Omnichannel for customer service – Optimize your agents experience

The tools in the Omnichannel for Customer Service app will increase your productivity and your customer satisfaction rate. But how can you ensure an optimal experience? Here’s how to equip your agents to provide the best possible customer experience.

So, you’ve taken the plunge into the world of Omnichannel for Customer Service in Dynamics 365? Congratulations! The channels are open: Current and future customers can now communicate with you at the click of a button, and you can reply to them using your CRM tools.

But what about the experience?

It’s all well and good to have teams standing by to respond, but you also want to make sure you’re providing a smooth customer experience.

Have you ever had an unproductive chat? Or one that’s never available? Or wasted your time on the chat feature only to end up picking up the phone? If these situations cause you to sigh with frustration, you’re not alone: 1 in 3 consumers say they would be willing to turn their back on a brand after just one bad experience. This means you only get one chance to make a good impression. Given that, you need to make sure you’re well equipped to do this with as many contacts as possible.

 

Omnichannel for Customer Service: 5 recommended tools

Among the following Omnichannel tools, none are perfect or will make your agents 100% productive. I think it’s up to each business to figure out what works for them, but that the wide range of options will certainly help you support your users.

For each minute you save, you’ll have more time to invest in:

  • defusing a tense conversation;
  • resolving a problem situation with a personal touch;
  • cross-selling a complementary product.

The idea is to make the best use of the human touch where it really matters.

 

1. Quick response time

First, the typical elements of a chat can be configured to appear with a single click or keyboard shortcut. For example, greetings, thank you, or wait times don’t need to be reinvented with every single conversation. And, most importantly, they take no time at all to send directly in the open chat window.

 

2. Agent scripts

Second, unlike telemarketing, you can’t start a conversation off with a script, since the agent is reacting to individual requests and information they receive each time. That being said, many questions come up over and over—and so do the answers. So, during a chat, depending on the topic, scripts help to provide a guide. They are broken down into segments to allow for some flexibility as the chat progresses.

Scripts are helpful to new agents who are going through the training process, but also help to maintain a certain level of quality across all team members. Once you’ve identified best practices or approaches that work especially well, you can share them with your entire team.

In addition to the script, you can automate certain features using macros, described below.

 

3. Automating elements of a script using macros

In addition to conversation prompts, a script that includes macros can cut down on response or input time.

Granted, macros may be the only exception to my promise that you don’t need any technical skills… But they’re so great! However, it’s still true that they don’t require any development. If you’ve ever played with the Flows feature in Power Platform, you’ll be in familiar territory!

In summary, macros are used to automate tasks: They’re the perfect solution to all the repetitive operations an agent needs to perform. In fact, they’re built into the call scripts mentioned above, making them easy to integrate and trigger.

 

4. Knowledge base

If you’re already using CRM for customer service, you’re probably already using the knowledge base. Agents can search for specific topics to answer questions or address certain issues. In a live chat with a customer, an agent can always use this feature, either to consult information themselves or to share documentation with the customer.

 

5. Bot

Faced with a high volume of incoming requests, a distribution based on the Pareto principle looks like:

  • 20% of requests are specific and require personalized intervention;
  • 80% are repetitive and easily resolved.

The virtual agent (also called a “bot” or a “chatbot”) can address the 80% of requests that are repetitive in order to free up the human resources needed to deal with the more important requests.

Using easy-to-configure automations, the virtual agent could answer questions about business hours or provide links to web pages in answer to customers’ questions. It’s also possible to imagine a slightly more sophisticated level of intelligence, where the agent could schedule a call or an appointment, send information about a pending order, etc.

A virtual agent could therefore deal with customer requests efficiently without taking time away from your team, who could then focus on value-added conversations.

 

Essentially, these tools in the Omnichannel for Customer Service app will help your team of agents to maximize their full potential!

This post is an initiative of our expert, Sarah Deschênes.

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