This month, we are exploring and explaining the many ways that omnichannel communication can improve overall customer experience and customer loyalty.
With customer behaviour constantly evolving and becoming harder to predict, omnichannel communication software is helping many businesses get closer to customers, understand their needs and ultimately improve business reputation.
Click here to read part one in this blog series.
For part two of this series, we are going to explore the nitty gritty of how omnichannel software can provide crucial insights, improve engagement processes and increase customer satisfaction rates.
Improved visibility of SLAs
The key to effective customer service and sales is knowing what your customer or client wants.
By knowing what your customers expect when communicating with your business, your teams can effectively plan customer engagements to deliver a more personalised service and improve satisfaction rates.
When working with new B2B clients, many contact centre/customer service providers will establish service-level agreements (SLAs) with clients to define the exact parameters and service they can expect. But how does this work practically and what is the benefit to a brand?
A solid case for SLAs is seen in the business travel industry. For companies that provide business travel booking services, many will define SLAs when pitching to a new client; e.g. “we will book all business travel for you, answer every call within the first 5 rings and confirm each new booking within an hour”.
By defining and agreeing on these three specific SLAs, the client knows what level of service to expect and the business travel provider knows which SLAs to measure and shape their team performance against.
When using omnichannel platforms, customer service providers can maximise the visibility and usefulness of these SLAs to improve team performance. For example, when working in Connex One, managers can prioritise specific customer engagements based on SLAs and use SLA prioritisation features to ensure agents handle the most urgent tasks first and adhere to the parameters of each agreement.
Example: A client interaction in Connex One marked with an SLA indicator, showing the agent how long they have left to respond and the expected time for the resolution of this interaction.
Not only does the visibility of SLAs bring more order to the prioritisation and handling of engagements, it also helps to improve the level of satisfaction among clients.
With the ability to provide performance reports, customer service teams can measure how often SLAs are met or exceeded. By giving viability on SLA practices, businesses can clearly demonstrate cost savings for their clients and create open, transparent ongoing relationships with them.
If more customer service providers were to harness and increase the visibility of SLAs across their teams, they would also be able to improve their brand reputation by providing exemplary service and increasing satisfaction rates across their customer or client base.
Creating applicable insights from AI
In today’s business landscape, customer’s expectations for quality of service are high, with many basing their purchases or subscriptions on how they ‘feel’ about a business rather than the product or service specifications.
With meeting the demands of customers becoming a huge priority for businesses, the importance of ‘finer details’ and seemingly smaller processes are amplified by customer expectation and cannot be left behind.
From the perspective of customer service businesses and their agents, this presents even more details to keep track of and adds even more steps to the process of delivering satisfying customer service. So how do businesses handle this increased scrutiny and pressure? They turn to Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Artificial intelligence and automation are on the rise across most sectors, with chatbots and IVR handling many customer interactions on behalf of businesses/agents to reduce workloads and improve efficiency.
However, many customer service businesses and contact centres are still new to the concept of AI and measurable ways it can improve their overall service and reputation with customers.
For example, when handling customer interactions through Connex One, clients use our AI features to provide IVR calls or livechat chatbot engagements to customers.
Our built-in AI then reports on the data collected from these automated interactions, allowing the client to analyse where customers are dropping off or exiting in these engagements and utilise this information to improve their Live Chat or IVR scripts for better customer interactions.
But AI isn’t just for automated processes. Features such as speech analytics and sentiment analysis can be applied to customer agent calls; with AI automatically capturing the the language and tone used by both agent and customer, which is then analysed by AI to produce data and reports on what aspects of the conversation were displeasing to the customer and what they responded positively to.
These insights can then be stored and synched with CRMs, adding them to customer records and profiles. This can provide full context for agents on how to best handle engagements with each customer, and provide indication on the type of service or engagement that will result in a successful interaction.
Automated insights such as this are absolutely crucial for businesses, as it removes the guesswork from how to create more satisfying interactions and allows for more careful script-writing or customer engagement training across their teams.
It also removes the pressure of agents trying to analyse the conversations themselves, allowing them to focus on being more proactive and providing a better customer experience through a personalised service.
By arming agents and customer service teams with the features of AI and automation, their processes can become more streamlined and allow them to satisfy more customers based on previous audience insights.
With AI handling such important roles in analysing and refining the customer engagement processes, it is clear how important AI features will be for businesses and improve their brand reputation.
Simplify workforce management
When considering the adoption of omnichannel software, some businesses may feel like an increased amount of communication channels will only complicate their customer engagement strategies, disrupt their existing processes or split focus among teams.
However, omnichannel can actually present more opportunities to improve business processes and streamline team efforts to get the most out of their interactions and improve customer experience.
When using Connex One omnichannel, many of our clients have utilised our system to monitor which team members are the most productive across each channel (e.g. instant messenger, live chat or phone call) and used built-in reports and insights to help shape and improve their overall team management.
For example, if a customer agent consistently receives great feedback or higher levels of positive engagement through live chat, their manager will be able to see this and can then decide to forward more live chat requests to them.
By utilising results and insights when shaping their omnichannel strategy, businesses can make more informed decisions on which agents or teams can best handle particular engagements and delegate them accordingly. This will allow firms to deliver more efficient customer service, achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction and increase the possibility of strengthening their brand reputation.
To feel the full benefits of omnichannel communication, businesses should be prepared for the structural impact it will have on their teams as well as the benefits it will present for their customer engagement strategies.
For more info on how omnichannel can improve your customer communication, check out our omnichannel explainer page.
Or if you would rather witness the benefits yourself, simply get in touch with our sales team to book a free demo or claim your free trial of the Connex One omnichannel engagement system.
