Customer experience is no longer a mere transaction; it transcends the entire sales and customer service journey. It can distinguish a business from its competitors — or a poor experience can set your reputation back considerably. However, this experience does not exist in a vacuum. It is intimately tied to the ‘total experience’ — the blend of technology, employee interactions, and the customer journey.
Customers expect to reach companies through a growing range of channels, including phone, email, messaging apps, conversational AI, and social media. Leaders in multichannel customer experience management recognize that customers expect seamless transitions between channels with shared context. Delivering consistent, high-quality support across every touchpoint builds trust and strengthens long-term brand loyalty.
A survey conducted by Gartner Peer Insights found that 55% of respondents feel emotionally connected with a business when they can reach customer care through multiple channels. It’s important to meet customers where they are and back up each channel with quality support. At its core, successful multichannel customer experience management relies on delivering seamless, consistent experiences across every customer touchpoint.
More digital channels mean more options for your customers to self-select how they engage with your brand and provide new ways for your business to reach customers where and how they prefer to be engaged.
What Are the Challenges Facing Multichannel Customer Experience Management?
Every year, new digital channels are being added and expanded to reach customers. But at the same time, roughly half of organizations still do not have specific initiatives in place to address cross-channel customer journeys.
- Fragmented systems and technologies can hinder the total experience due to siloed data, lost context, or an inconsistent brand experience. Legacy Systems/Processes/Tools and Labor Force/Staffing/Agent Performance top the biggest CX operations challenges faced by CX leaders. These deficits are passed on directly to the customer experience.
- A disconnect with the team and the tools or data available can create siloed processes. An insightful multi-national contact center study from Forrester Consulting, commissioned by SuccessKPI, found that 40% of survey respondents have limited success with CCaaS migration efforts, with top reasons flagged as limited internal talent with new tech and complex internal IT landscape. A lack of comprehensive, user-friendly technology can hamper the ability of customer care agents to deliver a superior customer experience.
- A lack of data, clean data, or clarity around data can make it impossible to gain actionable insights in a multi-channel strategy. According to the same Forrester study, 75% of respondents think playbook-based automation and insights to understand the customer journey and drive business outcomes is amongst the top three capabilities in contact center success. CX leaders need solutions that give insights and capabilities to act on the increasing complexity of multichannel customer journeys.
- Undefined goals and responsibilities can create confusion that makes it difficult to spot wins (or failures). 37% of CX leaders reported that critical KPIs have declined or remained the same – we see a link between this and the previous findings which indicated gaps in the CX tech stack and a lack of traction in multi-channel initiatives.
- Finding the right tools takes an understanding of what’s available and which are the best fit. Forrester Consulting also highlighted that 70% of respondents said optimizing the performance of a cloud contact center is critical for business success and foundational to effective multichannel customer experience management. But due to cloud migration complexities, an even larger majority, 79%, indicated that the right cloud toolset is critical to making their cloud contact center perform to its potential.
How Can AI Support My Customer Care Agents and CS Team?
While the focus is often on customer experience regarding cross-channel complexities, it is equally crucial to acknowledge and address the experiences and impacts of both AI and human customer care agents, who are an integral part of the digital revolution.
Agents are the heart of your contact center and the best connectivity you have to the customer. They represent the brand and influence how customers experience it. But human agents must navigate multiple disparate systems and technologies to deliver service, while AI agents face challenges such as attempting to grasp complex human language.
If your team’s experience is fragmented and difficult due to siloed resources and inaccurate outputs, they can’t be effective and may feel overwhelmed. Similarly, if your AI agents don’t have the right access or get unclean data, then you will get a poor output that can hurt the customer experience.
To build an effective strategy, we have to think about how these worlds combine: customers, employees, technology, AI, and digital experiences.
A holistic approach to multichannel customer experience management combines these elements, recognizing that the smoothness of agent experience with advancing technologies will directly affect the quality of the customer experience. Your tools need to work for your team (not replace them!) — and your team needs to know how to utilize those tools so they are as productive as possible. This requires a strategy that incorporates:
- Boundaries and responsibilities
- Access and information
- Training and team support
- Visibility into the customer’s experience and journey
- Clarity around your employees’ needs and workflows
The Solution for Multichannel Customer Experience Management
Addressing these challenges with the right cloud-native toolset and experience-minded partners can power competitive advantage and outcomes-focused digital transformation. Moving your contact center tools and technology—your experience engine—into the cloud with the right toolset provides the opportunity for many incredible outcomes:
- For care agents, you can harness toolsets to simplify navigation and management of customer interactions.
- For customers, you can enhance the overall quality and speed of service.
- Cloud-native toolsets make it easier to pivot or scale in any direction, unlike their legacy premise predecessors.
- Toolsets that harness AI can provide instant insights on real-time customer conversations across multiple channels, along with efficiency and advantages that can boost experience at every level.
- Implement automation to move your operation from manual quality monitoring to streamlined processes. Quality monitoring (QM) spans 1-3% of interactions and is critical to the individual experience.
- Achieve an actionable understanding of the Total Experience journey (the cornerstone of multichannel customer experience management) by integrating with other key application data for a 360-degree ‘single source of truth’ view of agents, customers, and operations.
Empower Your Multichannel Customer Experience Management Strategy
Wherever you are on your cloud journey, it is time to drive your contact center to its full potential and equip your team with optimization tools that support modern multichannel customer experience management and help you make the most of your technology and resources.
SuccessKPI is a revolutionary insight & action platform that uses AI, analytics, data aggregation, and automation to remove the obstacles that contact center agents, managers, and executives face in providing a great customer experience. SuccessKPI’s platform and ACT’s Total Experience solutions are helping customers get cross-channel under control.
