Introduction
In the highly competitive digital market we live in, it’s essential to find strategies to meet your target audience’s expectations, and that includes delivering personalized experiences. Omnichannel customer service can help you to achieve that.
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What Is Omnichannel?
Omnichannel is a strategy where all of your communication channels are integrated in a way that will enable your company to deliver a unique customer experience with your brand. The channels you put available to interact with your prospects, leads, and clients won’t work separately.
On the contrary, your agents will have access to every customer’s history, including the messages on all the means of interaction they used. A lead can start a conversation through your Instagram DM and choose to continue it via email without any problems, or losing context on the way, everything is going to be recorded and stored in the customer profile.
They won’t need to repeat themselves when moving from one channel to another because your agents already have all the information they need. It helps to optimize the attendance time and shows your customers that your company cares and pays attention to them.
Your customers will have the possibility to use live chat, SMS, calls, email, social media, and receive the same high-quality service in all of them. That will enable you to increase your company’s credibility and, consequently, sell more.
Omnichannel is a term used, as well, to describe marketing strategies that have the purpose of delivering a unique experience through different channels. You can see that, for example, when e-commerces provide several ways to buy their products, beyond the website.
It can also be used to grab leads attention. For instance, the person left an abandoned cart in your online store, then an ad about the same product appears on their Instagram, or they receive an email with a coupon discount. After buying the item, the customer is updated about shipping status through Whatsapp, that’s an omnichannel experience.
What’s The Difference Between Multichannel & Omnichannel?
In a multichannel strategy, you provide different channels of communication to be where your customers are and allow them to get in contact with your brand the way they prefer. But, it doesn’t mean the channels are integrated to deliver a unique experience that highlights the value of your brand.
On the other hand, multichannel selling focus on consistency and synchrony, by having all the means of communication used by your company to interact with your customers integrated and aligned. This way the person can have the same brand experience regardless of the communication channel. Integrating an omnichannel contact center software, for example, will help customers reach out to your business by using all methods possible.
Why Should Your Company Invest In Providing Omnichannel Customer Service?
Unified Customer Historic
By using a single platform to manage all the communication channels, such as JivoChat, your agents will find it much easier to follow up on conversations that started in Whatsapp and went to the live chat, for example. In addition, some companies also use interactive voice response, email, social media, and other communication methods.
Because they will have access to the customer context unified in a profile, being able to check the history of the interactions and identify the best way to solve the issue the person has, without having to ask the customer to explain everything all over again.
You will avoid agent collision as well since they can see when another agent is already answering a customer. Omnichannel customer service represents fewer chances of sending messages twice and leaving consumers without an answer, as the messages are displayed in one dashboard, without having to change from a platform to another.
All of this certainly will help with building your brands’ reputation, showing that you have an organized and efficient customer support system. Errors like contacting the same person twice or not knowing what the message is about have a bad impact on a company’s image.
Solve Problems Faster
With omnichannel customer service, your agents will be able to solve your clients’ issues quicker by accessing their whole history and redirecting them to the proper department right away. The customers can select how they want to be updated about their question, if by SMS, email, or WhatsApp, for example.
By eliminating the need to explain the same problem every time the customers go to another communication channel, a lot of time is saved. Besides, the agent can check the history to see if the same issue has ever happened to this customer, and to verify if there were attempts to solve the problem that didn’t work, once more optimizing the assistance.
Improve Customer Experience
One of the main advantages provided by implementing omnichannel customer service is that you can significantly enhance the customer experience. You are given the choice to get in contact with your company the way your customers prefer, and reassure them they will receive high-level assistance regardless of the means used.
Your target audience certainly doesn’t want to have to deal with the trouble of having access to your company only through one app they don’t use, for example. So, it would be better to use a client portal as an alternative communication channel and manage all interactions with customers in one place. They are going to look for products, services, brands that are available and active where they are, this encourages interactions.
When you can provide fast solutions in the way your clients desire, customer experience will improve. It helps to create a positive image of your brand and increases the probability of your customers associating your company with a positive image.
Increase Loyalty
You don’t want a customer to make a purchase and never come back, right? Building customer loyalty is important to have a solid base of clients.
As you invest in an omnichannel strategy, you can conquer your customers’ loyalty by showing efficiency to solve any problem, and personalizing their experience.
When they feel a company cares about them by providing assistance that goes beyond their expectations, they will likely come back, and even recommend your brand to others. When dealing with each customer, remember your agents to analyze their history, to know the best way to help them.
How To Implement Omnichannel Customer Service?
Understand What Are Your Customers’ Demands
Knowing your target audience’s behavior and preferences should be part of every business, marketing, and sales plan because it’s from these data that you can draw the best strategies to meet your customers’ expectations. That isn’t different when it comes to implementing omnichannel customer service.
By having a profile of who your potential customers are, it’s possible to develop guidelines to help your agents to know how to conduct the interactions with them. For example, you can create a tone of voice for your brand that is aligned in every communication channel. If it’s going to be more formal or casual, it depends on who your public is.
Map The Customer Journey
From discovering a demand to deciding to buy a product or hire a service, the customer passes through a whole path, which is called the buyer’s journey, and it varies according to the sector you are in, and from company to company.
In order to provide the best service, map the path that your customers usually take until finalizing a purchase. For example, how do they have their first contact with your company? Through google’s search results page, social media, or in a physical store? What is the next action they often take after that? What are the main sales channels?
By answering these questions, you will understand better what means of communication your customers prefer, and where you should be focusing, including the social media networks to be present.
Provide Self-service Tools
Many consumers don’t want to have to send a message to talk to customer support, they’d rather count on self-service tools to solve their problems by themselves, make sure to offer that possibility as well.
You can do that by adding a FAQ section to your website, publishing tutorial videos, and posting articles about the main issues they have, for example. Make self-service tools easy to be found on your page, so they can have access to the needed information with just a few clicks.
Use The Live Chat To Reduce Lead Response Time
Lead response time plays an important role in customer experience. Nobody wants to wait for hours or even days to have an answer, right? The digital world has brought up the need to speed up many processes, since we got used to having access, for example, to a page, in a matter of seconds.
This has affected customer service as well, and you can increase your chances of having successful contact 100 times, if answering in the first 5 minutes, as a Harvard study revealed. When you add a live chat to your website, the customer has the opportunity to have his questions solved in real-time, without having to go to another app or to call. Although it would be even better if you can provide video conferencing customer service as it increases user engagement.
Invest In Social Media
Social media networks are highly valued when it comes to digital marketing and that’s for many reasons, you can build a close relationship with your customers through them, generate leads, and even sell directly on them. They can be the first contact your clients will have with your brand and must be a part of your omnichannel strategy.
But, first, identify which are the social media that your target audience use, then, develop a marketing plan to post valuable content on each one, regularly. Remember, it isn’t enough to have a profile on social media, you have to be present, stimulate engagement, and, obviously, be always aware to answer DMs and comments.
Create A Balance Between Automation & Human Support
Chatbots, self-service tools are very helpful and many clients may prefer to use them, but don’t commit the mistake of not providing human assistance. With automated assistance, you can guarantee 24/7 support, however, your customers should be able to speak with someone when they feel the need to have an employee’s help.
All of those means of communication must be easy to access through your website, without having to pass through several steps before being able to contact an agent through the live chat, for example.
Don’t Forget The Mobile Experience
When implementing omnichannel customer service in your company, keep the mobile experience in mind. A Statista research indicated that, in 2020, 90% of the global internet population use a mobile device to go online.
Nowadays mobile internet traffic represents more than 50% of total web traffic, which highlights the importance of developing mobile-friendly websites, including communication channels that are easily accessible by smartphones, tablets, and other devices. To meet your customers’ needs, omnichannel strategies can’t be designed only for desktop computers.
Keep Your Eyes On The Metrics
To have success with your omnichannel strategies, it’s important to always analyze the data that you can gather with your CRM platform, website, paid social media management, social media, and the software you will use to manage the communication channels.
You can get valuable insights from taking a deep look at the metrics. They will help you to identify the points that need to be improved, to keep continuously offering the best customer experience through every platform your company uses.
JivoChat: Omnichannel Customer Service Solution
Now that you understand the importance of having omnichannel customer service, we have good news for you. Through JivoChat, you can have one business messenger to enable your agents to manage all the communication channels of your company.
You can allow visitors to talk to you through live chat, email, telephone, Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram, Instagram, and Chatbots, then have every message organized in one software.
Your agents will be able to answer your customer at the app and count with multiple features such as CRM integration, detailed visitor info, automatic triggers, translator, quick phrases helper, and email chat transcriptions. If you want to start implementing omnichannel customer service, you can begin by installing the basic version, which is for free permanently.