How To Simplify Omnichannel Engagement With Twilio Flex

Consumer expectations and behaviours are changing rapidly, and today’s customers demand a seamless, personalised experience across every channel – a truly omnichannel engagement.

According to Twilio’s State of Customer Engagement Report 2022, 45% of consumers said that an impersonal experience with a particular brand would deter them from becoming regular customers.

Another study showed that the number one driver of customers feeling emotionally connected to a brand is the ability to contact the company through any channel. Patagonia is a great example of such a connection – they even tell you what the wait time on each channel is!

Customer satisfaction is crucial to the success of any business, and those that focus on developing an omnichannel strategy will be able to drive more conversions and ultimately build stronger relationships with more customers.

Read on to learn how to simplify your omnichannel engagement and develop a friction-free customer journey.

 

The benefits of good omnichannel engagement

 

Before we get into the process of simplifying omnichannel engagement, it’s important to understand why it’s so important in the first place. Here are just some of its many benefits:

• Increased customer satisfaction
• Faster resolution times
• Remote workforce optimisation
• Ability to scale
• Better cost-effectiveness
• Simplified employee workflows

An omnichannel contact centre helps you to get in tune with your customer’s needs no matter where they are, set expectations around your responsiveness and avoid leaving your customer in the dark.

Informed customers are sticky customers. In fact, companies with responsive omnichannel customer engagement strategies manage to keep an average of 89% of their customers, while those with weak omnichannel efforts retain only 33% of their customers!

 

The complexities of multi-channel engagement

 

Technological advances have enabled businesses to provide their customers with more communication channels than ever before. And to their credit, most companies have adopted a multichannel strategy of one sort or another to improve their customer experience.

The problem with this multichannel approach is that these channels typically end up completely siloed and separate from each other, which can lead to friction in the customer journey and a lot of frustration. Since one conversation may be spread across different databases, it can be impossible for sales or service advisors to get the whole picture quickly, and the customer ends up repeating themselves.

Then there are additional challenges when it comes to things like security, privacy, and staying compliant with global rules and regulations.

An example is voice recordings, which is a non-negotiable requirement in most industries. Multichannel recordings mean that an inbound voice recording is in one database, while an outbound one is in another, and an SMS follow-up is saved in yet another database. This is a fractious and disjointed approach that will negatively impact customer satisfaction, not to mention analytics and operational clarity for your employees.

 

The solution is omnichannel engagement

 

The solution is omnichannel customer engagement – a strategy that allows companies to communicate across every platform and medium in a way that is fully integrated and offers a seamless experience between platforms. But many organisations are still struggling to implement it.

Brands that don’t prioritise omnichannel engagement strategies can experience consequences such as customer churn, lost sales, redundant or missed messages, and failed sales campaigns or regulatory fines. And, although it can be challenging to create a consistent experience across every channel and customer touchpoint, it’s worth the effort.

 

 

 

Tips to simplify omnichannel engagement

 

To be successful with omnichannel engagement, start by gaining a thorough understanding of your customer journey. This will help you to identify potential friction points and churn triggers and make it easier to spot opportunities for improvement.

From there, the following tips can help you simplify your omnichannel engagement:

 

• Focus on your specific target audience (don’t try to be all things to all people)
• Seek to understand your customer’s concerns and what offers you can make – then provide more of it
• Target, personalise and analyse communications with your customers to create a better experience for them
• Integrate new technology solutions into existing systems. When your systems are connected, you can better understand your customers and what drives them to make a purchase.
• Ensure that customer sales and service teams have an opportunity to contribute to the design of any new platform
• Ensure that your advisors have access to the customer information they need to be able to do their job well on every channel
• Using real-time data to trigger relevant messaging when a customer is connecting through any channel. This ensures that well-informed agents are in tune with customers, and their history, and can proactively engage callers.

 

The key to successfully implementing an omnichannel engagement strategy is unified data that pops up whenever a customer does.

Without a centralised customer data platform, businesses will continue to struggle with disjointed customer journeys.

In addition, the platform needs to have an intuitive user interface that allows teams to view, share, and act on insights.

 

How Twilio Flex can simplify omnichannel engagement

 

Twilio Flex is a powerful cloud-based contact centre platform that’s open, flexible and can be customised to integrate with any API or database. It lets businesses create tailored omnichannel experiences for their customers and agents, and brings them into one streamlined customer journey that is accessible from anywhere with an internet connection.

 

 

Here are five ways that Twilio Flex can help simplify omnichannel engagement:

 

1. Intelligent routing – Flex TaskRouter

 

Each incoming customer connection can be referenced against your CRM so that existing customers are recognised and prioritised against their existing relationship: their products and services, the last agent they talked to, their language, or if they’re responding to a new campaign.

Calls can be intelligently routed to agents with the right expertise, so that customers know you’re listening, engaged, and matching them with the right agent that can help.

 

2. Ultimate flexibility – freedom!

 

With Twilio Flex, you can design your Call Center advisor’s UX the way that they want it to work – it’s not one UX must fit all. Sales, Services, Escalation Experts, Managers and Operations all have different approaches to how they want to use an omnichannel UX.

Twilio Flex can be designed and customised for their case. This allows their expertise to be put to work and respond to rapidly changing customer requirements by updating workflows, routing rules, channels, integrations, and user interface design.

You have the freedom to change, adapt, and iterate your contact centre as often as you like, resulting in happier customers and hyper-engaged agents.

 

3. One unified interface – Chrome

 

Flex lets agents manage tasks across multiple channels, all from one simple user interface – the Chrome browser. This means that agents are free but feel fully in control and save valuable time, and customers are cared for promptly.

Instead of being locked into one channel, or having to skip between multiple applications or open tabs, they can serve customers seamlessly no matter what channel they show up in.

 

4. Easy integration – Open APIs

 

Twilio Flex simplifies things by integrating seamlessly with most modern cloud-based applications your team is already using.

You can easily build and deploy customisations, as well as use API integrations for tasks like pulling in inventory data, payments, customers’ past orders, and so on.

 

5. Access to key analytics

 

If you’ve ever printed off pages of meaningless metrics and fallen down a rabbit hole of data, you’re not alone. Most businesses are not using call centre metrics to their best advantage because of how complicated it is, but Twilio Flex changes all that.

It gives supervisors targeted operational insight into what’s going on in the contact centre, allowing them to monitor agents, track conversations, analyse trends, measure agents’ performance, and create simplified reports that suit their needs.

In addition, it allows you to create, share, and consume reports with drag-and-drop ease and integrate with any analytics platform like Microsoft Power BI or Salesforce Tableau.

 

Kaptea is your Twilio consulting partner

 

Twilio Flex is a fully programmable contact centre that offers everything you need to deliver personalised customer experiences, across all channels and in one powerful platform. Twilio Flex is enormously flexible and can be customised, for any business, but it can be tricky to deploy it correctly out-of-box.

With Kaptea as your Twilio consulting partner, you can benefit from our experience deploying Flex for many customers and then rest assured that your Twilio Flex deployment will be streamlined, hassle-free and perfectly tailored to your organisation’s specific needs.

If you are considering deploying Twilio Flex for your contact centre to simplify your omnichannel engagement, talk to a Twilio expert at Kaptea today!