In today’s digital world, customers are already Omnichannel, interacting with companies the way that best suits them, whether it is email, chat, self-service, sms, phone, or in 75% of the time, multiple channels.

This has driven contact center leaders to make enabling a seamless Omnichannel customer experience their #1 Priority, yet 87% of them are struggling to provide efficient and effective service across channels.

The technology decisions they make today are more important than they have ever been, since there is the right way to enable a true world class Omnichannel customer experience and then there are the more challenging ways.

The right way to a true Omnichannel contact center is to utilize OpenMethods’ Harmony and PopFlow Studio to deeply and bi-directionally integrate a contact center’s telecommunications platform with Oracle Service Cloud. With Oracle, we’ve helped some of the largest call centers and biggest brands in the world realize their Omnichannel vision, consistently reducing average handle times by 30+ seconds, improving customer satisfaction, and driving quick and super high ROI implementations.

Now, our ask is you read this document, bring us in deals early in the sales process, and call us at any time to chat about our solutions so we can help you win more deals. Ok, let’s cover the typical Challenging Ways contact center leaders try to implement Omnichannel.

OpenMethods makes Oracle Service Cloud the Best Omnichannel Solution in the World

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Challenging Way #1 – We’re thinking of going with our ACD provider’s Chat, Email, etc.

This decision is often driven by the Operations / IT Leaders in a contact center because they think if they go with a CRM platform’s chat, email or other digital interaction solution they will destroy their ability to effectively manage workforce costs, quality, efficiently queue interactions to the right agents, and much more.

You see, the backbone of most contact center operations is the telecommunications platform, especially the ACD, which not only routes interactions to the right agent, but is the data source for the workforce, reporting and quality management platforms. The Operations / IT Team has typically spent millions and years trying to perfect these platforms, the business rules, etc. So, their logical conclusion is… let’s not mess up a good thing. Let’s go with our ACD provider’s digital interaction solutions to keep our routing, workforce management, reporting, and other systems intact.

Their fear is that by utilizing OSvC’s digital interaction solutions they will instantly lose visibility into the digital interactions (which can quickly ramp up to 30-40% of the interaction volume), and will create silos of data, workflows, business rules and reporting that will drive down their important metrics of workforce utilization, service levels, first call resolution, etc.

And, while they understand by not using the CRM’s digital interaction solutions they will lose a lot of the connectivity, feature and workflow benefits of the CRM platform, they believe the loss doesn’t outweigh the loss they think they would incur with workforce, quality and reporting management degradation.

But, here is the thing, they don’t need to make this tricky and potentially costly trade-off. See, with OpenMethods’ Harmony Queue Adapters, they can go with OSvC’s digital interaction solutions and keep their telecommunications platform as the backbone of their contact center operations. Contact center leaders no longer have to worry. OpenMethods’ Harmony Queue Adapters enable a deep bidirectional integration between Oracle Service Cloud and their ACD. This integration creates a universal composite queue, enabling all of the new email, chat, social and other interactions to instantly and seamlessly flow through the ACD, keeping intact the contact center’s optimization in routing, workforce, reporting and quality management.

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QUEUE ADAPTERS & INTEGRATION SERVER

Challenging Way #2 – We’ll Focus on Omnichannel in Phase II or III

Integrating digital interactions and CRM into a telco heavy contact center environment naturally creates technology, data and workflow silos, which often leads to agents having to switch through more screens and cut and paste more data to try and resolve an interaction. This typically leads to increased average handle times, workforce costs, and a worse customer experience. While it seams great to integrate new digital interactions, if deep integration between the traditional telecommunications platform and the CRM platform don’t happen in Phase I, often the increased complexity makes the core contact center metrics suffer along with the ROI potential of the Oracle Service Cloud implementation.

By implementing OpenMethods’ Harmony Media Bar and PopFlow Studio in Phase I, many customers have paid for their entire Oracle Service Cloud implementation within the first year. You see, OpenMethods’ Harmony Media Bar and PopFlow Studio supercharge the features and benefits of Oracle Service Cloud.

OpenMethods’ Harmony Media Bar turns OSvC into a smart phone, giving agents the ability take a new call, post their status, conference in others, work on multiple interactions, receive customer and call detail information, along with many other workflows, all within their Oracle Service Cloud workspace. We typically see a 30+ second reduction in average handle time with the Media Bar, which in a 1500 seat contact center is worth ~$5 million in savings. Furthermore, it allows OSvC to be the dominate platform that unifies and controls the desktop of agents.

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MEDIA BAR & INTEGRATION SERVER

PopFlow Studio is unlike anything your prospects and customers have ever seen. And, once they see a demo they’ll be a believer and typically in shock. PopFlow Studio is the next generation of contact center technology, abstracting and making available all of the customer and related data generated in the IVR, while also tapping into the Oracle APIs and any related downstream applications to allow non-developers to automate screen pops and complex workflows utilizing a drag and drop visual developer integrated within Oracle Service Cloud. In literally minutes, it can shave 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 30 seconds off different types of customer interactions.

Traditional CTI development process for a simple screen pop…

The PopFlow Studio Way takes one non-developer minutes to develop, test and deploy automated screen pops and workflows all within Oracle Service Cloud …

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• Weeks to Months

• 6-10 People Involved

• $$$ Expensive

• Non-scalable Custom Code

Challenging Way #3 – We’re going with another CRM Provider

OpenMethods makes Oracle Service Cloud the best Omnichannel solution in the world. And, OpenMethods’ Harmony and PopFlow Studio are exclusive to Oracle products. Your CRM competitors don’t have access to OpenMethods’ solutions or anything comparable. So, bring us in early, so we can help differentiate Oracle versus the competition.

The OpenMethods’ Team is solely focused on enabling world-class Omnichannel customer experiences for contact centers. We understand all of the stakeholders, their concerns, hot points, and needs. Let us help navigate the complex world of contact centers so we can win more deals together and realize the potential of Omnichannel.

Challenging Way #4 – I don’t need OpenMethods…Oracle and the Telecommunications providers already do all of this, I’m just going to use their tools

Many of our customers come to us after they tried this challenging path. Here’s the thing, most software providers are focused on developing out their product, not necessarily on integrating their product with other technologies and potential competitors, keeping up with changes to a multitude of platforms and APIs. So, while they may say they have tools that do it all, they are typically limited in scope and features. This is what we do for a living…we know the telephony side of the world, we know the CRM side of the world, and we know how to deeply integrate them to enable a true Omnichannel contact center.

Bring us in early on deals, and we won’t disappoint you!

sales@openmethods.com

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Key Questions to Get Smart About Your Prospect’s Contact Center, Telecommunication Platform, and Omnichannel Challenges & Strategies

THE BASICS

Contact Center Technology1. What type of ACD / Switch do you have? 2. Do you have a workforce management platform? Which provider?3. What types of digital channels (e.g., Chat, SMS, Email, etc.) do you offer your customers?

What platforms do they run on? Are there plans to introduce new channels over the next 24 months?

Contact Center Metrics1. Do you know what your Average Handle Time is? First caller resolution rate?2. Do you know how many different interaction channels (chat, email, phone, sms, self-service) a customer

interacts with in a typical customer issue?3. Do you measure Customer Handle Time (the total time a customer takes through all interaction channels ?4. What is the average agent utilization within the contact center?

Contact Center Organization1. Are agents organized by interaction type (e.g., Chat Team, Email Team, Phone Team) or are they Omnichannel

Agents, meaning agents manage multiple types of interactions?2. Who drives and how are decisions made about technology that impacts the Contact Center?

OMNICHANNEL CHALLENGES & STRATEGIES

Omnichannel Challenges1. How seamless is the customers experience navigating through various interaction channels?2. How easy is it for agents to see and dive into previous interactions of a customer?3. When customers go through the auto-attendant and input information, does the agent the call gets routed to

get access to all of the inputted customer information?4. When interactions are transferred from one agent to another, does the new agent instantly see the interaction

context and notes of the customer? Or, does the customer have to repeat their background information and history of the call?

5. How many applications do agents have access to? 6. When agents are working a customer interaction do they spend a lot of their time switching from one

application to another, and cutting and pasting information from one application to another? Which ones? What is the rough estimate of their time spent on switching screens and copying and pasting?

7. What are the major challenges in creating a seamless omnichannel customer experience? 8. Is their consolidated reporting on all interactions?

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Key Questions to Get Smart About Your Prospect’s Contact Center, Telecommunication Platform, and Omnichannel Challenges & Strategies

OMNICHANNEL CHALLENGES & STRATEGIES (continued)

Omnichannel Priorities & Strategies1. Where does enabling a seamless Omnichannel customer experience fall within the priorities of the contact

center? What is the Omnichannel vision?2. What is the current contact center technology roadmap to enable an Omnichannel experience? 3. How integrated is the CRM platform with the ACD, IVR, Workforce Management, and other important contact

center systems? What technologies are used? What are the future integration plans?4. How much CTI work is done within the contact center? How involved is the CTI development lifecycle?5. Are there concerns about how digital interaction platforms that aren’t from the ACD provider will feed into

intelligent routing and workforce management?

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