With the aim to keep up with modern standards, Bicom Systems has been hard at work to prepare ourselves for the next step in the communication revolution, omnichannel.
Omnichannel is a more customer-oriented approach that aims to seamlessly unify their experience across communication channels like Live Chat, SMS, email and voice calls, in order to boost their overall satisfaction with the service.
What businesses need are the tools to facilitate that without too much hassle and that is exactly what Contact Center has aimed to provide them with.
APPLY FOR A 60-DAY OMNICHANNEL TRIAL
So let us take a closer look at what this new solution looks like.
What Is Omnichannel?
“A seamless, unified customer experience across multiple channels”
While we have covered the core aspect of omnichannel in the introduction, there is a lot more to this concept than meets the eye.
In telephony specifically, omnichannel is tied to CCs and a CC with omnichannel capabilities represents a unified and seamless customer experience across multiple channels.
In simpler terms, it allows customers to choose their preferred channel of interaction with the business, but allows them to freely switch between other available options with their prior interactions logged per channel.
It helps to provide a smoother experience where the customer will never have to repeat themselves over the same channel, improving agent efficiency and handling time as well as reducing customer frustration.
We here at Bicom Systems have adopted this communication revolution and have implemented omnichannel into our Contact Center offer, using it to modernize our infrastructure to give agents a unified overview of all available communication channels and easier channel swaps, as well as empowering supervisors to do their work directly from the agent panel so they do not have to constantly switch tabs, among other features.
Deliver Omnichannel To Your Customers
Now, this all sounds well and good, but your clients are sure to want a clean and intuitive solution with omnichannel included, one that does not strain the budget and that is not a hassle to integrate into existing infrastructure.
That is where Bicom Systems’ own Contact Center solution comes into play.
Now an omnichannel-capable solution, Contact Center provides businesses with the tools necessary to take advantage of this communication unification and to streamline their customer experience across all channels.
It is outfitted with a freshly refurbished, intuitive UI and a suite of tools to enable both agents and supervisors alike to manage and monitor their communications efficiently without sacrificing on flexibility and is sure to provide your clients with everything they need to keep their services immaculate.
Our developers have spared no expense and have equipped Contact Center with a number of useful tools like:
1. An Updated Agent Interface
In order to better familiarize both agents and supervisors with an omnichannel solution, we have given our interface a little touch-up, focusing on creating an intuitive experience with every tool needed remaining within reach.
The agent panel has been expanded to include all of the new communication channels, now containing Live Chat, SMS, email and voice calls all in one place with agent queues now being separated into either the ‘Voice’, ‘Chats’ or ‘Email’ tabs, allowing for effortless switching between all of them and a much clearer overview, increasing workflow efficiency.
Supervisors have not been left out of the fun either as they can now operate directly from the ‘Agent’ panel without having to switch to ‘Supervisor’ thanks to the added ‘Dashboard’ and ‘Conversations’ tabs.
2. Relieving Agent Pressure With Chatbots
Agents will cheer the inclusion of the Chatbot feature into their everyday work as this tool is aimed at elevating customer support by taking customer queries in and more efficiently routing them to the most appropriate agents to help resolve them, minimizing needless agent transfers which only end up increasing customer frustration.
3. Queue Assignment Strategies
To prevent agent burnout and to assign equal amounts of work among available agents, Contact Center has devised an auto-assignment strategy to enable exactly that.
Utilizing an algorithm that takes a number of factors into account like: agent capacity per channel, their availability, total workload and total unserved time, as well as checking if a request is coming from a returning customer, this strategy assigns the workload in the most optimal manner with the focus of maximizing customer satisfaction and minimizing employee stress.
4. Blended Reporting
Having readable data is always important in every business, and with a new strategy that introduces so many added data sources from new channels, Contact Center has ensured that none of it goes to waste with its updated Statistics section that now offers blended reports for both Agent and Queue Statistics.
All of it is neatly spread out in a comprehensive view of metrics per channel, providing key insights into agent, queue and channel performance respectively.
What makes it even better is the fact that report generation and delivery can now be automated thanks to the power of scheduled reporting.
5. Enhanced Security Options
With a new strategy come new security challenges, but our Contact Center team has accounted for that and has introduced a new Security page to help manage protective measures more easily like being able to proactively block individuals from the service in case their IP address is detected to be part of a DDoS or other form of attack.
Defined users will even be notified about potential security threats via Alert Email in order to improve threat response time.
6. Effortless License Management
With multiple channels coming into play, users need a way to better manage license assignment and release which is why Contact Center has added a Licenses page in order to further streamline the entire process and make resource management that much more efficient.
7. Various QoL Features
Aside from the more major changes that have been made to accommodate an omnichannel approach within Contact Center, the team has made a number of improvements across the board aimed at improving agent efficiency and overall workflow, as well as making Contact Center setup even easier.
Website Live Chat widget setup is now as easy as copying a snippet of code into the site, your clients can now designate operating hours to let their end-users know of agent availability, and their resource management and customer experience has been further improved through First Response Timeout and Chatbot Timeout protocols that streamline the customer queue process.
All of these tools and features come in a neatly wrapped package that integrates seamlessly into their existing infrastructure, is incredibly easy to pick up with a short learning curve, and remains competitively priced with similar market offers.
APPLY FOR A 60-DAY OMNICHANNEL TRIAL
The Benefits Of An Omnichannel Strategy
As businesses are often resistant to change, especially those that have been on single and multichannel strategies before, they may not see the value of such incredible potential that an omnichannel strategy can offer.
You will need to show them what makes it such a drastic upgrade for their business.
This can be relayed over a few key benefits, some of which we have already mentioned:
1. Better Understanding Of Their Customer Base
With the data being gathered through customer interactions, omnichannel strategies allow the business to gain a better grasp on what their average customer wants from them and what key demographic they belong to.
This knowledge is invaluable in today’s business world as it can help more accurately shape future marketing strategies and ensure that they are consistently successful with minimal risk included.
2. Improving Customer Satisfaction And Loyalty
The individually mapped customer journeys will also improve customer satisfaction during their interaction with contact center agents as they will not need to repeat their issues and the agent can better assess their inquiries and resolve them with little to no delay.
Businesses that can consistently deliver this level of service across all channels will not only improve their brand image, but will also help build customer loyalty and boost customer retention numbers.
3. Bringing New Customers Into The Fold
If businesses have a loyal customer base, they are sure to recommend their service to others which will then lead to an influx of new customers over time.
4. Saving Up On Operating Costs
While utilizing a cloud-hosted contact center already helps cut down on operating costs, knowing which channels are performing the best and driving sales through the use of customer insights will help businesses allocate their resources better and see better ROI over time.
Contact Center has laid the foundations for these benefits. Expect to see them fully realized in due course.
The Difference Between A Multichannel Approach Vs. An Omnichannel One
Aside from benefits, it is also worth explaining to clients the difference between older strategies like multichannel, and an omnichannel one.
While a multichannel deployment, in some cases, can cover the same amount of communication channels as an omnichannel one can, the main difference is that it lacks something that the latter has, coordination.
The focus of a multichannel strategy is more on the product itself rather than the customer on which omnichannel strategies focus on.
That is why they do not bother with coordination between their multiple channels as they all work independently and usually provide vastly different customer experiences.
Omnichannel contact centers, as mentioned earlier, instead aim to provide a frictionless experience for their customers by consolidating all customer interactions across their various channels and learning from collected insights.
Keeping Up With Trends
An omnichannel strategy is the current trend in both business and marketing and it would be a shame to not have businesses utilize it to its fullest potential.
Not only does it benefit businesses with better insights into their target audience, allowing for the development of better marketing strategies, but customers win out as well with improved customer engagement that aims to minimize the usual frustrations.
They also get to enjoy a business strategy that focuses on them as the key moving part in a business’s success.
The only thing left is for these businesses to find a platform that can facilitate their omnichannel endeavors at present and in the days to come.
And now, you can provide them with one thanks to Bicom Systems’ Contact Center Omnichannel solution that fulfills a good number of these needs.
It now sports an upgraded design, improved security features, an intuitive overview into agent capacity per channel, and many other quality of life features that streamline agent workflow and help reduce customer handling time like Chatbots and the Auto-assignment strategy.
If you would like to find out more about it, be sure to contact us. We will be happy to answer any of your questions.