Channel Silos Hurt Customer Engagement: Here’s How to Knock Them Down

Your company’s customer engagement operations might look something like this:

You have customers calling your contact center agents. You’ve got others using an intelligent voice response system. Some are reaching out via email. And some are looking for service through your intelligent virtual assistant. Then there’s your social media followers, who are asking questions via Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

If you think of these channels as separate pipelines heading off into different destinations, it’s likely that your company will end up establishing silos that will hurt your ability to provide the best experiences for your customers, and better operational efficiencies for your employees.

In the first blog in this series about silos, we discussed how operational divides between your front, middle, and back office create a workforce that’s unable to effectively serve customers across all touchpoints. Similarly, when it comes to your engagement channels, keeping customer data and interaction insights siloed apart from other channels makes it difficult—if not impossible—to provide a holistic, seamless, and sophisticated customer journey.

More Channels, Fewer Resources

In short, you need to get all those pipelines, or channels, flowing into the same place. Otherwise, you’ll create channel silos.

But, in today’s rapidly evolving customer engagement landscape, this isn’t always easy. Organizations have seen the number of customer interactions skyrocket while they’re also in the process of adopting the channels necessary to meet their customers wherever they reach out.

On top of that, customer expectations for excellent service have never been higher. They expect the same high level of service whether they’ve reached a live agent, sent an email, or messaged with your conversational AI solution via Facebook Messenger. Customers see your customer service operations as one big, unified source of assistance, and you need to think the same.

That means that you can’t afford to have these applications siloed and not communicating or uniting with each other. Even if a customer might not know the term “channel silo,” they’ll surely recognize the poor journey and experience that comes as a result of it.

Uniting Your Channels

At Verint, we’ve seen organizations of all sizes struggle with the issue of channel silos. Sometimes these silos arise because different internal departments within the company have added channels without considering how these channels and the data they gather integrate with one another and other applications that are used to manage customer experience. Other times, we’ve seen organizations adding channels in response to the evolution of customer needs without considering the asynchronous nature of that channel, and so their efforts fail to connect to the larger customer engagement strategy and applications.

At Verint, we think you should embrace a modern customer engagement strategy through a combination of channels, workforce orchestration, and bots. With Verint Channel Automation, your brand can:

• Orchestrate both customer journeys and your workforce’s operations across all engagement channels, dismantling both organizational and channel silos.
• Improve not only customer but agent experience as well; boost CSAT and NPS scores, lower handle and response times, and improve agent retention.
• Handle common customer inquiries with scalable conversational AI, and hand off to a human agent when needed for a smooth customer journey where customers aren’t forced to repeat themselves along the way.

Through Channel Automation, you also break down silos by creating an omnichannel customer service experience. This means that engagements happen in a continuous manner—not on a case-by-case basis where interactions are happening in silos—across multiple conversational channels. An omnichannel approach creates a more fluid experience not just for the customer, but also for agents.

Channel Automation also provides a process by which you can easily scale as you both add new channels and see your business grow and service needs evolve.

When you’ve embraced this sort of strategy for your channels, channel silos will be a thing of the past. You’ll have all those pipelines flowing into a single, unified interface where your customers can choose their entry point, and you can meet their expectations—regardless of how they reached you.

Want to learn more about Channel Automation? Check out the Digital Engagement Channel Playbook.