Omnichannel Analytics 101
If you are selling any type of communications solution in 2024, you have probably heard of omnichannel. More than a buzzword, omnichannel is one of the key elements to taking your solution into a future that will continue to focus more and more on customer and employee experiences.
What is Omnichannel?
Omnichannel combines several modes of communication, like voice, SMS, live chat, social media, and more, into one seamless solution. This allows buyers and customers to contact businesses in more convenient ways and empowers businesses to deliver a more personalized customer experience.
Omnichannel solutions organize all of these modes of communication into one synergized interface for maximum efficiency, offering new insights into communicating behaviors.
Benefits of omnichannel analytics
Of course there are many benefits to adopting omnichannel solutions, but today we are going to focus on the power of omnichannel analytics.
An omnichannel solution compiles data and reports on customer interactions across all touchpoints, giving both a big picture view and very detailed insights. Different teams within a company can take that raw data to further analyze and draw conclusions about how they can achieve:
- Personalized customer interactions
- Efficient resource allocation
- Seamless ongoing conversations
- Better understanding of target audiences
- Proactive conversations with customers
- Higher conversion rates
- Transparency and accountability
As you can see, the actions that can be taken based on information from an omnichannel solution is varied and wide-reaching, useful for all of the departments and teams of a business.
A real-life example
Bicom Systems’ Contact Center product is omnichannel-enabled with detailed analytics options to support different departments in prioritizing the customer experience, driving conversions, and setting goals for future growth. Contact Center supports voice, SMS, live chat, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp.
Contact Center PBX offers detailed individual and blended reports. For example, our Conversations Overview feature compiles all of the communications from different touchpoints into one intuitive interface with information about status and transcripts or recordings.
Keep reading to learn more about our omnichannel solution and how to use analytics to grow your business.
How to Use Omnichannel Analytics Across Departments
Collaboration between teams and departments is vital to the health and success of any business. Below we will discuss how five different teams can utilize and share data from omnichannel solutions to pursue customer-centricity, operational efficiencies, and business growth.
Sales Team
One of the most obvious benefactors of visibility into customer communications is the sales team. Intent on starting conversations and making sales, this department needs information related to availability and customer likes and dislikes.
One of the main challenges for sales teams is simply getting prospects on the phone. Once conversations are ongoing, they must focus on being personable and remembering details about each contact.
Analytics from an omnichannel solution can reveal trends in communication availability, such as what time of the month buyers are more likely to make a purchase or what time of the day they are more likely to pick up the phone.
Our Conversations Overview module organizes all communications from all touchpoints into one easily accessible interface. Sales agents will find this useful to quickly remind themselves of previous conversations, pain points, and personal details.
As conversations from various touchpoints are compiled into blended reports, feature requests may stand out. The sales team can pass that information along to the product development team to consider for the next release.
Marketing Team
While the sales team is focused on personal conversations with individuals, the marketing team must launch campaigns that appear personal and relevant to larger audiences. To do this, marketing teams need to be fully informed about their target audience and its pain points, desires, and nuances.
An understanding of where and how the target audience is communicating with your business enables the marketing team to deliver better placed campaigns that will grab the attention of their audience.
Ready-made reports and conversation overviews make it easier for the sales team to share information with the marketing team, knocking down traditional barriers and data silos.
Customer Success Team
Some businesses, like ourselves at Bicom Systems, go beyond sales and marketing teams to have a Customer Success team that is dedicated to the ongoing support of committed partners. This department focuses on proactively communicating with customers to identify issues before they arise and address emerging needs.
As such, detailed reports on communication habits will support this department as it seeks to maintain ongoing conversations and positive relationships. Similar to the sales team, the customer success department can use key information to know when to contact customers.
Our contact center solution supports scheduled reports that can be delivered at predefined intervals in a variety of formats. These serve as a reminder to check in with customers, giving a quick glimpse at their conversation history so effective communication can continue.
Human Resources (HR)
The Human Resources (HR) department has a hefty responsibility to empower incoming team members while also supporting existing employees however needed. While HR has less interest in customer communication, they can benefit from the same omnichannel system for interviews, training, and internal communications.
Agent statistics reports will provide key information to HR in the face of any concerns or disputes. These detailed reports reveal how agents spend their time, including active and idle time, pauses and breaks, and conversions. This is useful in analyzing performance and measuring workload distributions.
The Human Resources team can even utilize the omnichannel solution themselves during the recruitment and interview process. The detailed reports and Conversation Overview module will give them an easy way to track their contacts and identify the best ways to seek out new team members.
Management
Finally, the management team is responsible for making decisions and setting goals to pursue ongoing growth and improvement. One major hurdle faced by management teams is a lack of transparency and visibility into the work that their teams are doing. This lack of information holds them back from making informed decisions to increase efficiency and better use their teams and resources.
But with omnichannel, decision-makers can view detailed reports or watch real-time dashboards for full visibility into their organization’s productivity. As with the customer success team, scheduled reports can place important insights right in front of decision makers without them having to seek it out.
Detailed queue statistics can give management an idea of the daily activity going on around them, including the number of conversations happening per queue during a given time, response times, and more.
Collaboration Across Departments
As important as each of these teams using information individually to their advantage, is their using it in collaboration with one another to pursue common goals and steps toward growth.
Detailed reports and synergized interfaces make it easy to share information from department to department, preventing data silos and ruptures in communication. Especially when related to customers, it is important for communications to be seamless and interconnected across departments.
For customer-facing departments, it is vital that all teams are on the same wavelength to ensure brand consistency and ongoing customer loyalty.
We all know the frustration of calling a business, explaining our question or concern, only to be passed around and forced to re-explain to each new person. Omnichannel is the key to ending that disconnect and ensuring a more positive, consistent customer experience.
Finally, as management is viewing the same insights as the rest of the company, decisions will be transparent and more efficient. Shared goals can be reached together and a friendly competitive spirit as the results are tracked by a real-time dashboard will encourage productivity.
Getting Started with Omnichannel
Omnichannel solutions and their extremely detailed reporting capabilities are the key to prioritizing customers and making businesses as efficient and productive as possible. By giving key insights to the right teams and collaborating to reach common goals, the whole company grows together and customers enjoy an overall positive experience.
If you would like to learn more about omnichannel and our Contact Center solution, we have resources available for you:
- Our recent webinar on How to Use Omnichannel to Add Value to Your Business is now available on-demand. Watch the recording to get behind-the-scenes details on our solution and hear from a Bicom Systems partner that has been successfully using and selling an omnichannel solution. Watch the webinar recording now.
- Our blog post, Omnichannel: How Contact Center Mastered This Strategy, explores the details and benefits of a modern omnichannel solution. Read the blog post now.
- Or check out the Contact Center Release Notes for all of the product details and features. Download the release notes now.
Ready to get started? Contact us today to share your story and discover how omnichannel could make your business more customer-centric and efficient.