contactctrpipe_omni

Smart Insights and Practical Advice for the Contact Center
FEATURE / JUNE 2015
“The contact center has
found itself front and
center in the omnichannel
push.”
p. 4
THE
OMNICHANNEL
JOURNEY
SOLUTIONS PROVIDERS OFFER INSIGHTS ON
THE OMNICHANNEL EVOLUTION AND HOW IT
WILL IMPACT YOUR CENTER.
By Susan Hash, Contact Center Pipeline

2Pipeline Articles www.contactcenterpipeline.com
FEATURE | THE OMNICHANNEL JOURNEY
IT DOESN’T SEEM THAT LONG AGO THAT THE BUZZ WAS ALL ABOUT MULTICHANNEL.
TODAY,THE WORD OMNICHANNEL HAS BECOME OMNIPRESENT.
While many use the terms interchangeably,there is an important distinction between
the two. The meaning of the root words holds the key: “Multi” is more than one, while
“omni” means in all ways or places. Thus, while a multichannel approach may offer a variety
of channels to communicate with customers, each channel may be managed on a separate
system and lack insight into the customer’s activity on the other channels.With an omnichannel
experience, the customer’s information, history and interaction activity is connected on the
back end, providing the organization with a holistic view of the entire journey and a seamless,
personalized experience for customers, even when switching channels.
While many organizations are currently providing multichannel customer service, few as yet
have evolved their strategy and systems to deliver a true omnichannel customer experience.
by Susan Hash,
Contact Center Pipeline
@susanhash

THE PANELISTS
ANNA CONVERY
Chief Marketing Officer & Executive
Vice President of Strategy, OpenSpan,
www.openspan.com
MADELYN GENGELBACH
Vice President, Strategic Marketing,
inContact, www.incontact.com
MICHAEL GREGORIO
Director, Product Management
USAN, www.usan.com
BRIAN KOMA
Vice President & Practice Leader,
Customer Experience,
Verint Systems, Inc., www.verint.com
LIZ OSBORN
Vice President, Product Marketing &
Solutions, Five9, www.five9.com
KEITH PEARCE
Vice President, Corporate Marketing
Genesys, www.genesys.com
MARILYN SAULNIER
Director, Global Contact Center
Consulting, Interactive Intelligence
www.inin.com
BRAD SNEDEKER
Innovation Center Manager,
Calabrio
www.calabrio.com

And yet, customers today expect personalized, consistent service no matter how they contact
the company.
How can contact centers prepare for the transition from multichannel to omnichannel? We
asked several industry solutions providers to share their insights in this Q&A panel.The advice
they offer can help you to start your omnichannel journey off on the right foot.
ANNA CONVERY:
One of the top challenges faced by customer experience leaders regarding omnichannel initia-
tives is the definition of what omnichannel means to their organization. Omnichannel is, in and
of itself, not a metric of success—what it means in terms of delivering better, differentiated and
efficient customer service is. Many organizations have invested heavily in customer service
channels, and continue to refine and add more channels.The ability to stitch these channels
together to get an omnichannel view and to enable customer service levels to be consistent
and efficient across channels has been challenging.
The contact center has found itself front and center in the omnichannel push.First,because
the contact center is often regarded as the center of excellence and the hub of wisdom for
customer service transactions,and second,because the contact center is on the receiving end
of the points of failure of other channels—your mobile channel doesn’t work, call the contact
center; the website doesn’t work,call the contact center; you have no visibility into your claim,call
the contact center!As such,this is both an opportunity for the contact center and a challenge.
Gaining visibility across channels and the domino effect of omnichannel activity is key…
leveraging cross-channel activity and transaction analysis becomes vital. Ensuring that the
customer receives a consistent, efficient and optimized service no matter which channel is
very important: Remember, customers expect to be treated as individuals, not a series of
individual transactions—so integration of disparate systems and automatically aggregating
key customer data is foundational.
Finally, contact centers must enable and empower their agents to support the omnichannel
strategy through training, streamlining systems and sharing critical data. This is especially
important if the agent is responding to a customer with a broken transaction in another channel.
MADELYN GENGELBACH:
There are a couple of challenges that contact centers have: one is technological and one is
people.Regarding the technological challenge,does the contact center have the infrastructure
today to move to an omnichannel strategy? The numbers would show that the answer is often
no. Many contact centers now have disparate channels.Voice is most common and is routed
by an ACD. Email is not being routed by the ACD. Chat is routed in yet another way. It’s difficult
to monitor what is going on and also ensure maximum productivity. Here, the channels don’t
play well or talk together easily.
The other challenge is a people challenge. There is this sense that there must be a really
rapid acceleration of channels—it’s n+1: Add one channel, and then the next, and then the
next, and so on. It’s this idea that there is an inexorable pull to adding channels. Sometimes
you may have a shortage of agents who can handle another channel.
WHAT ARE THE TOP CHALLENGES
THAT CONTACT CENTERS FACE
WHEN TRANSITIONING TO AN
OMNICHANNEL STRATEGY?
The contact center has found
itself front and center in the
omnichannel push.
— ANNA CONVERY

For instance, when I worked in a contact center there were agents who were extraordinarily
gifted at handling people over the phone.But your dream agent for voice may not be your dream
agent for chat. An agent’s written skills may not be as developed as his or her verbal skills.
The fantastic voice agent may not be ready or suited for chat’s written and concurrent nature.
MICHAEL GREGORIO:
The contact center’s top challenges will be: product (technology), process and people.
Most of the products and applications used in contact centers today are largely obsolete
because of their outdated programming models, lack of a native cloud and poor abilities in
predicting customer journeys.
Contact center point solutions, such as IVR/ACD or consolidated agent desktops, address
specific functionality very well. However, they typically do not provide integration points with
other business applications, nor do they support interactions across the customer journey.
Organizations that use these systems are often faced with multiple data-entry efforts and
disconnected sets of customer data, making it difficult to report accurate information and
enforce business process.
More important is the general fact that none of these types of systems speak to customer
engagement across multiple channels.As organizations face a more connected,more distributed
customer base,they must address the changing requirements of a new generation of interaction
between contact center agents and consumers while maintaining a consistent brand experience.
BRIAN KOMA:
The No. 1 challenge when transitioning to an omnichannel strategy is the ability to identify
a customer and a common interaction which that customer is having, and then connect the
activity so that the organization can view the pathway, the customer’s journey and the success
of that journey as the customer interacts with the brand.
The second challenge is that an omnichannel approach requires very different skill sets than
a traditional call center.For instance,contact center staff that have been recruited for excellent
telephone skills may not have the multitasking skills that are necessary for channels like chat,
where you can have multiple sessions occurring simultaneously.
Contact center leaders also will have to consider where to find the right people to staff those
channels. Do you have the right mix of skills in your center today or will you have to recruit new
staff to handle these new channels? Do you ask for volunteers? We’ve seen several models
in which contact centers have their existing staff self-identify whether they would be willing
to take on some of these new components, as opposed to forcing them into it, because the
skill sets are different.
LIZ OSBORN:
A key challenge is working with siloed applications. Organizations generally have different
applications for chat, email, SMS—and they’re all cobbled together on top of a system that
was originally built for voice. That makes it very difficult to deliver a seamless experience
across channels.
Another challenge for larger organizations, in particular, is that different areas of the orga-
nization own different pieces of the customer experience. For example, in a large bank, one
group may own checking accounts, another handles mortgages, while another owns credit
cards—and each one has its own system.To the customer,it’s one account,but putting together
the cross-channel customer experience creates a nightmare of complexity for the organization.
WHAT ARE THE
TOP CHALLENGES
THAT CONTACT
CENTERS
FACE WHEN
TRANSITIONING
TO AN
OMNICHANNEL
STRATEGY?
Your dream agent for voice
may not be your dream
agent for chat. An agent’s
written skills may not be as
developed as their verbal
skills..
— MADELYN GENGELBACH

KEITH PEARCE:
The No. 1 challenge is gaining organizational consensus to be aligned to the customer, instead
of to the business unit or the particular touchpoint that the business unit has brought to cus-
tomers.The contact center is often left in an unenviable position when a department launches
a channel that is customer-facing. Customers switch among channels an average of three to
four times as they interact with a company throughout their customer journey—and they often
end up in the contact center. Optimizing a touchpoint is great, but against the reality of the
channel switching, you need the context of that channel interaction to be able to best serve
the customer on the next channel.
It can be difficult to get the organization aligned on what the omnichannel approach is and
who owns the customer experience. They will have to break down the silos of departmental
touchpoints and channels that have been offered to customers to create a more holistic or
omnichannel approach where,as customers move from channel to channel,the context of their
interactions is passed along so they can get the best service action that they need.
MARILYN SAULNIER:
First, there is much confusion between omnichannel and multichannel. Many think the terms
are synonymous.There is actually a pretty significant difference between the two. Multichannel
simply means you offer customers more than one access channel. Omnichannel channel
takes it to another level by providing the customer with a seamless experience across all the
channels supported. Omnichannel means a customer can contact you via multiple channels
and the history of their contacts will be available; no need to start over again with each contact.
Seamless. Easy.
BRAD SNEDEKER:
The biggest challenge facing the business is defining what omnichannel means to their orga-
nization.True omnichannel ties together multichannel customer experiences. It’s meeting your
customer wherever they interact with you and making that interaction a seamless, consistent
experience. Once you understand what omnichannel means to your company, the next step
is determining how that fits into your contact center and developing a strategy to integrate all
channels within it. The most challenging of those channels being brick and mortar and tying
that experience to other channels.
Another big challenge facing organizations is quality—actually gathering quality metrics
within a process that’s aligned to the business strategy. Integrating quality evaluations, surveys,
customer service scores, etc., and unifying those evaluations across all channels (calls, emails,
chats, social).
WHAT ARE THE
TOP CHALLENGES
THAT CONTACT
CENTERS
FACE WHEN
TRANSITIONING
TO AN
OMNICHANNEL
STRATEGY?
The most important part of having an omnichannel
strategy is to give your customer the right choices
for the transactions at hand… and make sure it
works!
— ANNA CONVERY

MADELYN GENGELBACH:
Identifying and prioritizing which channels to focus on is a critical first step. You don’t want
to add channels unless you are ready to add the channel. Here’s an analogy, it’s spring so
everyone is planting. But you don’t want to add a new garden unless you are prepared to take
care of it.And you’ve got to continue to take great care of your current garden. Contact center
leaders must take care of what they have and make it as good as it can be.
Yes, critical research shows that consumers want more channels, but they first want people
to resolve their issues and also value their time. Contact centers must find the balance between
what your customers want and what you are able to provide. Organizations should not be afraid
to reach out and talk to their customers. Customers crave a good experience and are often
willing to take an active role in their own customer experience.
After hearing the customer’s side you also need to ask yourself,“Where are we technologi-
cally?” Do you have technology or personnel barriers that make it hard to add channels? Take
an honest look and inventory before you add channels. Before you add that garden.
LIZ OSBORN:
First steps will depend on the maturity of the organization and where it is in the omnichannel
journey.
If the organization is just beginning and is taking baby steps,they can start by documenting
the needs and the wants of their customers and the business, as well as any compliance
requirements. For example, for voice calls, customers’ needs may include the hours of opera-
tion, speed of answer, max hold times, etc.Then, what are their wants? They want to get their
questions answered, they want the agent to be friendly, they don’t to waste their time.You can
document all of the needs and wants at a basic level.
Next, focus on building basic access to cross-channel information. For instance, CRM
integration—using screen pops to deliver customer information to the agent desktop as a call
arrives.This technology has been around for decades, yet statistics show that only about half
of contact centers offer that today. Another basic step is to ensure that your IVR application
has the ability to collect the data that customers input and transfer that information to the
agent. This is another capability that has been around for a long time, but the statistics are
even worse here—only about 30% to 40% of contact centers are doing that today.
More sophisticated organizations can begin to look at the overall customer journey—defining
the the customer experience and all of the touchpoints from end to end.
KEITH PEARCE:
There are technology implications, as well as organizational ones, but the questions that we
see more and more from contact center leaders are: How do we view our customers’ journeys
and understand the interactions that they have across those journeys? How do we start to
organize ourselves around the customer experience instead of being organized by business
unit? The contact center has an opportunity to move up significantly in strategic value if they
can lead that discussion.
WHAT ARE THE CRITICAL FIRST
STEPS THAT CONTACT CENTER
LEADERS SHOULD FOCUS ON NOW?
Every company is different—
the journeys are different and
the customers are different.
But the key is being able to
look at things from a holistic
standpoint.
— BRIAN KOMA

The reasons why customers interact with companies can be isolated into four or five customer
journeys (which will vary by industry):When they buy,when they’re being onboarded,when they
need help, and when they’re at end of contract. If contact centers begin to take a customer
journey-centric approach,then it’s not about who owns what—the focus shifts to how you man-
age the interaction points.For instance,during account signup,what are the interaction points
that customers are likely to invoke to get service? The contact center evolves from handling
complaints and resolving problems to a journey manager approach—and the frontline agents
become journey manager specialists in a particular step in the journey. They’re not handling
everything that a customer might call about; they’re finely attuned to the account signup journey,
for instance, and everything that entails.
For us, that’s the future of the contact center—moving from a cost to a strategic asset to a
key component for delivering on the promise of journey management and bringing innovation
to the contact center. Until now, innovation in the contact center has focused on getting better
yield out of people and keeping customers in self-service because it’s cheaper. It has been
about the company and not the customer.
MARILYN SAULNIER:
Assess your contact center’s current performance. Are you consistently meeting your service
level and customer experience objectives on your current channels? Identify and address any
gaps you have before jumping into the deep end.The last thing you want is more channels to
provide poor service and risk losing customers and damaging your brand reputation.
It is a major leap from a fairly traditional contact center to an omnichannel center with
blended and simultaneous interactions. Everything changes. Make sure that you understand
the changes and make the necessary adjustments to your organizational structure, agent
skillset requirements, quality program, metrics and reporting, and forecasting and scheduling
methodology. It’s 80% planning and 20% execution.
ANNA CONVERY:
With any initiative that involves your customers, it’s important to listen proactively to get ahead
of what your customer base desires and how they want to communicate with you. Not all chan-
nels are created equal and some are much better suited to some transactions or customer
profiles than others. Routinely evaluate what your customers are saying, analyze trends of your
existing channels and pay attention to the market. My customer service experience at my bank
is not evaluated against another bank, rather, it is evaluated against my personal experience
with my wireless provider, or my last online retail experience.
The most important part of having an omnichannel strategy is to give your customer the right
choices for the transactions at hand… and make sure it works! Make doing business with you
effortless, but keep intelligence at the forefront.Always have the ability to understand what is
taking place across all channels… Transactions are the heartbeat of your enterprise, so you’ve
got to monitor the pulse to keep all channels in an optimal state.
HOW CAN ORGANIZATIONS
IDENTIFY—AND PRIORITIZE—WHICH
CHANNELS TO FOCUS ON?
WHAT ARE THE
CRITICAL FIRST
STEPS THAT
CONTACT CENTER
LEADERS
SHOULD FOCUS
ON NOW?
Omnichannel is about quality
over quantity, focusing on the
customer relationship rather
than the actual channel is key.
— MICHAEL GREGORIO

MICHAEL GREGORIO:
Many organizations believe they need to engage in all channels for the “ultimate omnichannel
experience,” and that’s just not the case. It’s about quality over quantity—focusing on the
customer relationship rather than the actual channel is key.
There is also an added dimension of—and complexity of—growing channels.Many organiza-
tions are scrambling to accommodate them all.Yet, a recent Forrester survey (“Q1 2015 U.S.
Top 50 Brands Social Web Track”) found that just 0.22% of the top brands’ Facebook fans
interact on that channel.OnTwitter,Pinterest and Google+,that interaction rate is below 0.05%
and falling fast.
To break through this noise,an organization needs to identify and prioritize where to orchestrate
engagement across channels, including the fusion of inbound and outbound communication.
For example, customers rarely use just one channel to complete an interaction, and many
end up in the contact center. The majority of inbound calls to the contact center come from
customers who first attempted to resolve an issue on a company’s website,while many callers
are still on the company’s website as they are speaking to an agent.
Understanding your audience is one thing; knowing where customers will engage at multiple
steps in the journey is another critical part of an omnichannel strategy.
BRIAN KOMA:
First,make an inventory of the channels that you’re using today across the organization.We often
see “disconnected listening” in organizations.The contact center may be handling telephone,
while a technical support team within the organization may be using chat that you didn’t know
about,and another area has suddenly decided that they’re going to allow customers to text them.
Then identify how you are listening and interacting with your customers across all of those
channels.This gives you an opportunity to determine who’s doing what,how they’re doing it and
how it intersects with what you’re doing within the contact center.Are there some best practices
that you can pick up from other groups in the organization? How do we identify a customer in
each one of those channels? Are other groups interacting with customers on things that the
contact center is already doing? Are we duplicating efforts and increasing our expenses or
causing confusion for customers about how they want to interact with us?
Next, very simply ask your customers what their preferences are for interacting with your
company in some sort of descending order. Be sure to honor those preferences as you move
forward. Many companies forget to ask, so getting your customers to identify how they like to
do this is an important point and can save you a lot of time.Then you can start looking at how
to connect the dots and bring some of those touchpoints together.
LIZ OSBORN:
Creating a customer journey map will allow you to view the entire customer journey—from the
first time they hear about you through evaluation of the product, sales and post support, and
all the touchpoints that a customer would use for each of those.
Perform a gap analysis: Create a two-dimensional graph by plotting your customer journey
along one axis and,along the other axis,how important that channel is to that customer at that
point in time. By looking at and rating the channels, you may find that there some channels
your customers are using, but which are not that important to them.
I recommend surveying your customers to find out what their preferences are, as well.There
is a lot of great benchmark data available that will give you additional insights into general
consumer preferences. For instance, Dimension Data publishes a benchmark survey every
year. They offer a free summary that provides quite a bit of data about consumer channel
preferences by age.You can put all of that information together—the general preferences along
with the specifics for your customer—to identify and prioritize the channels.
HOW CAN
ORGANIZATIONS
IDENTIFY—AND
PRIORITIZE—
WHICH
CHANNELS TO
FOCUS ON?
Identify and address any gaps
you have before jumping into
the deep end. The last thing you
want is more channels to provide
poor service and risk losing
customers and damaging your
brand reputation.
— MARILYN SAULNIER

KEITH PEARCE:
Look at the entire customer journey and think through the interactions that customers are most
likely to need at each step.In some cases,it might be that proactive notification becomes a key
channel that contact centers can use at a certain part of the journey, rather than a traditional
voice interaction. For example, at account renewal, proactively reach out to customers with an
SMS or an outbound call instead of waiting to save a customer when they sign off of an account.
When you look at interactions in a journey context, you can start to be very intelligent about
how you manage and prioritize them. Oftentimes, when the phone call comes to the contact
center,it’s too late:A customer has had a billing issue,there has been an error in their account
sign-up and their name is misspelled, or they’ve just come out of an IVR where they have tried
unsuccessfully to enter their account information several times. That call lands on a contact
center agent who has a very small chance of making it a good interaction.
In a journey-centric approach, customers would receive a proactive phone call or notifica-
tion before they realize there is a problem. For example,“We apologize for a billing issue that
occurred. Can you arrange a time to talk to us so we can sort it out?” And then the contact
center agent can provide a credit to turn those negative experiences into wow moments that
build loyalty.That’s the journey promise.
MARILYN SAULNIER:
Survey your customers.Ask your QA team for input. Conduct agent focus group sessions.They
know more about your customers than anyone in the company. Pilot new channels to validate
your strategic assumptions and make necessary adjustments before rolling out.
ANNA CONVERY:
An omnichannel strategy poses a myriad of different challenges when it comes to knowing
what to track and why.Global enterprises are spending billions of dollars on analytics solutions.
The “Big Data Revolution” has opened up a world where businesses can measure anything
they wish, but what is the point of collecting data if it is difficult to organize and you don’t
understand how you’re going to use it?
To truly know what is going on within each channel, it really involves many data points,
including right down into the activity and transactions that take place on the desktop—your
customers interacting with your agents and technology and vice versa. Having intelligence col-
lected from desktop activities can help deliver a broad set of data that can be used to expose
key areas of improvement, pinpoint “gold standard” behaviors that are resulting in increased
revenue per transaction and trends over time that can give context into the customer journey
and result in positive customer experience.
MADELYN GENGELBACH:
There is no magic technology that can instantly solve the customer journey/experience. It is
still about agent interaction when the stakes are high, and tracking these interactions. Start
with where you are and get your house in order, then expand further and further. Get your own
backyard garden cleaned and weeded and branch out from there.
HOW CAN THE CUSTOMER’S
EXPERIENCE THROUGH MULTIPLE
CHANNELS BE TRACKED AND
MEASURED?
HOW CAN
ORGANIZATIONS
IDENTIFY—AND
PRIORITIZE—
WHICH
CHANNELS TO
FOCUS ON?
Creating a customer journey map
will allow you to view the entire
customer journey from the first
time they hear about you through
evaluation of the product, sales
and post support—and all the
touchpoints that a customer
would use for each of those.
— LIZ OSBORN

First,the most basic step is that multiple channels should all be managed from one platform.
Otherwise you don’t have a unified reporting system to measure the channels.Chat,email and
voice are the top three channels by far, so let’s use those as examples.You need to have them
all on one platform and the same system.They must be working well so that you can manage,
track and measure how your agents are doing.
From here you can move into what is happening with your customers and improve upon
their experiences. What channels are customers employing and what takes place in these
channels? Here you start to build customer histories in the CRM—agents need to write the
specific interaction sequence back into the CRM so that it is available to all of the other agents.
We have seen success with contact center leaders starting at their center of excellence to
get their sea legs.Set up current channels and branch out with agents who are eligible for that
additional channel.Take an incremental approach.
Next step is to measure your situation.Get all your channels routed together and transparent,
then add the flexibility to route from generalists to specialists and look at the interactions with
customers. In the end what a customer really wants is a great experience.A lot of people are
talking about a grandiose journey solution.But these are uber expensive and not about people.
Create a micro-journey,like moving from chat to phone.Begin with basic reporting out of your
CRM and ACD. Make the micro-journey visible to agents so they can understand interactions
that have been taking place prior to them.Customers may expect to stick with the same agent
from chat to phone, so if you have all of the agents on the same platform you can recognize
the caller, see them and route them to that agent who can handle both of these channels.
Again, here you have technology and people. Neither can stand alone.
BRIAN KOMA:
This is a very important issue,because it forces you to determine how you look at the customer
journey.A journey-mapping exercise will help you to understand how a typical customer comes
into the organization. There are products out there that will help you to do this, but a lot of it
is manual in nature because you’re trying to identify how most customers are interacting with
your brand: What is a typical path that they’re taking to interact with me?
Identifying a journey that a typical customer will take is part of the first step. Some of this
will involve conducting customer interviews, and some of it will involve tracking customers
using tools that will help you to understand their pathway through the website or how they
arrived at the contact center.
The next step is assigning a persona (or fictionalized person) to that journey. This does
a couple of things: It helps us internally to create a shorthand view of how to refer to that
customer. For example, instead of referring to a customer profile as a small-business owner
who has a billing problem with a particular software product, maybe that is best personified
by an individual named Beth. Beth has certain attributes that everyone agrees on: She works
for a company that employs 10 people or less, has been a customer for two years or more,
she purchases products on a monthly basis, etc. Identifying a common persona will help you
to communicate to others in the organization,“People like Beth.”
Finally, you need to identify those things that you can connect on the back end. One of the
top challenges is that the systems which many organizations use to track website visitors and
to track DNIS or ANI are not necessarily the same. So how can we now take that data and
associate a specific telephone number or email address with Beth, and then start to look at
all of the interactions that she is having with our brand? That’s a very hard thing to do.We are
making a lot of progress in this area,but it involves a combination of technology and consulting,
because every company is different,the journeys are different and the customers are different.
But the key is being able to look at things from a holistic standpoint.
HOW CAN THE
CUSTOMER’S
EXPERIENCE
THROUGH
MULTIPLE
CHANNELS BE
TRACKED AND
MEASURED?
True omnichannel ties together
multichannel customer
experiences. It’s meeting
your customer wherever they
interact with you and making
that interaction a seamless,
consistent experience.
— BRAD SNEDEKER

BRAD SNEDEKER:
Integration across channels,including off-line interactions,must have full customer interactions
tracked.This can achieved through loyalty programs and receipt emailing capabilities.In addi-
tion, a good CRM environment that allows for customer tracking by channel is critical to the
success of any omnichannel strategy.This resource must also be available to all customer-facing
employees to ensure that each and every interaction from that customer is available at their
fingertips. The ultimate goal is that this level of tracking is seamless to the customer-facing
employee so that it is transparent to the actual customer.
ANNA CONVERY:
One important metric that is playing a role in shaping omnichannel strategies is first-contact
resolution. It’s a critical indicator that can either turn a customer into a brand advocate or a
brand detractor.But so many companies think of first-CALL resolution instead of first-CONTACT
resolution.Do you know how many times the customer tried to solve their issue using a mobile
app?What about their visits to the website? Did they visit yourYouTube channel for instructions
on how to solve their problem? These are the questions that must be asked… and it’s difficult
to know where your customer has been in their customer journey.That is why it’s so important
to have as much information collected about the customer so that, if an agent is taking a call
of a very frustrated customer,they have the insight into the customer’s previous journey points
to offer a more definitive solution to their issue. Having the right information at the right time
can truly turn an irate customer into a delighted one, if the agent can diffuse the situation by
providing more expedited resolution.
MADELYN GENGELBACH:
Metrics are going to be different for each channel.Again,we suggest an incremental approach
to adding channels and the idea of testing with a center-of-excellence. Say you are adding
chat. Get your agents that are already really good at email, since you know they are good in a
written format—their grammar is good, along with empathy and fact sharing. Start them with
chat by trying it out with a few friendly customers. Have a test period.
Start learning and use metrics to ensure that channels and agents aligned. Survey the
customer—the metric could be transactional Csat. After you talk with someone on voice, ask
him or her how you did versus some other channel. The metric is about how well you as a
contact center are doing, overall, after adding the new channel.
LIZ OSBORN:
Customer Effort Score is a key metric that is being tracked by more companies. It’s absolutely
critical in an omnichannel strategy because,if you’re hard to do business with,it doesn’t matter
whether you’ve solved the customer’s problem.There is a lot of industry research which shows
that pouring resources into delighting your customers doesn’t generate the loyalty and repeat
business like making it easy for them to do business with your company. That is where you
really see the payoff.
WHICH METRICS WILL ENSURE THAT
ALL CHANNELS ARE ALIGNED WITH
THE OMNICHANNEL STRATEGY?
HOW CAN THE
CUSTOMER’S
EXPERIENCE
THROUGH
MULTIPLE
CHANNELS BE
TRACKED AND
MEASURED?
Contact centers that are moving
to an omnichannel strategy have
to rethink their entire recruiting,
hiring and training processes.
— LIZ OSBORN

ANNA CONVERY:
When you’re talking omnichannel, there are many differences in the delivery of information
during interactions, so it’s important to adapt the QA process to distill how a customer is
receiving information and if that exchange is resulting in a positive customer experience. It’s
definitely not a “one size fits all” QA evaluation, but the essentials still remain. Customers
expect a professional, efficient and accurate interaction. Is the customer able to effectively
communicate his or issue or request? How are they getting the information requested?
MADELYN GENGELBACH:
Yes—excellent question!The key is to re-evaluate… Much of this goes back to personnel.Just as
your ninja agent in one channel is not so in another, you can’t use the same QA forms for both
channels.“Did they greet the caller?”Can’t ask that,it’s not a caller,it is email.“Did they employ
active listening?”That doesn’t work.You have got to change the way you evaluate your agents.
First, work out those kinks with a small group to discover and measure the quality of those
interactions, to get it more nailed down. Regarding the process to change forms, think very
carefully: How would I adapt this to email? For example phone calls are real-time synchronous
with no delay. Email is absolutely synchronous; we expect a pause. Chat is kind of a blend; we
know that there may be a delay, but the tolerance for delay is seconds.
When you think of QA standards and evaluation against those standards, always talk with
other people who have gone before you, someone else who uses the channel.We connect our
customers with other customers.Talk to others.Ask them: How did it go? What are you happy
with? What else have you done?
BRIAN KOMA: The traditional measures that we might use to monitor performance in the
contact center—average handle time or first-call resolution—are not necessarily applicable to
someone who’s responding to a chat interaction or to a social media interaction.
An important step is finding out what is important from the customer’s standpoint and marrying
that with some of the more traditional contact center metrics that we measure and monitor
on a very consistent basis. Consider which elements of the relationship the customer is going
to find important.When I interact with a chat agent, how is it different from how I interact with
an agent on the telephone? In large measure, we’re seeing organizations that are doing this
successfully by first asking their customers what is important to them, and then incorporating
those metrics into the standard scorecard elements. So we’re not using old approaches to
measure the agents, but rather new approaches that take into account what the customer
thinks and what they find to be important.
LIZ OSBORN:
The first choice is whether to go with a best-of-breed QA approach for the individual channel
or a QA platform that’s all-in-one and supports all of the channels. Many of the QA packages
that are on the market today are just now adding multiple-channel support, so you will need
to revise your scorecards and your criteria. For instance, how well do your agents capture the
right tone for any particular social media channel? Or how well do they communicate via live
chat, and can they do it quickly while handling multiple chats at one time?
WHICH ELEMENTS OF THE QA
PROCESS WILL NEED TO BE
REEVALUATED TO MONITOR
PERFORMANCE ACROSS CHANNELS?
Not all channels are created equal
and some are much better suited
to some transactions or customer
profiles than others.
— ANNA CONVERY

You need to be able to measure and compare the consistency across all the channels, as
well.You can do this by looking at your metrics,your KPIs and the scoring across the channels.
Make sure that the technology you use supports all of the channels so that you can drill down
per channel, per team, per agent, and slice and dice it a variety of ways.
Finally, you have to look at things like text analytics and desktop analytics. Of course, in a
traditional contact center, you have to record everything. So now you have to look at screen
recordings, which take up a lot of bandwidth and a lot more storage.You have to think about
how long you need to keep those recordings, and whether you’re going to record 100% of the
transactions. For instance, one of our customers records 100% of the calls and 20% of the
text interactions right now.You’ll need to consider all of that.
BRAD SNEDEKER:
Businesses need to review and edit existing evaluation forms to accommodate all channels
within their strategy.This includes in-store,phone and email survey data to gather direct customer
feedback.While all evaluation forms, regardless of channels, should be in line with the overall
contact center strategy, media-specific questions should be created for different channels.
ANNA CONVERY:
Staffing for an omnichannel operation is dependent on so many factors—from corporate culture,
to the technology on the desktop and to the training programs in place.I’ve seen contact center
operations tackle omnichannel strategies in so many different ways.Some have blended agents
who handle calls, email, chat and mobile. Others have extended mobile and social customer
service to a more back-office function.The mobile and social channels have come to market
quickly and most are evolving as quickly as the technology changes.That’s why it’s critical to have
insight into desktop intelligence so that you are able to make decisions quickly about staffing,
process and technology changes to implement change that positively impacts the business.
Understand that employees who are mobile and social geniuses might not be the best phone
agents, and have a plan in place to ensure that all employees—regardless of channel—get the
right training and proper communications to ensure a consistent service experience is critical.
MADELYN GENGELBACH:
A lot of the impact is related to personnel.Are the people on staff qualified to handle the next
channel? Are they ready for n+1? If the answer is no, then you are going to have to train them
into it. If they cannot be trained into it, you are going to have to hire for it.
For example, consider a company finding agents for BPOS (Business Process Outsourcing
Services).As they were adding channels and finding the right agents a pattern was discovered.
When they were looking for agents to handle chat they found that those who performed well
had indicated in the application process that they text messaged in their own personal life
many times a day.So,their chances for success in chat were much higher.This really important
piece of information came from reverse engineering—from making the connection.
HOW WILL AN OMNICHANNEL
APPROACH IMPACT CUSTOMER
SERVICE STAFF IN TERMS OF THEIR
ROLE, SKILL SETS, TRAINING?
WHICH
ELEMENTS OF
THE QA PROCESS
WILL NEED TO
BE REEVALUATED
TO MONITOR
PERFORMANCE
ACROSS
CHANNELS?
Knowing precisely how many
agents to staff for every half-
hour of every day to answer
inbound calls was challenging
enough. That challenge morphs
in complexity when supporting
multiple channels with varying
skills and service level objectives.
— MARILYN SAULNIER

Have an idea of the role,skill sets and training for each channel.Understand how to evaluate
the applicant and what variables best contribute to success. Provide a job preview to make
sure it is fair, so people can evaluate their own abilities.
As a former contact center manager myself, if I had to handle WFM and if I had to add a
couple of channels to a lot of agents, my head might explode because I am not yet sure what
the roll up will be of all the variables. Take average handle time, agent productivity, types of
problems, types of businesses you are in, types of interactions, and on and on.All this is very
specific to the business and how it runs. There is no silver bullet. Take it a bite at a time and
you can head down the road. Enlarge that garden by two feet instead of eight.
MICHAEL GREGORIO:
I am always surprised when consulting with an organization on omnichannel.Many pull together
huge teams to discuss customer engagement strategies,channels,integrations,contact center
technologies… and last, but not least… the actual call center agent!
Sure,every organization implements tools to reduce call times and increase first-call resolution.
But the depth of online information to help customers solve their own problems is increasing.
That means the questions and problems that customers may have after being in self-service
may be too difficult for the average call center agent to answer.
There has never been a greater need for “high-touch” customer service using elite contact
center agents.The adoption of more productive channels such as chat,SMS/and social media
allows agents to engage in several simultaneous conversations, whereas live-agent voice is
typically one-to-one and is not the preferred method of today’s generation.
To be successful, organizations will have to step up their human resource and training
programs to attract, train and retain top-performing contact center staff, as customers will
make fewer, but more critical, calls.With many products and services becoming commodities,
providing an excellent omnichannel customer experience is the only way companies can
differentiate themselves.
LIZ OSBORN:
An omnichannel approach adds more complexity to the agent’s job.One trend that we’ve been
seeing in the industry for a while is the increasing customer preference for self-service. Over
the next few years, the percentage of phone calls as overall interactions will start to drop, but
the complexity of those interactions will increase—and now we’re adding all of these other
channels on top of the agents.
We recently conducted a survey with ICMI on agent performance and how it impacts the
customer experience (“Agent Apathy: The Root Cause of Poor Customer Service”). We found
that the average agent has to access five different applications in order to handle one interac-
tion.As you can imagine, it can take quite a bit of time for most agents just to track down the
information that they need to be able to solve an issue.
What contact centers have to start rethinking is how to provide agents with the tools to
simplify their jobs.We believe that it creates a ripple-effect. In our survey, 100% of the contact
center leaders that we talked to—over 400—said that the agents’ involvement, morale and
engagement has the biggest impact on the customer experience—and yet around 72% said
that they are actually blocking agents from providing an excellent experience because they
don’t give them the tools and the systems that they need.We have to solve that.Agents are the
front line. They’re responsible for representing all of these channels and the entire company,
and we need to make their jobs easier.
HOW WILL AN
OMNICHANNEL
APPROACH
IMPACT
CUSTOMER
SERVICE STAFF
IN TERMS OF
THEIR ROLE,
SKILL SETS,
TRAINING?
Optimizing a touchpoint is
great, but against the reality
of the channel switching,
you need the context of that
channel interaction to be able
to best serve the customer on
the next channel.
— KEITH PEARCE

KEITH PEARCE:
A journey-managed approach elevates the frontline agent position in value, as well as what
contact centers need to pay people and the type of talent they need to hire.The frontline agent
is currently one of the highest attrition jobs for a reason: It’s someone who sits in a cubicle all
day and is closely measured on how much time they’re on the call,how much time they spend
between calls doing wrapup work,and whether or not they read the script.Compare that with a
journey manager specialist—someone who is adept at multitasking and social media,who has
phone and written skills, who can write to the brand voice, and is someone who brings energy
and passion to the role.That’s what customers expect. Not the monotone robot, but someone
whose personality can come out in interesting ways that are appropriate for the customer and
where they are in the journey.
In a journey-managed approach,the enterprise becomes the instrument of customer experi-
ence, and not just the contact center.There are people in the back office and specialists with
deep product expertise who don’t need to put on a headset and sit in a contact center, but
in certain moments of the journey, they might need to collaborate with a customer through a
chat application or get on a call to solve a customer issue.Today, the approach is to contain
it at a low cost in the front office. The future is a much more blended environment in which
frontline staff have access to other functions so they can quickly collaborate to get things done.
BRAD SNEDEKER:
Customer service staff will need to be aware of customer interactions across all channels,and
will be required to absorb much more customer data quickly in order to properly serve the
customer. Privacy will be a major concern and staff will need the necessary training on how
to address those concerns.
ANNA CONVERY:
Having the right players at the table for developing an omnichannel strategy is crucial. Such is
also the case for the day-to-day operations.As with your more conventional channels,you must
build a team that consists of business, IT, process and training leaders.All of these roles must
be aligned and understand their business unit’s role in ensuring success across all channels.
This means alignment vertically and horizontally, with a keen eye to managing the details and
the many dependencies and interrelated impacts to the business.
MADELYN GENGELBACH:
Start where you are and conduct a stringent self-evaluation—and this goes back to some of
my earlier answers; do you have the technology to do it and do you have (or can you find) the
people to support it? Customers want omnichannel, they expect it, but if you offer it and then
do it poorly, your customers will leave you as a result. How do you handle these expectations?
I am passionate about this: Winning your customer’s loyalty, in the end, is all about blocking
and tackling. It is not glamorous work and it can seem really intimidating, but it is really about
taking it one step at a time.
WHAT TYPES OF INTERNAL
RESOURCES AND SKILLS ARE
NEEDED TO IMPLEMENT AN
OMNICHANNEL STRATEGY?
HOW WILL AN
OMNICHANNEL
APPROACH
IMPACT
CUSTOMER
SERVICE STAFF
IN TERMS OF
THEIR ROLE,
SKILL SETS,
TRAINING?
Over the next few years, the
percentage of phone calls as
overall interactions will start
to drop, but the complexity
of those interactions will
increase.
— LIZ OSBORN

It’s a technological crawl, walk, run.
When you are ready to add that next channel, don’t just add it for every agent. Take some
time and discover how to handle it well and intertwine it into your operations. Understand how
it impacts your business, including workforce management. Know where the tentacles reach
and understand the possible impact.
To keeping up with the n+1, remember the garden analogy.When you add a garden you’ve
got to be able to maintain it, to weed and feed. You have got to be able to understand the
impact, get a good plan together and test it out, do a little bit and then work around it. This
sets people up for best success.
LIZ OSBORN:
Contact centers that are moving to an omnichannel strategy have to rethink their entire recruiting,
hiring and training processes.When I was a contact center manager, back in the days before
multichannel, I always interviewed candidates over the phone because I wanted to hear how
they presented themselves on the phone. I would apply that same principle to text channels.
Conduct a live chat interview with a job candidate to see how well they’re able to think on their
feet, write and respond quickly, and how they answer social posts.
Training will also require a different approach. Seek out high-quality interactions that have
the tone,consistency and quality of service that you want to represent in your text interactions
for social posts and live chats. Use those to train staff on how to respond and to give them
guidance.As we know, it’s much more difficult to get the right tone in text than it is with voice.
According to our recent survey, 48% of contact centers now have super agents or universal
agents handling cross-channel interactions.And 75% of contact center leaders said that they
were planning on expanding that and moving to a universal model—I think it’s inevitable.You
may not have agents handling every channel. It may be a subset of channels. But we have
customers that are using cross-channel interactions as an incentive for their top-performers.They
find that agents are much more motivated and productive during the day if they can alternate
among voice, email and chat, rather than just handling one channel constantly.
MARILYN SAULNIER:
Highly skilledWFM resources are critical to the success of an omnichannel implementation.The
challenge has always been to have the“right number of skilled agents in place at the right time.”
Knowing precisely how many agents to staff for every half-hour of every day to answer inbound
calls was challenging enough.That challenge morphs in complexity when supporting multiple
channels with varying skills and service level objectives.HR,training and quality teams must be
actively involved early in the process to identify skills, recruit and hire as needed, and develop
training programs,templates,and a quality program to support all channels.Collaboration with
IT on the rollout strategy is critical as the technology and contact center must be in lockstep.
WHAT TYPES
OF INTERNAL
RESOURCES
AND SKILLS
ARE NEEDED TO
IMPLEMENT AN
OMNICHANNEL
STRATEGY?
Organizations should not be afraid to reach out and talk
to their customers. Customers crave a good experience
and are often willing to take an active role in their own
customer experience.
— MADELYN GENGELBACH

ANNA CONVERY:
From the company executives to the employees that are handling interactions, there must
be a clear understanding of WHY an omnichannel strategy and what success looks like. Why
is important to the business? Why is it important to customers? And finally, what is each
individual’s responsibility for executing and delivering world-class customer experience… no
matter the channel.
MADELYN GENGELBACH:
Technology and people. That is the absolute and most important thing. Technology can’t
solve it alone. People are the ultimate integration tool, but can’t solve technology problems.
If you have two systems on your screen it is a human integration issue. It used to be—we’ll
just add more people.This is no longer the case.Margins are too tight and we need our agents
to be efficient so they can be freed up to handle the customer and listen instead of juggling
nine screens.We can’t use people to integrate these systems. Do not rush into omnichannel.
Create a system and environment that allows agents to spend time in the most effective way
possible and provide an effortless, standout customer experience.
MICHAEL GREGORIO:
Almost any omnichannel vendor in the market can solve the problems of yesteryear, but few
solve today’s most pressing challenges.
The goal of an omnichannel strategy is not only to provide reactive service to customers as
they move among communication channels while retaining the customers’context,but also to
determine the next best action,information or process to proactively engage with the customer.
This approach is typically referred to as“persistent predictive automation.”It can be thought
of as a concierge service where the organization establishes processes to proactively reach
out to the customers to assist them when there is information or advice to deliver. A holistic
approach like this can often differentiate an organization from the competition.
BRIAN KOMA:
The most important thing for leaders to keep in mind is that it is a journey and not a destina-
tion. You need to identify what your customers are doing today, but also continually monitor
and understand what channels they’re using on a periodic basis.The channels are changing.
Think about the interactions that you’re conducting on your smartphone today,and what you’re
doing with chat and SMS—these are things that you may not have thought possible five years
ago. Who knows what new channels will be added in the next few years? Look at the rise of
wearable technology—there are many different ways for us to interact that we didn’t even think
about several years ago.
If you think you have an omnichannel strategy today,that’s great—but don’t think that it’s going
to stay the same for a long period of time because the technology is changing and people’s
preferences are changing.You have to keep on top of what the channels are, how they change
and how they’re going to evolve.
WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT
THING FOR COMPANY LEADERS TO
UNDERSTAND ABOUT DEVELOPING
AN OMNICHANNEL STRATEGY?
With many products
and services becoming
commodities, providing
an excellent omnichannel
customer experience is the
only way companies can
differentiate themselves.
— MICHAEL GREGORIO

LIZ OSBORN:
First, this is absolutely inevitable. Don’t fight it.You need to figure out how to do it.
Second, it affects your bottom line.You’ve got to do it in order to become competitive.You
need to be looking at how you can make this happen, because your competitors are.
There is a great study byWatermark Consulting (“The 2014 Customer Experience ROI Study”)
that compared seven years of stock performance for customer experience leaders versus
laggards.They found that the leaders increased their stock price by 77% while, for laggards, it
declined by 2.5%. Forrester conducted a similar study. So the data bears it out—if you invest
in this, it does affect your bottom line. You have to be able to present that business case to
your executives.
KEITH PEARCE:
Think about a comprehensive channel approach rather than a point solution.You can get to a
certain level of optimization with a point solution, but that only solves part of the customer’s
problem, and they’re going to continue to interact over other channels.
Sometimes the new channel solution is a very shiny object, but So beware of overinvesting
in it. For instance, would you rather have the best chat point solution or be able to ensure that
you can pass along the information contained in that chat so that the next interaction, no
matter which channel, is informed about that last interaction?
MARILYN SAULNIER:
It must be viewed from the customer experience perspective.Too many omnichannel strategies
fail because they were approached as technology projects, focused on contact avoidance,
assumed a customer desire that did not exist, attempted to drive complex or emotional
interactions to unsuitable channels and a myriad of other reasons all related to lack of due
diligence.This stuff is complex. Don’t underestimate the level of effort required to do it right.
BRAD SNEDEKER:
Omnichannel is ALL about customer service. The focus of omnichannel for company leaders
shouldn’t be the technology behind it, but on servicing the customer. Omnichannel is com-
municating in the mode which a customer is coming to you,and understanding how you should
respond. Agents/staff must be able to provide that service to the customer, and deliver a
consistent service experience regardless of mode.
WHAT IS
THE MOST
IMPORTANT
THING FOR
COMPANY
LEADERS TO
UNDERSTAND
ABOUT
DEVELOPING AN
OMNICHANNEL
STRATEGY?
For us, that’s the future of the contact center—moving from a cost to
a strategic asset to a key component for delivering on the promise of
journey management and bringing innovation to the contact center.
— KEITH PEARCE

PIPELINE PUBLISHING GROUP, INC. PO Box 3467, Annapolis, MD 21403 • (443) 909-6951 • info@contactcenterpipeline.com
Copyright ©2015, Pipeline Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication (including, but not limited to, logos, images, photos, design, graphics and text) may be reproduced or stored in a
retrieval system in any form or by any means without the prior written permission from the publisher.
About Contact Center Pipeline
Contact Center Pipeline is a monthly instructional journal focused on driving business
success through effective contact center direction and decisions. Each issue contains
informative articles, case studies, best practices, research and coverage of trends that
impact the customer experience. Our writers and contributors are well-known industry
experts with a unique understanding of how to optimize resources and maximize the
value the organization provides to its customers.
To learn more, visit: www.contactcenterpipeline.com
Download complete issues, articles, white papers, and more at http://bit.ly/14bq01k
C ONNECT WITH PIPELINE
youtube.com/ccPipeline linkd.in/17M5rKM@SusanHash • @CCPipeline
SUSAN HASH is the Editorial Director of Contact Center Pipeline and blog.contactcenterpipeline.
susan@contactcenterpipeline.com - (206) 552-8831 - @susanhash

contactctrpipe_omni

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (15)

Similar to contactctrpipe_omni

Similar to contactctrpipe_omni (20)

contactctrpipe_omni