7 gaps that need addressing to improve your omnichannel offering
Organisations have been talking about omnichannel for years. The accelerated digital transformation we saw in 2020 has forced businesses to embrace and invest in omnichannel capabilities more than ever before. As we all know, new channels and touch points emerge but old ones don’t disappear. Technology has, and will continue to create, more channels for customers to engage, most recently – video, instant messaging (IM), and voice messaging (VM) platforms.
Customers expect organisations to provide a seamless, cross-channel experience but all too often their expectations far exceed what many businesses can actually deliver. Businesses that can’t provide this type of joined up service are at a real risk of losing customers. So, what are the knowns unknowns that need addressing in your omnichannel strategy ?
7 key gaps for your omnichannel strategy
The following are 7 gaps that you need to fill in order to deliver a successful omnichannel offering:
Silo gaps
Caused by different parts of the organisation having different views of the customer and driven by different KPI’s. You need to start aligning marketing, sales, and service teams with the same access to customer data so they can deliver a better joined up and more personalised customer experience.
Knowledge gaps
Not understanding what your customers really need and the lack of 360º visibility to all of a customer’s history and previous interactions. Fill this gap in and then frontline staff have a comprehensive view of customers, which helps them to create a better customer experience based on contextualised engagement.
Channel gaps
Customers don’t think in channels they think in conversations with companies, so try to close the gaps between physical retail and online customer experience removing the need for customers to repeat the same information to multiple employees or through multiple channels. Closing this gap will enable you to create a customer experience which feels the same to a customer in whichever channel they’re interacting in.
Systems gaps
Legacy systems and the inability for systems to talk to each other and integrate customer information across all channels. This results in advisors losing time switching between multiple system screens to deal with customer enquiries. According to Contact Babel UK Contact Centre Decision Makers Guide 2020-21, contact centres waste £4.33bn per year on the time agents spend navigating between multiple desktop applications. Addressing this gap results in having greater visibility of a customer’s history, reduces advisor frustrations and allows you to respond to customer enquiries more quickly, making them happier and saving you money.
Process gaps
Customers want connected processes, so the lack of tools, along with clumsy or broken processes all impact on the service you can deliver. If you can close this gap, you will decrease costly failure demand and customer frustration
Self-serve – Assisted serve gaps
The inability for customers to easily switch between automated and human engagement if they need additional support. This is all about creating synergy and making it easy to move between self-serve and assisted serve, which is essential for delivering a better experience and delivering against customer’s needs
With self-serve and AI handling most of the simple, straightforward customer enquiries, what is left will be more complex and have a higher emotional component. Therefore, the skills required by frontline staff to deal will these types of enquiries will be very different than they were a few years ago. This has implications on who you recruit and the type of training, coaching and L&D they need. Having these more highly skilled staff in place means they can build better emotional connections with customers and improve the overall experience delivered.
By closing these 7 gaps you will be able to create an omnichannel strategy that adjusts quickly and easily to changes in customer’s expectations and behaviours, giving you a competitive advantage.
