What is Omnichannel?

Omnichannel is a very widely used buzz word in the marketplace today. Any company today will have their own thoughts and ideas about what it means to them, and it is most likely at the core of most of their discussions around marketing strategies.

In its broadest sense, the omnichannel concept revolves around the idea of connecting and engaging with customers in a professional and consistent manner regardless of the the mechanisms that their customers have for contacting them. At one time, those touchpoints were limited to their brick-and-mortar store front, email campaigns and the telephone, but now they encompass not only those but many other social media interfaces – such as their corporate website, messaging services such as SMS (or plain texting) and specialized applications such as WhatsApp and Facebook.

Some of these touchpoints are well suited for outbound marketing campaigns, while others are not. Similarly, some work best for inbound communication compared to outbound. For instance, websites and Facebook pages have long been used for large scale outbound messaging campaigns. SMS and WhatsApp have been designed for one-to-one communication. By their very nature these types of social media interfaces have not been designed with an infrastructure for managing multiple incoming connections and sharing the workload of responding to those incoming requests in a timely and consistent manner.

On the other hand, both telephone and email are less effective in reaching target audiences (unless they have an already established relationship) but effectively enable a single point of contact – an email address or phone number – to reach a group of subject matter experts that can pool their resources to respond to those incoming requests in a timely and consistent manner. E-MetroTel’s UCX Call Center solution is a perfect method of handling multiple incoming calls to one or more telephone numbers, queuing them and then distributing them to a group of call center agents. Groups of agents are easily trained to be the face-of-the-company to the callers, providing messaging consistent with the company branding, making sure that responses are based on the latest information available, and building strong customer relationships to encourage repeat business.

Meanwhile, many businesses struggle with the process of managing social media communication. SMS (text) messaging, Facebook and WhatsApp accounts may actually be handled by completely different employees, many of whom are not able to provide full-time coverage for incoming requests as this is often just seen as best-effort task they have been assigned. Oversight of the social media communication is also difficult since there is no one central point of contact. Adding to the complexity of this for businesses is the process of identifying and setting up a separate web based chat system that doesn't take into account all the other potential social media feeds that need to be managed.

The omnichannel approach to marketing for businesses focusses on connecting with customers wherever they are and through whatever means is most convenient for the customer. Therefore, from an inbound communication perspective, companies must be able to handle incoming traffic from multiple connections and provide the same level of service, if not greater, that customers expect from inbound telephony-based call centers. E-MetroTel has responded by enhancing our InfinityOne Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) platform with an omnichannel-based contact center solution.

E-MetroTel's Omnichannel functionality completely changes the user experience, by acting as a collector and distributor of multiple social media feeds, with specific departments being able to have knowledge experts on hand to respond to specific lines of inquiries regardless of the social media source.

Pre-requisites:

• InfinityOne must be installed and operational on the customer UCX. Refer to InfinityOne - Installation & Configuration Checklist for additional details.
• Omnichannel license(s) must be applied to the UCX.
• Properly configured Account information for the E-MetroTel SMS service, WhatsApp Account, and/or Facebook Account on the E-MetroTel Serial Number Records portal, and/or a website that can be modified to include a Livechat code snippet, depending on the social media interfaces the customer wants to connect.

License Requirements

Omnichannel capabilities require the addition of one or more licenses installed in the UCX before they can be used within InfinityOne. This requires that you have completed the purchase of the license using the Quotations and Ordering Tool; refer to License Retrieval for steps required to update the license with the latest information. Refer to License Details for instructions on how to add licenses to the UCX software

To verify that the Omnichannel license tag is included in the applied license, check that the Product Code includes the license tag OCB:n, where OCB refers to Omnichannel Basic and n = the desired number of configured Agents.

Reference Terminology:

Omnichannel related terminology includes the following:

• Account - Each person accessing InfinityOne or Omnichannel capabilities requires a username and password and is assigned one or more Roles
• Role - a specific set of permissions  for a particular account
• Agent - an InfinityOne account that has been assigned the Omnichannel Agent role
• Manager - an InfinityOne account that has been assigned the Omnichannel Manager role
• Guest - the person originating contact with the customer's Omnichannel interface.
• Department - used to allow specific channels (i.e. SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook or Webchat accounts) to be supported by a designated subset of Agents
• Chat - the communication between the Omnichannel Agent and a Guest