Omnichannel in 2024: Context & Data Flow are Only Half of the Omnichannel Battle

Everyone wants to understand how channels and data are colliding to help businesses make better decisions. At the same time, omnichannel has evolved dramatically. 

What are the blockers to omnichannel success in 2024? How have companies merged their vast system architectures and data streams to deliver truly personalized service? A new report by Frost & Sullivan has some answers, and we’re sharing access to the content in full for free here on our blog.  

In partnership with Frost & Sullivan, a top global market research firm, we looked at omnichannel execution within the contact center industry at a granular level. From where it began nearly a decade ago with improving customer journeys to the sophisticated CX strategies we talk about today, we’ve gathered an in-depth analysis of how businesses are using omnichannel capabilities and the twists and turns in the paths they’ve forged. 

Omnichannel in 2024: Context & Data Flow are Only Half of the Equation 

Is omnichannel engagement a reality in 2024?

In short, yes and no. 

Omnichannel is certainly a reality, but surveys show that execution is still lagging. To illustrate that this remains top of mind, the move to omnichannel has been one of the top trends in NTT’s Customer Experience Benchmarking reports for several years. The 2020 Customer Experience Benchmarking Report marks the 20th edition of the study, polling over 1,000 contact center decision-makers on issues pertaining to CX. 

The study reported, “Most organizations engage via eight contact channels, yet two-thirds (66.4%) have no cross-channel contact management strategy.” At the same time, 23.2% of respondents placed omnichannel as the top driver of their customer journey design strategy. This gap between strategy and execution mirrors the similar disconnect the industry generally has between legacy systems and applications and more modern cloud-based technologies.

Read the full Frost & Sullivan analysis in full for free here. 

The benefits of seamless customer engagement

While execution is lagging, the benefits of omnichannel have never been more clear. The seamless integration that omnichannel fosters has immense, diverse benefits for an organization, including:

• Unified customer engagement across channels no matter where the journey starts, fostering deeper relationships that facilitate brand loyalty and upsell opportunities.
• Agents who are more invested in customer outcomes that lead to greater employee satisfaction and higher retention rates.
• The ability for agents to truly understand what is happening with each customer interaction.
• The ability for agents to better align customer outcomes with business goals.
• More accurate and insightful quality management and compliance processes.
• Lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
• Reduced average handle time (AHT).
• Increased first-call resolution (FCR).
• The ability to more easily add channels as they are needed or invented.
• Increased customer satisfaction (CSAT) and brand loyalty

Budgetary issues, the reluctance to move off-premise to the cloud, and a misperception that pursuing omnichannel will result in multi-year projects continue to hamper forward movement.

Read the full Frost & Sullivan analysis for free here. 

Unification is key to solving the omnichannel equation

There’s also the stubborn problem of tying everything together— a task required on the backend and front end. This means that if the technology agents are using is difficult to navigate, that difficulty translates directly to the customer experience. 

The ability to seamlessly act upon a customer profile to control the customer journey outcome is what helps turn agents into super agents and generate CX success where it starts. To do so requires the implementation of tools that provide the insights and knowledge needed to improve both AX and CX at any touchpoint along that journey.

This kind of seamless integration extends to the management of the contact center as well, with a complete WFO suite that includes interaction and speech analytics, quality and performance management, and risk mitigation capabilities—all accessed and controlled through a single unified interface. 

To learn how LiveVox’s unified platform can help improve the customer and agent experience, watch this short video.