A symptom I see recurring when speaking to contact center managers who are deploying hardware-based contact center solutions is a desire to provide a more personalized experience to their customers.

“Yes it does route my interactions to my agents, but I would like to give my customers a great personalized experience. I can’t do that with my current solution.”

Sounds familiar?

In a recent webinar titled ‘One to one Routing‘ I discussed the needs and benefits for a well-designed, cross-channel, one-to-one routing strategy.

During the webinar I asked the audience two poll questions about their current landscape. The first question I asked was:

“Have you implemented a skills based, data driven routing strategy to provide a more personalized customer experience?”

Here are the results:

The majority of the audience has not implemented such a strategy but 31% recognize the need to do so and are trying to find a solution.

During the same webinar, I discussed how the rise of different communication channels will drive the need for a cross-channel strategy. Understanding cross-channel customer behavior is a key requirement for providing a consistent customer experience.

The second poll question I asked was “How many communication channels does your organization offer to customers?”

The audience responses indicated that only 8% of the audience offer a single channel and almost all customer service operations offer at least two channels but more is very common:

Number of communication channels offered to customers

To me this proves that in today’s world consumers hold the power, and are driving enterprises to serve multiple channels.

In order to provide a consistent customer experience across these channels a good contact routing strategy is a ‘must.’ During the webinar I shared ‘The Four Ingredients’ to creating a smart one-to-one routing strategy for your business:

  1. Recognize your customers over all channels
  2. Define your skill matrix or framework
  3. Create business/routing rules aligned with your objectives
  4. Determine your virtual resource pool you can pull from

To make this cross-channel dream a reality you should begin by having one contact center solution for all your communication channels, or what is sometimes referred to as a ‘Universal Queue’:

A Universal Queue creates one overview of incoming interactions; uses one set of prioritization rules, and can assign work to employees using one skill database.

To learn more about creating a great cross-channel experience we invite you to watch the Genesys Conversation Manager demo here.