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Customers are increasingly turning to digital channels as their first point of contact with companies. Research shows that customers engage an average of nine channels to browse inventory, seek advice, and make purchases.
Despite adding more channels to accommodate customers, most businesses take an inside-out view of the multichannel experience, leaving a wide gap between what customers expect and what companies deliver. Take SMS, for example. A recent study on the State of the Customer Service Experience found that, while 71% of businesses believe that they’re making it easy for customers to resolve issues via text, only 55% of customers felt the same way.
Closing the gap between expectations and reality requires an omnichannel approach no matter where the journey starts. The truth is that customers can’t always get their needs met through their channel of choice. Applying analytics to the data captured from each touchpoint will help you understand your first-contact resolution performance across channels, pinpoint where the breakdowns occur, and make informed decisions about how and where to apply your resources to deliver a more seamless experience.
Understand how customers use each channel
Most customers utilize a rich set of touchpoints to interact with companies. Aligning these touchpoints and channels that customers encounter is critical to sharing essential customer information with agents. It also ensures that every part of the organization consistently delivers on the customer experience vision.
The real value of omnichannel analytics is that it can help you understand what’s happening at each stage in the customer journey—from initial contact through purchase and beyond. So what will help you create a single view of the customer journey?
Understand who your customers are. Unify customer data— such as account information, past purchases, interaction history, and communication preferences—into a centralized repository for a 360-degree view of their entire experience with your company.
Understand how your channels are used—both from the customer’s and company’s perspectives. For example, consider:
- Which contact center team has responsibility for each channel?
- Which channels are most actively used?
- Which CRM systems, databases, and applications support each channel?
- Which channels are specific to particular products or customer segments?
- Which interactions take place within each channel? For example, typical chat interactions might include password reset, checking order status, order cancellations, and returns.
- What do customers expect to be able to accomplish in each channel? Are their expectations being met?
- Are there interaction redundancies across channels? Which channels are the most and least effective from an FCR standpoint?
Apply analytics-driven quality management for a holistic view of omnichannel CX
Interaction analytics delivers more in-depth insights and data to complete the omnichannel CX picture. Best-in-class solutions include several innovative capabilities to help you analyze what’s happening at each customer journey stage and identify barriers and opportunities to improve the customer experience.
For instance, customer intent detection provides a highly accurate and deeper understanding of the drivers for every interaction. Intent data helps you understand what the customer is really thinking by surfacing both the primary and underlying (unspoken) reasons why they contacted you.
Analyzing intent can reveal opportunities to improve the omnichannel customer experience, such as:
- Routine live-agent transactions that can be handled more efficiently by self-service options.
- Recurring complex call types that may require more targeted training for agents.
- Answers to frequent customer service inquiries that can be added to an online knowledge base.
To ensure that your agents are engaging with customers appropriately within each channel and are able to fully resolve their issues, Automated Scorecards can be easily customized to uncover patterns and trends in your agents’ performance by channel and across channels for a more consistent customer experience.
Sentiment Analysis makes it possible to understand feelings and emotions expressed on both sides of the conversation— the agent’s and the customer’s—so you can quickly address bad experiences and zero in on the channel touchpoints or handoffs that create the most friction for customers.
Unified Analytics can bring all your insights together by overlaying channel data with intelligence from your agents, customers, operations, and more for a 360-degree view of the customer experience presented in intuitive and compelling visualizations for informed decision-making.
Omnichannel analytics is essential to stay competitive in today’s digital landscape
Service delivery channels are continuously expanding and evolving with customer expectations. Omnichannel analytics is a critical tool that can help companies transform the structured and unstructured data captured from multiple touchpoints into actionable information to create a more cohesive customer experience.
LiveVox SpeechIQ® with Quality Management seamlessly integrates omnichannel interaction analytics with robust quality management tools to give organizations 100% visibility and understanding of the voice, email, SMS, and chat conversations handled by their teams, as well as the ability to take action and improve contact center performance.