Are You Ready for an Omnichannel World?

This week, we’ll be at Enterprise Connect in Orlando where omnichannel customer journey management will take center stage for Genesys. We’re kicking things off today with the launch of the next generation of the Genesys Customer Experience Platform. The platform is truly a game changer for customer experience, enabling companies to deliver true omnichannel customer journeys. Read the announcement here.

The Shift to Omnichannel Journeys

Today’s customers engage with companies in multichannel and multitouchpoint journeys, which they pause and resume over time. For example, according to the Corporate Executive Board (CEB):

• 58% of callers have visited the web before calling, and
• 34% of callers are on the web while talking to a rep

For a customer to complete a single task – buy a product, answer a question, understand a bill – they often require multiple, disconnected interactions with an organization. When a customer needs assisted service to supplement self-service, they typically must start over when they engage with the organization.  In the case of voice, it’s calling a contact center, using an IVR, and explaining their issue. In the case of chat, it’s starting a dialog with an agent without any context to their journey. These time-consuming and disconnected ‘channel shift’ experiences are one of the leading causes of missed sales opportunities and high operating expense for organizations – as well as a major source of frustration for costumers.

Omnichannel Journey Management

While most organizations today support multichannel customer engagement – voice, email, chat – they are challenged to bring it all together to manage an omnichannel customer journey, which includes:

• Sharing context across all digital and voice channels and touchpoints (omnichannel context)
• Synchronizing multiple channels simultaneously within a single interaction (multimodality)
• Directing journeys or interactions in step-by-step sequences (orchestration)
• Managing the lifecycle of the customer journey – design, orchestrate, monitor and tune – to provide a personalized and context-appropriate experience for each customer (journey lifecycle management)

Omnichannel customer journey management combines omnichannel context, multimodality, orchestration, and journey lifecycle management to provide a great customer experience with compelling business outcomes, and leading organizations are embracing it for competitive advantage.

As organizations embrace omnichannel journey management:

• A customer can start a product search or initiate troubleshooting in mobile, web, or social while simultaneously calling into the contact center. Based on this knowledge, the organization can personalize the IVR treatment so that the customer connects directly with a skilled agent who has full context of the customer, the interaction, what the customer is doing on the digital channels, and of previous engagements. The organization can further synchronize the voice and digital sessions together to create a rich multimodal experience.

• A customer can start a credit card application in a mobile app or on the web, and call into the contact center at a later time. Based on this knowledge, the organization can personalize the IVR treatment so that the customer connects directly with a skilled agent who has full context of the customer and of previous engagements. The customer resumes their journey right where they left off on the previous channel.

• A customer can start a service request in mobile, web, or social self-service. The organization can add chat, co-browse, or video for richer customer engagement or can schedule an appointment leveraging voice or video at a later time.

• A customer who calls into an IVR can be offered visual assistance from the website or mobile app for a richer multimodal experience.

• A customer can be proactively notified of a late shipment and confirm the new delivery time, with an option to connect directly or via callback to an agent or the responsible sales representative for any changes or questions.

Omnichannel journey management enables organizations to provide a consistent and connected experience over each and every channel and touchpoint — whether self-directed or with an agent – across all customer journeys. Organizations need to shift from single channel, single department solutions to organization-wide solutions.

The new era of omnichannel journey management is driving a refresh of customer engagement solutions within the contact center and across all customer touchpoints including websites, mobile apps and stores. The refresh spans all departments including marketing, sales, service and finance. Organizations can quickly get started by refreshing single touchpoints with solutions that will scale to span all other customer touchpoints when they are ready.

Learn how the next generation of the Genesys Customer Experience Platform helps you bring it all together here.

Genesys will be hosting a series of global webinars discussing the various aspects of omnichannel journey management.  The first in this series, Redefining the Agent Desktop for an Omnichannel Customer Experience will be on April 1^st. You can register for the session in your timezone here.

If you are at Enterprise Connect this week, check us out at booth 429. We’ll be demonstrating the omnichannel journey management capabilities of the Genesys Customer Experience Platform. Engage with our experts to take a deeper look into how it can help you. We’ll also be participating in a range of panels and sessions.