How businesses connect with customers has radically changed over the past few years.
Instead of in-person window shopping, we scroll through our social media feeds from the comfort of the couch. Instead of bringing in a broken product for in-store repair, we chat with an online support agent or watch a video tutorial to see if we can fix it ourselves. Instead of writing a company to tell them how much we love them, we tag them on social media or leave them a glowing online review.
This is omnichannel customer engagement in action: the ability to communicate with businesses on our favorite voice or digital channel–even switching between communication channels–without missing a beat.
Read on to learn more about what omnichannel customer engagement is, why it matters, how to implement it, and more.
- Overview
- Why It's Important
- Benefits
- Challenges & Best Practices
- How to Create a Strategy
- Examples of Uses
- Tools and Technologies
- Next Steps
What Is Omnichannel Customer Engagement?
Omnichannel customer engagement is a marketing and communication strategy that creates a familiar, consistent, and cohesive customer experience across all of a company’s available communication channels and touchpoints.
Omnichannel customer engagement is about maintaining consistency throughout the entire customer journey–even when customers switch between communication channels, re-engage with your support team after a few days of silence, or contact you from a different device.
The goal of omnichannel engagement is continuity, regardless of customer intent, communication channel, customer lifecycle stage, or which agent is assisting the client.
In short: no matter when, where, how, or why customers and businesses connect, omnichannel customer engagement provides a unified experience informed by past interactions and free from communication silos.
Why Is Omnichannel Customer Engagement Important?
Omnichannel customer engagement is important because it ensures businesses meet consumer expectations of a consistent, recognizable customer experience across multiple communication channels and throughout the entire customer journey. It also:
Centers Customer Preferences
Omnichannel customer engagement puts your customers in control. Customers can connect with your business on their preferred channel, instead of being limited to the one or two channels you provide. This level of flexibility shows you care about customer preferences, and that you’re willing to meet customers where they’re at–not where you want them to be.
Widens Your Customer Base
Different demographics are drawn to different communication channels. For example, most Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) prefer to communicate with businesses via email, while most members of Gen Z (born 199-2012) would rather connect with brands on social media.[*]
The more communication channels you have, the larger and more demographically diverse your customer base. Omnichannel engagement introduces your business to customers you wouldn’t have converted if you’d stuck to just one or two channels.
Offers Detailed Customer Insights
Omnichannel customer engagement isn’t just a strategy to help you get more customers, but also a way to get to know your current customers on a much deeper level. Collecting and analyzing customer data from multiple channels and touchpoints streamlines the market segmentation process and makes it easier to provide a personalized omnichannel customer experience. Omnichannel data collection helps businesses identify trends in customer behavior, anticipate customer needs, respond quickly to common pain points or gaps in the customer journey, and improve omnichannel marketing strategies.
What Are the Benefits of an Omnichannel Approach?
Taking an omnichannel approach to customer engagement and support increases customer retention rates, improves the agent experience, and eliminates common customer frustrations that lead to churn. Omnichannel communication makes it faster, easier, and more convenient for customers to connect with your business. It also builds brand recognition, makes customers feel valued, and increases consumer spending–all while providing business owners with granular insights that continually optimize the customer experience.
Higher Customer Retention
Omnichannel engagement makes the support process more efficient, shortens customer buying cycles, and gives agents the tools they need to provide personalized service. That’s why, while companies without an omnichannel strategy in place retain only 33% of their customers, businesses that properly leverage omnichannel engagement have a customer retention rate of 89%.[*] An increased customer retention rate lowers operating costs, increases upselling opportunities, and boosts CSAT scores. Happy, repeat customers transform into loyal brand ambassadors who recommend your products and services to their networks.
Better Agent Experience
Nearly 50% of contact center managers cite increased agent absenteeism and high turnover rates as their biggest business challenges.[*] Overburdened employees, irate customers, inefficient scheduling, and a lack of quality customer self-service options all increase agent attrition–but omnichannel customer engagement can help.
Omnichannel solutions streamline customer-agent communication across channels into a unified agent inbox, giving team members instant access to complete conversation histories, CRM data, account information, and more without app switching. Admins can create a searchable internal knowledge base or leverage Agent Assist for automated next-best-action suggestions to agents, ensuring a consistent experience across channels.
Because customer service requests are spread out across channels, individual agents aren’t overburdened. In-call CRM screen pops make providing contextual, personalized support a breeze. Forecasting tools optimize agent schedules across channels, eliminating overstaffing and understaffing while ensuring each shift contains agents with different skill sets.
Increased Consumer Spending
Providing an omnichannel experience has been proven to increase conversions and boost individual consumer spending. Businesses leveraging omnichannel customer engagement see annual revenue increase by nearly 10%, while brands without an omnichannel strategy see annual revenue grow by just 3.4%.[*]
Consumer spending especially increases when businesses establish a link between in-person and online shopping. 67% of customers who choose the “Buy Online, Pick Up In Store” option when shopping online add extra items to their cart, and 51% of American shoppers are more likely to make a purchase when they can buy it online and return it in-store.[*]
Effective Market Segmentation
Omnichannel customer engagement gives businesses detailed insight into how customer behavior differs across channels, optimizing market segmentation strategies and personalizing product recommendations. 80% of businesses implementing market segmentation see increased sales.[*] What’s more, 78% of consumers say they’re more likely to repurchase from–and recommend–businesses that personalize the customer experience.[*]
Omnichannel Customer Engagement: Challenges and Best Practices
Here, we review the top challenges of implementing omnichannel customer engagement and provide actionable solutions to these common problems.
The Challenge: A Fragmented Customer Experience
While omnichannel communication gives your customers more ways to connect to your business, implementing too many channels without proper preparation and agent training creates a fragmented customer experience that’s inconsistent across channels. Without continuity between channels, customers end up repeating themselves, wait time increases, agents are overburdened and stressed, and customer satisfaction plummets.
The Solution: Create A Unified Customer Experience
To create a unified customer experience, determine the three communication channels that are most popular with your customers, and focus your efforts there. Scale channels gradually, one at a time–avoid adding too many new channels all at once. Review historical data and conduct surveys to ensure any channels you do add are ones your customers actually use. Consider the best possible use cases for each specific channel, and leverage from there. For example, while SMS texting is perfect for sending automated appointment reminders or shipping updates, it’s not the best channel for providing highly detailed technical support.
Shared inboxes are agent-facing dashboards that streamline complete omnichannel conversation histories into a unified dashboard. Shared inboxes prevent customer repetition, sync conversations across channels in real-time, and let agents respond to all customer support/service requests regardless of channel. Admins can assign top agents specific interactions, and available agents can seamlessly switch between channels based on real-time contact volumes. This creates a consistent customer experience across channels, and keeps wait times low.
The Challenge: Data Silos
While omnichannel communication gives your business access to a huge amount of analytics and consumer data, data silos lead to inaccurate or incomplete reports, increased operating costs, and improper staffing. Agents don’t have access to complete conversation histories, and managers can’t monitor customer sentiment and agent performance across channels. Most of all, data silos make it impossible for businesses to get a complete, 360-degree view of their customer base and the overall customer journey.
The Solution: Streamline Analytics
Most contact center solutions automatically streamline omnichannel analytics into a single interface and let admins filter and monitor interactions by channel. If you’re using several different analytics tools, integrate as many as you can or consider upgrading to an omnichnnal platform. Consider AI-powered conversational analytics tools, which offer real-time and historical speech and text analytics across channels.
The Challenge: Low Conversion and Engagement Rates
Giving your customers more channels to shop and engage with your business on doesn’t guarantee increased conversions and higher engagement. When engagement remains low despite adopting an omnichannel strategy, profits go down, employee engagement falls, and you may have to tighten your budget.
The Solution: Automated Marketing and Proactive Engagement
Respond to low or stagnant conversion rates by implementing omnichannel proactive engagement strategies like using outbound chatbots to make automated product/service suggestions to website visitors or sending out reminder text messages to existing customers when it’s time to renew a subscription. Proactive engagement is about anticipating customer expectations and needs, reaching out to them before they reach out to you, and suggesting products each market segment is the most likely to be. Couple this with automated marketing strategies like email cart reminders, SMS sales alerts with coupon codes, and more to increase engagement and conversions.
The Challenge: Understaffing and Overstaffing
Understaffing increases customer hold times and exhausts agents, while overstaffing drives up operating costs and increases agent idle time. Creating a balanced schedule that ensures each channel has enough available agents to provide quality customer service–without having to hire additional agents–is a huge challenge for omnichannel contact centers.
The Solution: Omnichannel Forecasting
Omnichannel forecasting evaluates historical and real-time contact volume data across channels and leverages predictive analytics to forecast future contact volumes. Admins can access automated optimized schedules for specific channels, adjust schedules in real-time, monitor contact volume trends, and better prepare for peak times. Forecasting tools come with a variety of customizable algorithms, and even ensure each shift/channel has enough available agents with a diversity of skill sets.
The Challenge: Consumer Trust and Privacy
While the majority of customers are excited about personalized marketing messages and support, there is such a thing as over-personalization. About 42% of consumers don’t think companies are using their data responsibly, and many are concerned about how much access businesses have to their personal information.[*] Over-personalisation can feel creepy, off-putting, and destroy consumer trust in your business.
The Solution: Opt-Ins and Communication Preferences
First, always look for WFM and contact center solutions that redact sensitive customer data, offer custom data retention policies, and use automation for TCPA compliance. Since close to 90% of customers say they want companies to ask their permission before collecting sensitive data, make your opt-in and opt-out process as simple as possible–and let customers set their own notification preferences.[*]
The Challenge: Increased Handle Times
In most cases, implementing omnichannel solutions decreases average handle times and makes customers support/sales processes more efficient. Sometimes–especially for smaller contact centers that can’t afford to hire more agents–handle times increase when new channels are initially added. Customers must wait longer for available agents, support teams are forced to rush through customer interactions, and support quality decreases.
The Solution: Omnichannel Self-Service
Implementing automated customer self-service options across channels is an essential part of effective omnichannel customer engagement. AI-powered chatbots, Conversational IVR, online knowledge bases, and automated SMS or social media messages all enable 24/7 omnichannel customer self-service while freeing up live agents. Omnichannel routing automatically connects customers to the best available live agent regardless of channel, creating a seamless experience. Agents even have time to review customer conversations with automated support chatbots before taking over the interaction.
How To Create An Effective Omnichannel Customer Engagement Strategy
Below, we’ve outlined a step-by-step process for successful omnichannel customer engagement:
1. Research Your Customer Base
First, identify your customer base’s favorite communication channels and determine if they usually access them on desktop and mobile devices. Use historical analytics to evaluate how contact volumes and buying patterns shift across channels throughout the year, and segment your current clientele into different buyer personas and customer profiles.
2. Conduct Customer Journey Mapping
Once you’ve chosen your channels, integrate them into a single interface and conduct omnichannel customer journey mapping. Evaluate how different customers behave across channels based on their intent (researching your company, buying products/services, seeking customer support, etc.) Doing so makes it easier to identify roadblocks, find key touchpoints, and determine which channel is best suited for a specific intent.
3. Build an Omnichannel Internal Knowledge Base
Creating an internal knowledge base with agent scripts, canned responses, communication guidelines, product guides, and more is the best way to ensure consistent messaging and a unified customer experience across channels. Ensure the knowledge base is well-organized, frequently updated, and searchable. Tools like Agent Assist use Natural Language Processing and machine learning to evaluate customer intent and make automated, in-conversation next-best-action suggestions to agents from knowledge base data. Automated chatbots and virtual agents also integrate with your knowledge base, providing high-value and accurate customer support without involving a live agent.
4. Train Agents and Optimize Staffing Strategies
Leverage Workforce Management and forecasting tools to optimize the training, onboarding, and staffing process. Create and assign custom training modules, use call recordings to create playlists of successful interactions, and monitor live customer-agent conversations, jumping in when necessary. Optimize agent schedules and keep all channels adequately staffed by using different forecasting algorithms, enabling adherence monitoring, and allowing agents to bid and swap shifts.
5. Review Analytics and Feedback, Adjust Accordingly
Once you’ve implemented your omnichannel engagement strategy, monitoring key metrics and identifying areas for improvement is essential. Create customer surveys, use performance management tools like live coaching and agent scorecards, and identify trends in agent and customer behavior via conversational analytics. Insights from analytics optimize agent schedules, omnichannel routing strategies, IVR menus, chatbots, marketing team strategies, and more across different channels.
Examples of Companies Using Omnichannel Strategies
Below are three real-world examples of successful omnichannel customer communication:
Home Depot
Home improvement giant Home Depot offers superior omnichannel customer service, providing a variety of agent-led and self-service options. Customers can reach out via phone, SMS, email, chatbot, live chat, review online FAQ pages, or shop in-store.
Using the automated website chatbot, users can check product inventory levels at nearby stores, schedule at-home deliveries, or have items shipped directly to the store for in-person pickup at a later date. If products are unavailable, Home Depot makes alternate recommendations. All users receive email order confirmations, but can also opt to receive order updates via SMS. It even provides a “Visualizer” tool to let customers see what flooring or other decor options will look like in their homes.
Ulta Beauty
Cosmetics and skincare retailer Ulta is another example of omnichannel engagement done right. Their mobile app lets users review their customer loyalty program status, apply coupons, check product inventory at nearby stores, and review recommended products.
Ulta sends segmented marketing emails, offers SMS notifications, and makes it easy to connect with customer support via in-app chat messaging, or email. Best of all, it provides virtual skin analysis, virtual makeup and hair color try-ons, and even an online foundation shade-matching tool.
eBay
Online auctioneer and e-commerce site eBay also provides excellent omnichannel engagement. Users receive custom SMS/email notifications about watched items, seller offers, sales, or new listings that might interest them. All sellers have access to the on-demand customer and seller knowledge base (shown below) with tutorials, best practice guides, and more.
Customer support is available via 24/7 chatbot, voice calling, or email. Users can message other sellers directly, ask for discounts or make offers on an item’s listing, and leave or read verified reviews from a seller’s past customers.
Tools and Technologies for Omnichannel Customer Engagement
The most important tools to add to your tech stack for effective omnichannel communication are:
Omnichannel Contact Center Software
Omnichannel contact center software enables agent-led support and customer self-service across voice and digital channels. Admins can configure AI-powered website chatbots, use IVR to direct voice callers to the best available agent, and leverage Agent Assist for automated in-call agent support. Conversational speech and text analytics offer insight into live and historical customer sentiment and intent, popular support topics, call volume trends, and channel usage.
CRM Solutions
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software collects essential customer data like contact information, current CSAT score, omnichannel conversation histories, past/open orders, shipping/tracking updates, account value, agent notes, and more. CRM systems like Salesforce, Zendesk, and HubSpot integrate with popular call and contact center software to provide agents with real-time, in-conversation access to relevant customer data.
Workforce Management Platforms
Workforce Management (WFM) solutions provide tools that optimize the employee experience, monitor agent performance, and improve the scheduling process. Omnichannel forecasting tools use predictive analytics and historical data to create suggested agent schedules that can be updated in real-time according to current contact volumes. Agents can request PTO, swap or bid on shifts, and review performance scores and assigned training modules from anywhere. Workforce Optimization (WFO) tools like gamification and wallboards increase employee engagement, recognize and reward top performers, and boost productivity.
Implementing Omnichannel Customer Engagement: Next Steps
How can your business implement a successful omnichannel customer engagement strategy? The first step is to evaluate your current business communication tools and determine if they enable truly omnichannel communication, or if they limit your business and customers to siloed multi-channel messaging.
Look for all-in-one omnichannel customer engagement platforms that streamline voice and digital communication into a unified dashboard, integrate with your third-party marketing and CRM tools, provide custom real-time and historical analytics, and include workforce management features that optimize agent scheduling and employee training.
Not sure where to start?
Our guide to the top omnichannel contact center software gives you a quick overview of popular providers, key features and integrations, pricing, and user experience.
