensitive data from customer conversations and evaluate agent performance during customer contact via any channel.

Identifies and analyzes problem areas

The overarching responsibility of an omnichannel contact center is to identify customer experience problem areas. As such, omnichannel contact center software has multiple ways of doing this, including:

  • Tracking customer interactions and behaviors across channels to map typical customer journeys and drop-off points
  • Converting customer conversations into actionable insights based on what customers say they want and need
  • Analyzing speech to determine positive and negative sentiment and emotion in customer conversations
  • Identifying patterns in customer conversations across all channels

Creating an omnichannel contact center strategy

Customers want and need to be heard by the businesses they choose to spend their money on. According to Softtek, an omnichannel customer strategy can help retain about 89% of customers. Launching an omnichannel contact center strategy starts with these three steps:

1. Choose the right contact center software

Omnichannel contact center software is what will ultimately help you manage customer interactions, gather insights from customers, and map customer touchpoints. It’s crucial to feel connected to the software you choose by finding one that best meets the needs of your company, its agents, and its customers.

Specifically, look for software with conversation analytics, detailed reporting, agent monitoring, and automated organization.

2. Map customer journeys

Customer journey mapping explains what customers do as they explore and interact with your brand. By learning the typical journey your customers take across your brand, you can offer help at various touchpoints to ensure that you give them what they need each step of the way.

3. Train and support agents

Call center agents should be trained on and off your contact center software to quickly and effectively assist customers. They also need the right supports from management, including training, meetings, feedback, and supportive software, to continue improving.

The right contact center software intelligently tracks and evaluates conversations to give agents productive feedback, like in-call guidance and immediate call metrics.

How CallMiner is transforming the omnichannel contact center experience

CallMiner delivers an omnichannel customer experience via our CallMiner conversation analytics platform. The AI-powered platform tracks customer conversations, highlights areas for improvement, and brings data to life through visualization tools that benefit agents and management. With CallMiner’s software integrated into your system, you can monitor every customer channel, adding agents and self-help options at critical points throughout the customer journey.

Frequently asked questions

What’s the difference between a multichannel and omnichannel contact center?

A multichannel contact center monitors and uses information from each customer channel separately, while an omnichannel contact center blends that information together to paint a more accurate portrait of overall customer interactions. Additionally, omnichannel agents are trained to handle interactions from multiple platforms.

What is an example of omnichannel customer service?

Suppose a customer published a post on Twitter about an issue they had with Company A’s product. A representative from Company A reaches out to the customer via Twitter DM and asks the customer to call a supervisor’s direct phone line.

The customer does, and the supervisor offers a solution the customer accepts. The next day, an agent follows up with the customer via email to ensure their satisfaction.

What is the best omnichannel contact center software?

The best omnichannel contact center software seamlessly connects agents to customers on every platform they use for interaction while tracking the customer’s journey with the company. The CallMiner platform is among the best options for omnichannel contact centers, gathering customer insights and providing detailed feedback to assist companies in meeting their customers’ needs.

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