Delighting Consumers and Driving Efficiency With Omnichannel Support

In recent years, the customer engagement space has changed remarkably. As companies seek ways to improve customer experience, silo support channels are becoming a thing of the past. Most people are now shifting to omnichannel customer service to deliver a great support experience. According to a report by Digital Commerce, 86% of customers expect you to know them as they interact with your team across multiple channels, and that’s best achieved with an omnichannel support platform. Why? Because all communication channels are synchronized to deliver consistent customer service. 

Sounds like something you might want to implement? Well, it’s time you bring your omnichannel vision to action. But first, let’s understand what omnichannel support is all about and how it adds value to your business. 

What’s Omnichannel Support?

Omnichannel support entails providing a unified experience to customers across multiple channels such as live chat, email, phone, and social media. It means taking an integrated approach to deliver a high-value experience across all your customers’ touch points. With omnichannel support a customer can start a conversation on one channel whenever they want, and continue in any other channel integrated within the platform. Omnichannel platforms, like iService, allow you to store your customer conversations in a single integrated history so that your support team always has context for the next interaction. 

A properly implemented omnichannel strategy not only helps you to understand your customer journey but also their conversation history so that you deliver a personalized support experience every time they interact with your brand. Taking an omnichannel approach is essentially a win-win for both your customers and your support agents. 

How to Build Real-Time Omnichannel Customer Experience

Now that you know what omnichannel support is all about, how do you get started? 

It can take quite a lot of effort to integrate separate support channels into one unified experience. However, with the right omnichannel platform you should be able to implement your strategy in no time. Adopting a platform that integrates all your support channels in one place is the key to delivering consistent experience to your customers. 

Here’s what you should consider to deliver a winning omnichannel customer experience.

Map the Customer Journey

Mapping out the customer journey is the very first thing you should consider if you choose to take the omnichannel approach. It’s essential to understand the customer journey and identify the various touch points with your team and your brand. For instance, at what point do most customers tend to fall off the journey? Do they abandon your shopping cart? Do they research your space, and then return after submitting questions? With this type of information you’ll be able to determine the digital touchpoints required and the necessary actions to take to acquire new customers as well as retain existing ones. 

Go for Tools That Support Omnichannel Service

Before you even think of implementing an omnichannel strategy you should invest in the right tools for seamless integration. Having tools like live chat and an easy to navigate support center on your website ensures conversations are linear and customers are well connected. In that way, your customers or prospects can start a conversation with your brand on the channel they prefer. For instance, if an email response is taking too long, they might go for live chat support or make a call if that’s supported on your website. Or, they might find the answer quickly in your knowledge base and then move on to completing their purchase.

Build a Strong Customer Feedback Loop

As an entity, it’s essential to improve your product based on the feedback you receive from customers. Therefore, strengthening your feedback loop is a great way to enhance the omnichannel customer experience. Listening to your customers needs and complaints will help you refine your omnichannel strategy to offer a better experience across all communication channels. 

An omnichannel solution, like iService, provides opportunities to gather feedback on your interactions. Since the feedback is directly tied to agent responses, you can get a deep understanding of your customers’ expectations and your service levels.

Identify the Most Preferred Channels

Like every other business, you have a target audience and as you try to discover their needs, it’s essential to identify their preferred channels. As you do this, be sure to include both reactive and proactive channels so as to build a complete omnichannel support system that users find intuitive. If you already have an omnichannel system in place, it’s essential to review existing channels to find out which is the most preferred. In that way, you’ll keep up with the changing needs of your target audience.

Omnichannel Support Best Practices

As you plan to improve your customer experience by adopting the omnichannel support approach, it’s important to equip yourself with some of the best practices in this space to maximize your gains.  

Let’s dive deeper into this!

Provide More Self-Service Options

Nowadays, most customers prefer getting solutions for their issues without necessarily reaching out to your support team. Being able to search for the answer and fix the problem whenever they want saves them a lot of time. If anything, more than two-thirds of customers prefer searching answers from a well-built and reliable knowledge base to asking questions through other service channels. Therefore,  making your common answers accessible to customers in a knowledge base is a great way to educate them about your brand and answer their questions. 

Use Live Chat

Some customers might look for help just before buying an item, and live chat can be the fastest way to interact with them in such cases. Typically, live chat ensures less waiting time and offers the convenience of immediate assistance, which improves the customer experience. With live chat support, your agents can also personalize your customer’s buying experience at any point of their purchase journey. They can direct the customer to a specific page, and the customer has a written summary for future reference. 

Offer a Personalized Experience Through Emails

Email is still the preferred channel by most  customers, especially when the question is not urgent. By providing quick, personalized responses you build their trust in your brand. How do you do this? Addressing customers by their first name is a great way to connect with them. It makes them feel you understand their needs and they’ll be more than willing to interact with your brand. 

Would you like to build long-term customer relations? Adopting an omnichannel support strategy is the way to go. Let your agents access customer conversations across all channels in a centralized place for a customized experience.