3 IT Priorities for Your Next Omnichannel Platform
Your next omnichannel contact center platform should do more than connect communication channels. It must simplify operations, reduce IT workload, and improve the customer experience. As digital demands increase, your IT team needs tools that integrate easily, require minimal maintenance, and support long-term growth.
Sharpen’s cloud-native omnichannel platform is built to support IT teams and customer service leaders alike. With easy-to-manage tools, seamless integrations, and real-time insights, Sharpen helps contact centers deliver faster, more consistent service across every channel. Schedule a demo today to see how Sharpen can simplify your tech stack and elevate your customer experience.
Here’s what your IT leaders want you to know about your omnichannel platform – or, your lack thereof.
Unifying technology under one umbrella is better for customers.
Most contact centers run on a patchwork of disconnected tools. Your team might have SMS, email, and web chat—but if those tools don’t share data or communicate, you’re not truly omnichannel.
Unifying your omnichannel contact center technology means more than linking channels. It’s about building a centralized ecosystem where systems integrate, agents have full customer context, and data flows freely.
Key benefits of an integrated omnichannel platform include:
- Systems that share data to inform your agents of customer history and past problems.
- Data culled from every channel and system, all reported on in one interface.
- Fast and easy scalability, without the need to re-integrate or purchase entire add-ons for platforms.
- Less time spent training on technology and more time dedicated to coaching on how to improve interaction handling & customer convos.
- Greater ROI on your customer experience with inclusive pricing for your tech rather than shelling out cash for each disparate system.
- Fewer cross-departmental silos to bulldoze.
- An IT team that can dedicate more time to innovation and less on standard maintenance.
More channels doesn’t mean better service.
It’s tempting to launch new channels to meet every customer where they are. But adding too many platforms without a clear strategy creates friction, not convenience.
IT teams frequently see spikes in support tickets and call volumes when platforms aren’t fully integrated. Agents struggle to switch contexts, and customers get stuck in loops—like being forced to end a call to email a receipt and wait days for a response.
This kind of fragmented experience wastes time for everyone involved. A true omnichannel strategy prioritizes fluid transitions between channels, allowing customers to move from voice to chat (and back again) without repeating themselves or restarting the interaction.
Let’s map out an example:
Say you have customers who need to process returns. A customer calls in for help, but to validate her purchase, you need a picture or hard copy of her receipt. Now, you pass effort back over to the customer. Your customer gets funneled down two paths (neither of which are great).
Option A: Your customer has to disconnect her call, so she can email or text a picture of the receipt. Then, she has to wait for another rep to reach back out for confirmation. After that, she has to pick up the phone and dial in again to finish the transaction.
Option B: She has to mail in the receipt and wait three weeks for any sort of verification. Then, she can pick up the phone and solve the problem. Only, in that amount of time, she could’ve purchased and returned items from Amazon Prime five times over.
If your current vendor doesn’t offer an omnichannel solution, now you have immediate criteria to move forward on a quest to fix your processes and tech.
Work with vendors who streamline your omnichannel platform updates and let you make simple changes to your strategy.
Partnering with vendors who help you keep up with your omnichannel platform, without tagging in IT, reduces expensive (and time-consuming) maintenance to free up resources for projects that grow your business.
Relying on disjointed systems to support modern business activities isn’t a sustainable business strategy.
The beauty of omnichannel is being able to adapt how you communicate with customers based on their changing needs.
But if you’re using tools that require extra effort from IT every time you need to complete a simple task, like changing a call route, you won’t realize the benefits of omnichannel in full.
To get real ROI out of your omnichannel, build a digital ecosystem with partners who lower barriers and effort in your journey. With Sharpen, you don’t have to rely on IT every time your customer journey evolves. You gain the freedom to innovate and scale, while your IT team gains time to focus on what matters most.
Sharpen Makes Omnichannel Contact Center Solutions Simple
Finding the right omnichannel contact center platform starts with aligning IT’s biggest pain points and fixing them with flexible, intuitive technology. Sharpen’s cloud-native platform is designed to reduce IT strain, simplify operations, and deliver seamless customer experiences across every channel. Schedule a demo today to see how Sharpen can improve your customer experience.