Effective digital communications are the lifeblood of most organisations, and in the last few years, they have become more important than ever.
Businesses have ramped up digital communications to help them deal with everything from supply chain disruption to interruptions to healthcare and education services during COVID lockdowns.
Omnichannel communications have helped many organisations reach customers, business partners and the public faster, more reliably and when it matters most. But what are they and how can developers enable them for their organisations?
To explore this, we interviewed Phil Nash, principal Developer Evangelist at Twilio.
Listen to the interview below.
“Consumers today have multiple ways of getting in touch with an organisation – from SMS to email to phone calls – and they may prefer to use different channels at different times,” Nash said.
In omnichannel contact centres, those communication channels are connected to provide a seamless end-user experience, he explained.
“The important thing here is that the communication channels are all integrated and displayed together in the contact centre. Without that, you just have multi-channel communications, which is separate and siloed and doesn’t have the context of whatever happened in another conversation,” Nash said.
Omnichannel communications allows a customer to start a conversation by sending an SMS, then switch to email, and then use their phone to finish the interaction. When they call the contact centre, the agent will have all the context about those previous interactions. This eliminates the need for customers to repeat previous conversations.
Making this possible isn’t always easy. For example, in our interview with Nash, he explains that developers had one week to retool communications for Lifeline Australia during the pandemic.
Listen to the interview to learn how they did it and about the case for Twilio’s platform approach to enabling omnichannel communications.
