What is Omnichannel Customer Service?
Omnichannel customer service refers to a consumer's ability to get assistance from a business in multiple channels (ex., phone, chat, and mobile app), receive a consistent experience in each channel, and be able to seamlessly move across channels during their customer journey. With the proliferation of digital services, it's not unusual for today's consumers to use multiple support channels, often within the same transaction. For example, a customer with an issue might seek help in an online chat session and midway through decide he wants to talk with an agent over the phone.
In the past, this scenario would have meant starting from scratch with the phone agent, who wouldn't have access to the chat transcript. The customer would have to repeat everything they had just told the chat agent, making for a bad customer experience. Omnichannel customer service solves this problem. In an omnichannel customer service scenario, the phone agent will have access to the chat transcript and might even be the same person the customer was chatting with.
Our research shows that 91% of consumers expect businesses to deliver omnichannel customer service, however only 24% of organizations rate themselves "excellent" at delivering it. This reflects the difficulty and complexity of providing true omnichannel customer service. It requires revamping processes and systems company-wide. Within contact centers it means, for example, having an automatic call distributor (ACD) capable of intelligently routing interactions regardless of channel, arming multi-skilled agents with an interface that supports true omnichannel, and workforce management solutions that can forecast and staff for multiple channels.
Investing in omnichannel customer service capabilities is becoming imperative in order to meet customer expectations. Businesses that make this a priority will be well-prepared to compete in the experience economy.
How NICE can help
We provide the tools businesses rely on to deliver omnichannel customer service.
NICE CXone is the market leading contact center software in use by thousands of customers of all sizes around the world to help them consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences. CXone is a cloud native, unified suite of applications designed to help a company holistically run its contact center operations. CXone includes:
Omnichannel Routing – routing and interaction management that empowers agents to positively and productively interact with customers in digital and voice channels and to deliver the omnichannel customer service consumers expect. These solutions include an automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), interaction channel support and proactive outbound dialer.
Workforce Optimization – unlocks the potential of your team by inspiring employees' self-improvement, amplifying quality management efforts to enhance customer experience and reducing labor waste. These solutions include workforce management (WFM), quality management (QM), recording and performance management (PM).
Open Cloud Foundation – enables rapid innovation with an extensible enterprise-grade platform that scales securely, deploys quickly and serves customers of all sizes globally. We guarantee an industry-best 99.99% availability and offer easy customization through RESTful APIs and DEVone developer program.
CXone also includes pre-defined CRM integrations and UCaaS integrations with most leading solutions on the market. These integrations provide a holistic contact center software solution capable of elevating customer experiences for companies of all sizes.