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BEST PRACTICES & STRATEGIES

How to modernize your

omnichannel strategy

In the whitepaper Think your business offers an
omnichannel experience? Think again!, its
author Audrey William, Principal Advisor of
ecosystm, explains why it is so crucial for
businesses to engage with customers across
multiple digital channels and be “proactive”
instead of ‘’reactive’’ when trying to be
omnipresent.

When you are running a contact center in “reactive”
mode, you are attending to problems only when they
occur, she explains. Unfortunately, that’s just what most
contact centers do today. You are not thinking ahead
and evaluating what might has gone wrong in the cus- 4. Assess cost savings from having an omnichannel
tomer journeys and how you could have alerted the platform and the cost efficiencies of different timesaving
customer along the way. features for your agents (e.g., automation, CRM inte-
grations, etc.).
“It is also likely that you are not analyzing the data and
seeing how to make best sense of the data to engage 5. Investigate the possibility of having a central data
better with your customers”, Audrey continues, high- repository and not storing data on vendors’ clouds.
lighting that serving customers in a reactive mode, will
certainly have an impact on revenue opportunities. 6. Ensure that interactions across all channels are au-
tomated, so you do not have to rebuild interaction
To deliver that proactive customer experience (CX), flows, increasing operational efficiency.
contact centers need to have the ability to predict the
customer’s next move and/or send pre-emptive notifica- 7. Take advantage of self-service analytics. The data
tions before problems occur. When you start doing that, will give you full visibility into how customers move
you are getting ahead in understanding how to deepen through the multiple self-service journeys.
the customer engagement.
8. Continuously run testing on every single channel
Finally, she gives the following ten useful recommenda- rigorously and make sure all your channels are syn-
tions on how to modernize your omnichannel strategy: chronized. You must not revert to a multi-channel mode
when there is an issue.
1. Perform a thorough review of how many solutions
you are using in your contact center and look at areas 9. Re-define your contact center KPIs. For example,
where there are overlaps. Some systems might be re- your AHT metric might need to be adjusted to be realis-
dundant. tic for an asynchronous mode of communication.

2. Assess which vendors you are using for chat, social, 10. Train your agents about the new changes as you
chatbots, email, voice, and messaging to understand if go through a complete overhaul towards omnichannel
this can be merged into a single location. modernization. Help them adapt to the new changes so
there will be minimal disruption. ◊
3. Get feedback from customers about their channels of
preferences. You may be surprised to find that some of By MediaBUZZ
your customers prefer channels that you do not offer.

August 2021: Omnichannel Marketing 15