BPOs opting to provide omnichannel customer experience

Digital technologies are disrupting communication models like never before. New products and solutions are changing at such a rapid pace that many times it is baffling to comprehend the transformations taking place. With increasing use of social media, mobile chats, instant messaging and multiple forums to voice concerns and complaints from customers, businesses cannot exist and prosper without a fully functional omnichannel contact centre. 

Millennial customers may start looking for a product online, rave about it on social media and finally choose to buy at a store. They expect a seamless, relevant and personalised experience across all channels of communication. At the same time, businesses globally are influenced by consumer behaviour, feedback and opinion. So it is important for them to ensure customer loyalty and reduce churn. 

This has triggered a shift from being channel focussed to creating an ecosystem where channels become irrelevant and only customer experience in entirety matters. Omnichannel is thus becoming a prerequisite for all contact centres to survive and thrive in a world where customer interactions are at a maximum. As a result, BPO providers are morphing into omnichannel contact centres with a wide arsenal of communication tools. 

Essentially, omnichannel handles customer communications across numerous channels such as voice, SMS, web, email, social, chat and fax. To manage all these interactions requires immense use of data and analytics derived from it. A modern contact centre can gain profound insights into people behaviour and the way their sentiments are shaping up. Thus, this makes an easy way to develop better products and services for consumers.

A recent report by Aberdeen Group suggests that companies with strong omnichannel customer engagement strategies in place see a 9.5 per cent year-on-year increase in annual revenue compared to 3.4 per cent for those with weak similar capabilities. Also, strong omnichannel companies see a 7.5 per cent year-on-year decrease in cost per contact compared to 0.2 per cent decrease for weak omnichannel companies.   

BPOs handle a great deal of data on transactions, sales, processing and customers by leveraging customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning systems. With an omnichannel strategy at play, the providers can gather real-time data on communication channels and sentiment of the customer when interacting using text analytics which uses algorithmic approaches and natural language processing methods. 

They can then make use of this data to conduct data analysis to determine key process indicators and monitor the flaws encountered in a specific communication channel. The key success factor of BPO providers wanting to improve their partners’ customer experience is the ability to manage multiple channels as a stand-alone activity by eliminating the archaic model of siloed communication, and train personnel to manage such interactions seamlessly. 

This is made possible by investing in a contact centre software that is capable of delivering a true omnichannel experience which customers demand. Since a significant number of calls start pouring in during the first month after purchasing a product, having access to insights fosters the net promoter score along with increasing first call resolution. 

An omnichannel contact centre also includes real time communication with customers over the web. With the help of web real time communications (WebRTC), agents can carry out voice calling, video chat and file sharing with customers on their systems. WebRTC supports browser-to-browser application without the use of external or internal plugins. 

So customer service is no longer restricted to a phone. Customer calls are routed through a company’s interactive voice response system and transferred to the rep’s web browser. This trend is likely to continue and be commonplace in 2016. Providing this form of customer support in an omnichannel contact centre setup certainly goes a long way to ensure customer loyalty and higher retention. 

An omnichannel analytics web platform is made available to supervisors, managers and key stakeholders in a secure setting. They can interact with the application and know the pulse of what is going on in their business and how to improve it. This is very different than the traditional approach where research and technology teams found something interesting and then went about sharing it. 

New technologies now capture and process the data in near real time. Large amounts of data are crunched to get to decisions in a matter of minutes, and ultimately even seconds. Omnichannel analytics helps the social teams improve their current approach to online customer care. It helps them identify and solve issues much faster because they have all the analytics they need right at their fingertips. 

Artificial intelligence and machine learning allow companies to even predict events before they happen and act more proactively to best serve the customers. It allows companies to not only identify what happened, but to know why it happened and what the best approach is to solve it the first time.

Authored by: Bishal Lachhiramka, CEO and co-founder, Ameyo