Surveying the Omnichannel Landscape

Omnichannel is a word that’s mentioned often in customer support circles and it’s fascinating to see what existing cloud-based platforms like Zendesk and Salesforce are doing to make this a reality. You may want to check out the recent announcement from Zendesk on this topic and also Salesforce’s decision to discontinue Desk.com and transition to Service Cloud Lightning by March 2020. Furthermore, players like Kustomer and Gladly are entering the market with new, fresh offerings worth keeping a close eye on.I recently collaborated on an article with Kustomer to explore some of the benefits and possibilities of omnichannel. One of the benefits is the ability to more completely hear the voice of the customer. Whereas in traditional tools a customer’s email, chat, and phone history might potentially live in three (or more) disparate systems, imagine how powerful it would be to have the complete customer history in one central place. A common practice on many support teams is to search the customer’s history in all of these system to make sure there aren’t duplicate interactions.

Couple this with customer survey data, sentiment prediction that’s fueled by machine learning, and other insights about customer orders, shipments, billing, etc and we’ve made the customer and agent experience better and more efficient. The goal of omnichannel is ultimately to put everything pertaining to each customer and their issue at hand in a central place in a way that makes sense — and it’s exciting to see what different vendors are coming up with.

Also, if you’re looking for some additional listening on the topic of customer experience, check out this recent interview I participated in with Kustomer and my good friend, Nate Brown from the new customer experience Slack community, CX Accelerator.