Taking a Leap Beyond the Traditional CTI with an Omnichannel Strategy

Exceptional customer service is the backbone of any company yearning for revenue growth. A significant part of this good service stems from having seamless access to customer data, however, the current competitive age of digitalization demands more than simple telephony functionalities.

Especially in today’s digitalized world, customers expect an excellent brand experience regardless of the channel they choose to communicate on (email, website, social media, live chat, etc). Deploying unique customer service across all channels of communication can help boost customer satisfaction and improve brand loyalty. As of today, there are umpteen platforms available to assist your agents in customer engagement.

Leveraging the capabilities of Omnichannel services in a connected environment can help you get beyond traditional telephony.

CTI & CRM: A Connected Experience

Once you enter the sales funnel, a vital step is to make your sales team reach out to customers through phone calls.
According to Salesforce, 92% of interactions happen through a phone call.

Now, for a good engagement, salespeople would benefit immensely if they could access all lead information on the CRM while simultaneously interacting on the phone. This would require providing them with unified access to customer information, that too just a few clicks away. One way to achieve this is by adopting an effective computer telephony integration that can help cut down interaction time between two parties without bringing down the quality. Here’s how:

Improve Customer Interactions

Integrating CRM like Salesforce, with a telephony system, empowers agents to know customers even before they utter a “hello”. A unified display of customer details, as stored in the CRM, helps equip agents in handling customers better. Secondly, the agents do not have to constantly toggle between the telephony system and CRM to understand the customer’s requirements.

Optimize Agent Performance

Creating a seamless customer experience stems from simplifying contact center processes for the agent and offering them seamless information access even with other departments. CTI capabilities equip agents by

• Enabling them to place and receive calls directly from within the CRM
• Preventing manual dialing of contacts with a click-to-dial feature
• Workflow automation with customization to save wrap-up information automatically in the telephony and the CRM

Cost-effective

Integration of telephony with a CRM system does not require expensive hardware to be in place, especially if the deployment is on the cloud. Also, the human resource cost spent in training agents comes down to a bare minimum, because integration enables the utilization of a single license to train any number of agents, rather than buying a separate license for each of your agents.

Going Beyond Plain Telephony

“15 years ago the average consumer typically used two touch-points when buying an item and only 7% regularly used more than four. Today consumers use an average of almost six touch-points with nearly 50% regularly using more than four” – Marketing Week

This explains why today’s mobile-inclined customers would like to explore more communication channels vis-a-vis connecting on a call alone. Thus, to make your customers feel connected to your brand, you would have to offer them value, not just numbers.

An omnichannel strategy addresses the needs of the ever-mobile customer effectively, by integrating various modes of communication to deliver a more engaging customer experience. By enabling a seamless transition between channels like social, chat, email, WhatsApp, voice, etc it makes contextual conversations a reality.

Enabling Omnichannel Capabilities Using CTI

In order to deliver a multichannel engagement, it’s important to opt for a platform that addresses business needs with a single solution without making support quality take a hit. One way could be to opt for omnichannel services available as part of the CRM. For example, the Salesforce omni-channel solution extends the omnichannel capabilities in the CRM itself. Another way could be to opt for a contact center system with Email & Chat capabilities as part of its services, for example, Genesys Cloud Contact Center.

Here are a few benefits of delivering an omnichannel experience to customers:

Improved Customer Insights

A connected experience is the USP of an omnichannel strategy. By following customer footprint and intent across multiple channels, it brings data relevant to your business and customers to the agent’s fingertips. Embedded with the CTI, omnichannel capabilities enable agents to initiate contextual conversations across channels and expand the scope of personalization for greater brand loyalty.

Social Listening

Social media has carved a niche for itself in terms of brand-building and its importance in delivering an omnichannel experience cannot be ignored. 47% of respondents according to a survey by Statista Research indicates they have a more favourable view of brands that respond to customer service queries on social media.

Proactively collecting data from social mentions and broader customer conversations can help agents pull insights and deliver what the customer wants. This sort of social monitoring helps avert a situation where you might miss out on a huge chunk of data that doesn’t mention your brand name exclusively.

Better Customer Retention

Apart from the increased number of conversations through multiple channels, query resolution also significantly improves owing to the omnichannel capabilities within the CTI. When the customer support executives are aligned with the brand objective, resolving customer queries becomes much easier and more efficient. Secondly, the connected experience lets agents know in real time about the customer experience. This helps organizations to rework strategies for maximum customer retention.

Expanded Reach

By limiting the number of channels, organizations pay the huge cost of lesser engagement opportunities and ultimately lesser revenues. By strengthening your CTI with a multi-channel engagement strategy, agents can cater to a wide range of audiences, especially the digital generation that prefers social media as their go-to mode of communication. Not addressing your customers on social networks can spiral into abandonment pretty quickly. This wider reach helps customers avail the flexibility of usage and faster responses.

Enhanced Brand Accountability

Increased gateways of communication bring greater transparency into your actions as an organization. Brands have an image to maintain and if you nail your omnichannel strategy, you might be close to hitting a bounty in your organic reach too. Word of mouth is still the most reliable marketing strategy. While CTI is a competent tool in helping agents resolve queries faster, aided with omnichannel services, it gets a competitive edge. Thus, delivering quality services, and making them known to people makes brand accountability a given.

Traditionally, CTI is about integrating your telephony with the CRM for a seamless customer experience. But the customer presence is not limited to calls only. With multiple channels at their behest, they should be able to interact with agents from any channel they want. The extension of multi-channel services, by threading together email and chat capabilities in the current telephony system, can render organizations the intuitive edge that discerns them from the majority of the competition. So transforming your customer experience is now just as simple as using a telephony system.