Author Archives: Hiren Pancholi

One of the necessary parts of any business is communication. In African countries, as businesses are growing at the fastest rate and the economy is also moving upside down, businesses have started investing in the top technology tools to support the growth of their business. At this time, it is essential for these businesses to focus on communication and collaboration to stay connected with investors, partners, vendors, suppliers, etc.

Traditional communication tools like telephones, cell phones, etc. have several limitations and businesses cannot restrict themselves to those conventional business phone systems. Thus, businesses in Africa have to take a leap to the best technology driven communication tools that are trending not only in African regions but worldwide. Unified communication platforms are trending across the globe with the increasing demand for unified communication among customers, prospective clients, investors, and more.

Unified communication is no more a magnificent option to have for businesses in Africa. It is indeed a must have element in a business to grow and meet business communication needs. In multiple ways, a unified communication solution can benefit businesses in African countries.

What is unified communication?

It is a modern day communication instrument, which allows business professionals to use combined access to all major communication tools from anywhere, at any time they need. Unified communication lets businesses store all interactions in a single point system to make all business communication and operation quite easy and straightforward.

Unified communication and collaboration often define the progressive and modern nature of a business in Africa. UC&C stands for Unified Communication and Collaboration. It is a modern way of communication, which has various advantages to offer.

What is a unified communication system?

A unified communication solution is a platform that integrates all major communication channels and business communication modes within a single system. This includes the following communication channels:

•         Voice calling
•         Instant messaging
•         Conference calling
•         Screen sharing
•         Video callings
•         Social media
•         WhatsApp
•         Integrated business apps
•         Texting
•         And more

The major goal of unified communication platforms is to provide an integrated solution to all business users that are accessible from anywhere, at any time. Moreover, if a business person initiates an interaction on one communication channel and after some hours or days, communicates via another mode of communication, the platform will give the same user experience.

Similar to several other countries, countries in Africa, Unified Communication & Collaboration tools have started growing in popularity. The reason behind this trend is the bouquet of benefits it has to offer.

Top ways unified communication software benefits businesses in Africa

1. Excellent call management

Voice and video calls are commonly used in African businesses. Businesses in Africa work with multiple vendors, suppliers, partners, and more in multiple countries. It makes it difficult to manage calls from these different business associates. The systems with unified communication channel integrations help in managing these calls. The best solutions for unified communication consist of several features for effective call management. Some of the most popular features of this platform are automatic call distribution, interactive voice response, call monitoring, call transfer, call forwarding, and more. This helps African countries to remove the burden of managing calls manually.

2. Improve the efficiency of business communication and collaboration

As business and the economy grow, the need and demand for reliable communication and collaboration also grow. Thanks to a unified communication system that incorporates calling, messaging, texting, and even conferencing within a single system. It makes it easier for Africa to keep track of all interactions among all associates. Moreover, the same system can be used for a sales conversation, customer care, and even to give a live demo of the product. This helps in keeping records that can be referred to whenever needed to personalize conversations and lead them in a favorable direction.

These tools are effective not only to bridge the communication gap but also to encourage uninterrupted collaboration. Business representatives and team members can collaborate to brainstorm, discuss, make decisions, conduct board meetings, and have all other types of business conversations. This makes the remote working model indeed lively and reliable in countries like South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia, Uganda, and more.

3. Optimize business operations

The unified communication platforms are loaded with amazing features to help businesses in Africa. One of the major benefits of a system supporting unified communication is that it helps in providing automation features. Automation can help in streamlining operations related to prospecting, sales, customer care, customer relationship management, investor and partnership relationship building, and more. Unified communication also helps in defining, monitoring, and optimizing different operations to improve the overall impact.

4. Excellent customer and partner satisfaction

A unified communication system not only provides the integrated system with all communication channels, but it also provides integration of different business apps. In fact, an expert unified communication software provider company can integrate any third party app or software with a unified communication solution. This can provide a holistic view of all interactions carried out by a business with a customer or partner or even a vendor and supplier. The integrated system gives a complete context to business representatives while having conversations. They can lead context driven conversations.

These solutions have autonomous features for clients so they can self serve themselves. This can augment the customer experience and partner satisfaction because they don’t need to wait too long for African business representatives to respond. Moreover, they can also check their own records and take autonomous actions to speed up various operations. This saves time for clients and partners, as well as business resources.

5. Reduce expenses

Automation, unified communication, and other amazing features help in directly reducing expenses. Businesses in Africa don’t need to manage and maintain individual business systems such as CRM, IP PBX, payroll management, conferencing solutions, etc. A holistic system and its powerful features reduce the cost of ongoing maintenance, monitoring, and management. Moreover, automation and similar features further help in reducing expenses. A unified communication system can be hosted over cloud platforms. This can further reduce the expenses of physical space, servers, and more. Some cloud platforms provide a “pay as you go” model.

All these advantages of using a unified communication solution reduce expenses and help in saving funds. These funds can be reinvested in the business to make some more vital business advancements.

Concluding notes

UC&C platforms are built to meet the growing and rapidly changing business communication and collaboration needs of African businesses. Not only big enterprises, but even SMEs in Africa can take advantage of these platforms. It helps them build reliable external and internal communication strategies. It also helps in leveraging several other advantages like better business positioning, branding, boosted agent productivity, access to actionable insight, and more.

We have been benefiting African countries with our excellent unified communication platforms. One of our most popular platforms in this sphere is our DialShree: call center solution. It supports all modern communication channels and can integrate other business communication application integration, too. We have been meeting the business needs of businesses of all sizes in Africa. This has given us the required skills and experience to meet business needs. Moreover, we also provide recommendations based on our experience with businesses in Africa.

To know more about our UC&C offerings and services, book a demo now!

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ChatGPT has captured all headlines because of the amazing use cases of this chatbot, which is developed by OpenAI. It is one of those amazing chatbots that excel in self learning. In fact, it is the most effective in generating human-like content and self learn to provide better output every time. All different industry verticals are exploring ways to bring it on board to multiply advantages and the contact center industry definitely cannot be set behind.

The potential of using the stated chatbot in all industry verticals is huge and in the contact centers, it is making an immense impact. From improving customer satisfaction to enhancing different operations, reducing agent attrition rate, and much more it can do to improve overall performance and ROI of contact centers.

The impact of using ChatGPT in the contact center industry is so huge that industry leaders are considering that it will bring on a whole new revolution.

What is ChatGPT?

Back in November 2022, OpenAI launched a chatbot, which gained immense popularity because of its efficiency. It uses the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) model. It provides quick access to information, automates several operations, and can even handle conversations with consumers.

This is how it paves its way as an effective chatbot in multiple industries, including, but not limited to, contact centers.

Provide enhanced support to improve customer service

One of the major areas in which chatbots are used in the contact center industry is enhancing customer satisfaction. In multiple ways, ChatGPT can improve customer service.

Customers are fine to deal with chatbots if they can handle their queries effectively. The major roadblocks that customers face while using a chatbot for customer support are listed below:

• Chatbot cannot provide the required assistance. The answers that a chatbot provides are often fairly limited.
• Many times, chatbots fail to understand user queries and put the customer into an endless loop.
• It provides quite mechanical responses.

All these are major turn offs for the customers and it reduces customer satisfaction.

However, the chatbot launched by OpenAI has brought a revolution in the contact center industry. It overcomes all major challenges faced by other chatbots and literally adds value to the objective to improve customer service.

The stated chatbot can provide human-like responses and process information really fast compared to other options available in the market. It can also provide the best assistance to customers to ensure they receive the required resolution. It also reduces call queues and long call hold times. This chatbot is faster than humans in processing customer concerns.

One of the major advantages of using it is that it can self learn from different instances, which makes it better and better in the job of improving customer satisfaction.

1. Improve agent productivity

The first way of boosting the productivity of agents in contact centers is by automating answering repetitive questions. As per the survey result, 40% of customer concerns are repetitive (Source). That means by implementing ChatGPT, more than 40% of customer queries can be resolved without the need for any agent. This directly results in performance improvement of agents.

Along with eliminating the need of answering frequently asked questions, it can also help in different other areas to improve agent productivity. For example, after call work (ACW) is one of the core jobs of agents. According to this process, once a call is completed, agents need to summarize the call and write a disposition message as one of the jobs required in ACW. This helps another agent if a customer calls again by giving the required information from the last call. This helps in enhancing customer satisfaction as well because agents can provide more personalized responses instead of asking customers to reiterate the same issue again. As this process is important, agents in all contact centers have to follow this practice of adding disposition messages.

The traditional approach of adding disposition messages actually is a time consuming process and demands almost a minute of each agent, which is huge when considered collectively. This further negatively affects other KPIs like the average time to handle calls, the average time to first response, etc. Due to the pressure of keeping KPI values positive, agents often try to work hurriedly and leave vague or incomplete disposition messages. This negatively affects the whole essence of leaving this summarized message for other agents to effectively handle the call.

The chatbot of OpenAI resolves this issue because it is quite fast in processing information and summarizing human interaction. It can provide a precise and concise summary of each call without human intervention. This is possible with an automated AI transcription process and then processing information into a summary. This makes the whole process effective without wasting the time of agents. This helps in improving agent productivity because now agents can work on handling more calls and also more effectively.

2. Empower decision makers by helping them in process of better decision making

ChatGPT is not only accurate in handling customer queries, but it can also affect several other aspects of the contact center industry. One of them is providing insight into various KPIs by using AI transcription of calls and extracting valuable insight from these conversations. This chatbot can blend speech analytics and call coverage to reduce the traditional time of diagnosing an issue by up to 400% (Source).

This chatbot presents information in a simplified manner to make it easier for decision makers to identify major areas of improvement to work on. It also provides information that helps in identifying revenue generation opportunities or areas that can help to improve customer service to enhance returns.

3. Better relationship building with customers and investors

Several contact centers rely on investors and it is necessary for them to keep relationships in a positive direction with them. Along with investors, for a contact center, handling position relationships with clients is also crucial. Here comes the OpenAI chatbot at the rescue of the business.

It can help in reducing the time to answer common questions of customers and investors in the minimum time possible. Moreover, it helps in reducing the time it takes to answer the questions whether it is answered by an agent or chatbot. It also provides the options to improve the whole process by presenting insightful data in a simplified manner.
All this can be used to define the best ways to build a strong and delightful relationship with customers and investors.

Conclusion

Technology has been empowering the contact center industry for many years by bringing revolutionary transformations in processes. ChatGPT is one of the most amazing technology revolutions that have shaken the world of this industry in a positive manner. It will not only improve processes with automation by replacing humane intervention, but it also helps human agents to perform better and decision makers to make better and consolidated decisions. That means it has several advantages to offer to consolidate this whole industry.

We can help contact centers by leveraging the real power of this powerful chatbot and employing several other technology advancements. We have several ready to use products that have been gaining popularity among global customers such as DialShree: omnichannel contact center solution. It is an ideal software for this industry. Moreover, it is compatible with emerging AI solutions that are bringing revolutions for businesses. To know more and discuss your requirements, get in touch with us.

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The contact center industry in Africa has been serving the global industry with its customer care, support, and other services to retain clients. When an industry grows, the opportunities grow and so do the threats! This is necessary to be aware of major threats and take precautionary steps to safeguard the business. Likewise, businesses also experience advancements in technologies that can help businesses improve overall performance and returns. Moreover, the African contact center industry is one of the highly technology influenced industry verticals. 

There are different technologies and threats that are affecting how the African industry of call centers is evolving and growing. Two major technology advancements are becoming imperative for this industry, which are artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. The importance of cybersecurity and AI in Africa’s contact center industry is irreplaceable. Thus, it is necessary to understand their roles and how AI and Cybersecurity in the contact center industry of Africa can make a difference.

Importance of cybersecurity in Africa

The contact center industry in Africa or any country runs over technology solutions like a call center software solution. This solution supports omnichannel communication over VoIP/ SIP lines. Anything that transmits over internet lines has a threat of getting intercepted and voice, video, and other forms of data that are getting exchanged over internet lines are definitely not exceptions. All common threats related to the cybersecurity of any VoIP or internet based solutions are applicable to the contact center industry in Africa as well. 

Here is the stat result shared by Norton to prove the importance of cybersecurity in Africa, “3.86 million dollars is the global cost of recovering a typical data breach”. One more supported stat shared by Norton is, “A typical data breach takes 196 days on average to recover for an enterprise”. 

Consequences of a cybersecurity attack and data breaches in the call center industry

Data loss

If you do not understand the importance of cybersecurity in Africa in the contact center industry and do not take the precautionary steps, you are likely to lose a lot of things and one of them is data. Data is an asset for any business. In industries like the African contact center industry, data is not just an asset, but also a critical resource that cannot be shared or leaked. The cyber attackers steal your data and can use it for their malign intents such as running fraud calls, selling data to third parties, and more. Hackers can even temper data to affect your customer care services and integrity. 

Legal trouble

Preserving and protecting user data and sensitive information is a key responsibility of businesses. In many countries, it is abided by legislation and telecom regulations to keep customer data secure. In industries like contact centers, in which sensitive information such as customer bank or payment details are stored, it is even more crucial to keep this information protected. Thus, the law forbids businesses to protect customer interests by protecting their data. The African contact center industry needs to be cautious about legislation to ensure that clients receive the best services and their data is also protected if they want to do business in these countries.

Reputation damage 

It is extremely difficult to return to a positive brand reputation once you lose it. Businesses in the contact center industry in Africa have no way back to work on their brand reputation if they cannot survive cybersecurity attacks. For obvious reasons customers don’t trust brands like this and they are likely to move away from their competitors. This is not just a temporary effect. Even in the long run, call centers that faced reputation damage due to cyber attacks need to face consequences. 

Monetary loss

Recovering from cyber attacks for any business operating in the African contact center industry is a long, tedious, and expensive process. Businesses lose money in the process of recovering the system, data, infrastructure, etc. Businesses also need to face monetary loss by losing some data, business, and clients. If they get trapped in legal trouble, then there is a long process of getting into the judiciary and getting out with the penalty or other punishments. Thus, it is necessary to handle the monetary loss. 

All these major consequences caused by attackers make it quite obvious that the importance of cybersecurity in Africa is quite evident.

AI and Cybersecurity in the contact center industry of Africa

To prevent these types of attacks, it is necessary for businesses to take precautionary steps, which include using technology tools and advancements. This introduces one of the most vital technologies that is making its mark in all industries. Yes, we are talking about artificial intelligence (AI). The role of AI in the African contact center industry is huge. It can do wonders. From improving customer experience to agent performance, reducing expenses, and there is so much more artificial intelligence can do for improving returns and the reputation of the contact center industry in Africa.

Artificial intelligence can also work along with cybersecurity mechanisms to solidify the security offered by cybersecurity products to customers. 

Importance of cybersecurity and AI in Africa’s contact center industry

In multiple ways, cybersecurity software and tools can be enhanced to improve the security of the infrastructure of the African call center industry. This increases the importance of cybersecurity and AI in Africa’s contact center industry.

AI algorithms can be integrated into cybersecurity products. This automates various operations to solidify the security steps from cyber attacks and protect the contact center industry in Africa.

• Monitoring:

  AI tools will automate the monitoring of cyber attacks and other threats 24×7. It will not need manual resources, which will save money and manual effort. It will also make the whole process more efficient.

• Prevention:

  The importance of cybersecurity and AI is high because it not only monitors threats but also prevents them. It can immediately suspend suspicious users. 

• Recovery:

  In case the attackers succeed in breaking security mechanisms for any reason, then also AI and cybersecurity tools will immediately start the recovery process. Usually, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity tools keep taking regular backups, which can be used for recovering from any attack within a minimum time.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the role of AI and Cybersecurity in the contact center industry of Africa is quite essential and crucial. It can make a huge difference in protecting businesses from major cyber attacks. It can even help in taking immediate steps to prevent any risks to data, users, or customers of Africa’s call center industry. Moreover, it can take immediate steps to prevent attacks by suspending attackers. It can also recover the data if any sort of attack has already happened. All this helps in speeding up the process of prevention and recovery along with security. This makes it quite vital to accept the worth of AI and Cybersecurity in the contact center industry of Africa.

We provide a contact center solution for African countries and their contact center industry. We can implement the best practices of AI and Cybersecurity in the contact center industry of Africa. If you have already accepted the importance of cybersecurity and AI in Africa’s contact center industry, time for you to implement these technologies in favor of your business. To know more about our software and the implementation of AI and cybersecurity in it, Get In Touch With Us Now.

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Communication has been an imperative part of any business. Even if a business faces some ups and downs, the demand for reliable and steady communication remains constant. From internal teams to external customers, vendors, and other associates require a reliable means of communication. To meet different types of business communication needs, innovators invent different modes and channels of communication. Digitization and automation have further influenced the communication channels used in businesses.

Call centers being one of the businesses that rely heavily on communication and communication tools need to be updated with technology to keep serving clients with the right experience. An omnichannel contact center is the latest trend in this industry.

In this blog post, we have covered the following points:

1.       Some important statistics that you must know if you are in this industry
2.       What is an omnichannel contact center?
3.       What is an omnichannel contact center solution?
4.       What are the major benefits of omnichannel contact centers?
5.       What are the best practices to run a successful omnichannel contact center?
6.       Which are the top omnichannel call center providers?
7.       Major FAQs related to omnichannel call centers
8.       Conclusion

The omnichannel contact center has become a buzzword and it becomes necessary for all businesses associated with the communication industry or using call center software to have insightful knowledge about it. To give all the required insight on this subject matter, we have compiled all the details: from omnichannel contact center definition to FAQs. Let’s take an insider look at this captivating topic.

1. Some important statistics that you must know if you are in this industry

• According to Google Research statistics, 98% of American users use multiple devices within a single day and one of the uses of these devices is to communicate with friends, brands, family, etc. 
• According to Omnisend data, marketers registered a 287% high purchase rate by using more than three communication channels in
• According to the statistical result shared by Omnisend, companies achieved up to 90% of customer retention rate by using omnichannel communication tools over a single channel.

There are so many statistics results available in the market, which define the benefits of omnichannel contact centers.

2. What is an omnichannel contact center?

When we talk about the omnichannel contact center definition, there are different versions available. Each version defines one common definition, which is as below:

When a contact center adopts the power of all popular communication channels and provides customer support or runs sales campaigns through all popular communication channels, it is called an omnichannel contact center. The omnichannel contact center definition also covers the top communication channels that have to be part of an omnichannel call center. These communication channels are listed below:

• Voice calls
• Video calls
• SMS
• Email
• Chat
• Facebook/  Twitter/ Other social media platforms
• Instant messaging
• WhatsApp

3. What is an omnichannel contact center solution?

A contact center solution, which can be either an on-premise or cloud call center software that provides all unified communication channels within a single platform is an omnichannel contact center solution. It eliminates the need of managing independent communication channels across multiple platforms. Instead of that, a single solution is used to manage communication across channels.

All conversations will be logged regardless of the communication channel used, which makes it the best tool for call centers and customer care centers. It will also make it easier to switch to another communication channel or use more than one communication channel in parallel. The omnichannel solution supports all communication channels that are preferred by your customers to keep them delighted in terms of the selection of the communication mode. As it contributes heavily to handling customer support, it is also referred to as an omnichannel customer support solution.

4. What are the major benefits of omnichannel contact centers?

There are several advantages of using an omnichannel customer support solution. Let’s explore the top three of them.

A) Improve customer experience

One of the major advantages covered even in the omnichannel contact center definition is improved customer experience by using this software. Everyone likes to make a choice instead of falling short of choices. The selection of a communication channel is often considered a small thing, but it can be comforting to your customers. Some customers willingly use Twitter for communication and some love having a telephone conversation. It is necessary to give this freedom to your clients to choose which mode of communication they are more comfortable using.

Even if you don’t accommodate all communication channels within your software, your customers are still likely to use these channels to reach out to your customer care team. No response and the delayed response would cause major concerns and brand damaging impact, which would get difficult to cover. By incorporating omnichannel communication into your strategy, you will be able to deliver an excellent customer experience. Your agents will get notified for all messages, not considering the use of communication channels, so they can respond quickly. They will also have context as all conversations across channels would be logged into the system. This helps them serve your clients better and improve customer service standards.

Prompt responses and personalized responses will keep your customers happy and excited about your customer service. This way you can improve customer experience with omnichannel call center adoption.

B) Improve agent productivity

The productivity of agents is as important as the happiness of customers. A productive agent can deliver better and faster services and help improve the values of many more KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to increase the ultimate goal conversation. As mentioned earlier, despite the fact that you use an omnichannel solution or not, your clients will use their favorite mode of communication to reach out to your support team. Thus, at a certain point, your agents or other team members will need to check individual platforms such as Facebook messenger or Facebook page wall and respond to these clients. This will be an exhaustive and error prone job. Likewise, there are so many communication channels to manage, and handling each of them independently can cause several challenges and affect the productivity of agents negatively.

Unlike that, using an omnichannel system will give a notification for each message. The software can also put clients into queues like chat queues, WhatsApp queues, etc. to make it easy to manage the process. When you avoid the need for switching across communication channels, your agents can save time and energy to synergize them on improving customer experience. Moreover, some communication channels let agents handle more than one customer at a time with templates and other features available in the software. This further contributes to boosted productivity. As we all know, improved productivity reflects improved performance because the same headcount can deliver much better output.

C) Improve ROI (Returns over Investment)

Managing different communication channels within a single platform is cheaper than handling different communication platforms. Saving time for agents also saves a lot of resources, including expenses. A majority of providers help in saving time by adding added features such as a message scheduler, message templates, auto replies, chatbots, and more. That means using an omnichannel system, a call center can reduce expenses and otherwise get invested in infrastructure, manpower, communication platforms, and more.

The high productivity of agents directly contributes to better performance of all campaigns and call centers. Call centers can elevate their revenue generation with the same manpower. Even if they hire more agents, they can then spike up revenue by taking more work and handling more campaigns. Customer retention, on the other hand, contributes to the stable stream of generating revenue. Reference business and referral leads are a few more contributors to increase revenue.

In a nutshell, the benefits of omnichannel contact centers include improving revenue and cutting costs, so call centers can enjoy a high ROI generation rate.

5. What are the best practices to run a successful omnichannel contact center?

When you decide to leverage the advantage of technology and trend, you need to have a proper strategy in place. You cannot just win the game by getting the best omnichannel customer support solution. You also need to have a strategy in place and you must follow the best practices. You can learn with experiments, but using an omnichannel customer support strategy is quite mature. You can learn from the experiences of others. To help you lead the game and maximize the benefits of omnichannel contact centers, we have shared the top best practices for you. You must rigorously follow these best practices to run your support center like a champion:

• Don’t ignore self serving options

All communication solutions, including an omnichannel customer care system offer self serving options to call center users. It is necessary to use all communication channels and let your agents handle customer calls, messages, and other forms of interactions. However, it is equally important to invest in self serving options and encourage their use among customers. Using self serving options can help customers to get responses to their concerns on an immediate basis as they don’t need to wait for agents to join the conversation. On the other hand, it keeps your staff available to handle more complicated cases of customers to deliver excellent support.

Technology tools like chatbots, AI voice analysis, smart WhatsApp web tools, self serving IVR, voice broadcasting, SMS broadcasting, and more can be used to increase effective self serving options.

• Live agent has to be available for customers

Even if you have plenty of self serving options, you need to be sure that you have enough live agents to handle clients and their concerns. You also need to give the option to connect with a live agent at any point. Some customers prefer to have a conversation or interaction with humans even if it is an easy task like retrieving the total due balance. This type of client also needs to get complete attention and respect from your customers to retain a good brand image.

• Identify top performing and in-demand communication channels

Even if an omnichannel customer support solution is used to blend the power of all communication channels in serving your clients, it is worth investing resources to identify popular communication channels. Different customer bases may like different communication channels. In some countries, WhatsApp is the most preferred mode of communication. In some countries, SMS is still one of the top used communication channels. These facts also vary from industry to industry. Even in the same industry, two different customer care centers may have different charts of communication channel usage.

With careful analysis, you can identify the top performing communication channels for your business. Knowing this information can help you define further strategies to serve these clients. You can also put adequate resources based on the preferred modes of communication for your clients. You don’t need to put an equal number of agents for each communication channel. Rather optimize resource allocation based on the volume of queries received for that specific mode of communication.

• Focus on unified customer experience across communication channels

One of the major advantages of using an omnichannel contact center is that it provides a holistic view of all customer interactions across channels. That means agents can view all conversations between a customer and an agent that could have taken place via one or more communication channels. Having this information is very useful as agents will be aware of ongoing updates, common issues faced by customers, preferred solutions or assistance by that particular client, and other aspects. All the information can be used to provide a universal experience to clients across all communication channels. The customers can be served with the same professionalism and experience through any mode of communication he or she chooses. This not only impresses your clients, but it also helps in building an unforgettable experience for clients as a brand.

• Collect feedback and suggestions from customers and agents

Guessing games can be good, but only in gambling. In fact, even there, people use experience and logic. In businesses like customer care or contact center, using metrics, data, suggestions, recommendations, etc. can be really beneficial. One of the vital sources of data is humans correlated to the system. Your customers and agents use your services, software, etc. on a day to day basis. Therefore, there is nobody better than them to give feedback on how your omnichannel customer strategy is performing. Direct interaction can give direct answers.

You can ask your agents in weekly or monthly meetings or you can use a self serving IVR to collect their feedback. You can take their opinion to scrutinize your resource allocation, strategy, and more for improvement.

Your customers are receiving customer service from your team and they can give you brutally honest opinions. You can ask them how they feel about the service they received right after the call or any other form of interaction. This data can show you the mirror and give you much needed and reliable data.  

• Empower your agents

The next important best practice is team empowerment. You need to empower your team of agents that interact with clients. You can give them the required training to be more professional and effective across multiple communication channels. Alternatively, you can hire experts for each communication channel. Depending on your strategy, you can define how you want to train and furnish your team with the right resources.

To empower your agents, along with training, you also need to give them adequate technical support. You must use the integration of third party tools like CRM, communication channels, AI voice analysis, chatbots, etc. All this helps them work more productively. They can also be encouraged to self learning by giving them access to some of the reports or their own call recording files.

Having a rich knowledge base is another important best practice to become a champion of customer care strategy that blends omnichannel communication in it. Agents can use this knowledge base to keep themselves updated with different best practices, procedures, tools, etc.

• Invest time in report analysis and live monitoring

The call center solutions provide an extensive range of reports. You must review these reports on a regular basis. These reports will give more insight into the performance and effectiveness of different communication channels. It will also contribute to identifying strengths and weaknesses. You can also use live monitoring tools to take real time actions for improvement.

• Keep improving

No strategy or trend is permanent. Thus, you must constantly evolve and improve. Keep fine tuning the best practices and omnichannel strategy to stay competitive and impressive for your clients.

6. Which are the top omnichannel call center providers?

There are multiple providers of this type of software. We have listed out the top 3 of them.

     1) Elision Technologies Pvt. Ltd

It is one of the most affordable providers that offer omnichannel communication and has more than 15 years of industry experience. It offers omnichannel communication, speech analytics, and multiple other features at very affordable rates. You can get a licensed solution or opt for the hosted model.

     2) Nice InContact

It quotes 100 USD/agent per month and has a hosted model to use its omnichannel solution. It supports omnichannel communication, but it does not have a video channel. You will need to integrate a third party video calling app and that integration would cost additional for customization.

     3) 8×8

It charges 115 to 175 USD/agent per month with unlimited call support in the USA and Canada. For other regions, you need to check for the cost of calls. It does not have a multilevel IVR as an inbuilt feature. You need to use it as an add-on. It supports omnichannel communication and a hosted model.

7. Major FAQs related to omnichannel call centers

Should I use an omnichannel call center?

It can be used by anyone that wants to implement an omnichannel customer strategy. Still, businesses with bigger clientele or diversified customer bases gain more advantages by using it compared to small scaled call centers.

Can I add omnichannel communication to my existing software?

That depends on the software. If you have access to the code and if the software is compatible with third party integration then you can add more communication channels to the software. However, compatibility still needs to be checked. It is better to get an omnichannel solution than add communication channels into it to avoid compatibility related issues or increasing cost of ownership.

How much does an omnichannel solution cost?

That depends on the provider. There is no standard cost for the software. Thus, you need to contact the provider and get a quotation for the software.

What will be the hardware requirement to use an omnichannel call center?

Usually, the software and hardware work in coordination with multiple other driving factors. You need to define what software you will use for omnichannel operations and based on that, you will learn about the required hardware. Usually, your software provider will guide you about the hardware that you will need to run your call center with an omnichannel communication mechanism.

8. Conclusion

Superior customer experience gives momentum to call centers to reach beyond the competition and stay ahead of them. An omnichannel contact center contributes to achieving exactly this. It lets customers choose their favorite communication channel to reach out to the customer care team and receive the required assistance, whether it is a self-serving option or any other mode of communication like voice, video, WhatsApp, social media, etc. Agents get empowered with a holistic view of all interactions between customers and call centers to deliver a more contextual and personalized customer experience.

The right tools, best practices, trained and skilled team, and strategic approach can help you take maximum advantage of this trend of using omni channel communication. We have been witnessing call centers growing in leaps and bounds with our DialShree: omnichannel contact center solution. This software helps them achieve a better balance between technology and human interaction and ace the game of customer care like a champion. Get in touch with us for a free demo.

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