Omnichannel is Here: The Case for a Digital Contact Center

It’s time to open the possibilities of your contact center with an omnichannel approach

Many of us rely on GPS navigation while driving to avoid getting lost on our way to a destination. However, a good GPS isn’t static; it will offer up alternate routes depending on things like traffic and road closures. Essentially, it knows that there is never just one way to get somewhere and it adjusts its strategy accordingly.

In the same way, customers choose to use different channels to meet specific needs they have (conflict avoidance, convenience, speed/immediacy, etc.), just like GPS systems offer different routes to meet specific needs (e.g., convenience, fastest route, avoid tolls, etc.). With companies increasingly adopting this omnichannel approach, new levels of importance are now placed on the contact center’s ability to analyze the data coming from all of those channels in one comprehensive package. By doing so, the contact center can go beyond traditional interaction—it can truly gain a holistic view of their customers and become one of the most effective customer engagement tools in a company’s arsenal.

Given the breadth of modern technology, it only makes sense that customers are interacting with companies using the same channels they use for personal purposes—and that doesn’t always include the telephone. It has evolved to include email, social media and text messaging, so now companies can analyze data from multiple avenues to understand customer behavior.

However, if a contact center looks at each channel’s data in a silo, in turn, the organization has no choice but to look at the contact center’s fragmented data in a silo. If both the contact center and the larger organization continue to take the silo approach, they will miss valuable insights that can drive customer engagement strategies. By failing to make adjustments and changes based on those insights, they risk poor interaction with customers and, ultimately customer churn.

If a contact center can integrate data from all aspects of the omnichannel approach, then the company as a whole has the opportunity to treat the contact center as another step on the customer journey. Post-sale data will affect pre-sale strategies, and the contact center can adjust its efforts by using the most comprehensive view available of customer engagement data. This will then cement the contact center’s importance to the overall organization, not just to the post-sale customer relationship. As more and more data is collected and analyzed, the contact center will become increasingly critical to a brand’s overarching strategy.

While analyzing multiple avenues of communication is a great starting approach for the contact center, it’s not the end of the journey. The important part is analyzing that data across those channels to develop a complete view of the customer—and then rolling those findings up to the greater organization. Not only does this allow the contact center to better understand the customer, it allows the brand to make more informed decisions. By building on their existing omnichannel strategies to include a cumulative view of customer data, the contact center can be more efficient, responsive and accountable. Then, just like a good GPS, a company can adjust and improve strategies while providing the best methods possible for a customer to continue along the journey.

Matt Matsui

Matt Matsui, Chief Product Officer, oversees Calabrio’s companywide product efforts. Matt joined Calabrio with more than 25 years of experience leading product and marketing organizations for a broad range of companies, including ACNielsen, Cognos, Andersen Consulting, and numerous early-stage analytics firms. Through this experience, Matt developed a keen sense for growing markets with a heavy emphasis on big data, AI/ML, and applied analytics. Matt’s proficiency is bringing to market scalable and flexible enterprise SaaS solutions that leverage the power of analytics in simple and powerful ways. He holds undergraduate degrees from the University of Maryland, a master’s degree from Northwestern University, and a master’s degree in Applied Psychology from the University of Southern California.