Breaking Down the Silos in Contact Paths to Achieve an Omnichannel Vision

With digitalization, new contact channels emerge, but due to organizational and flow reasons, customers find themselves exerting more effort than on traditional channels. To get their answers through these new paths, they repeat their requests across multiple channels to get a response. This repetition is one of the most frustrating aspects of a poor experience. 71% of customers expect companies to collaborate internally so they don’t have to repeat themselves*. Consequently, customers may prefer the telephone channel, whether or not it’s the most suitable for their query. The Customer Effort Score should be consistent across all journeys; otherwise, customers will favor one path over others.

Companies often manage each channel as a separate project, with dedicated investments and reporting. They usually wish for each channel to handle all types of requests, creating complexity and demanding significant setup and training efforts.

Hence, the customer experience varies depending on the chosen journey and is more or less satisfactory across different channels. For instance, a customer might initially try to find answers directly on a company’s FAQ page. If unsuccessful, they might send an email; without a quick enough response, they might call customer service... This is omnichannel iteration. The risk of losing a customer and unnecessarily increasing the CRC (Customer Relationship Center) workload is high.

Indeed, the right journey is tailor-made to match the initial contact intention. However, failing to qualify this intention beforehand, companies broaden the spectrum, offering choice instead of precision, with the risks of iteration these multiple options entail. Yet, companies have no means to accurately and comprehensively calculate multichannel iteration. This underscores the importance of mutualizing and rationalizing journeys.

To measure iteration effectively, one must first establish a unique contact journey accessible from all channels. This requires three steps: exhaustively listing contact intentions; matching them with solutions; then defining contextualization criteria, such as hours, languages, customer segmentation, waiting times, etc.

Taking a simple contact intention with no added value, like invoice consultation, the most suitable solution often involves directing the customer to an autonomous resolution channel, their personal account. For a more complex intention, like contract subscription, the appropriate solution might involve human resolution during business hours or a callback if the call center is closed.

Once this mapping is completed, the time comes to mutualize the journeys. An omnichannel orchestration platform can then guide customers to the right solution via the most appropriate channel for their contact reason, relying on a knowledge base accessible from all entry points. Thus, using the same solution as the entry point for all contact journeys provides a complete overview, complemented by consolidated reporting of end-to-end journeys (telephony and digital). The collected data allows for successive optimizations of the contact journeys. The steering of these journeys is left in the hands of the business sectors. Companies seeking to optimize their customer journeys often find it a long and costly process that requires significant technical team involvement, i.e., monopolizing time and personnel essential for journey management. This IT dependency hinders the effective mutualization of contact channels. The goal is clear: achieve First Contact Resolution. Besides providing a satisfying customer experience, omnichannel orchestration (Visual IVR) enables substantial savings due to reduced iteration and contact volume.

Going Further: Streamlining and Prioritizing Incoming Contacts via Omnichannel Journey Orchestration

*based on the Zendesk 2020 report on customer experience trends.