Omnichannel Customer Support: The Future of Customer Interactions [And How You Can Get Started]

The more we move forward, the more technology gets integrated into our daily lives. The lines between our online time and real-life have begun to blur. As customers change their behavior, companies and support agents will need to react. Apart from thinking about providing a superior experience on various devices, brands also need to think about having one holistic approach to provide an omnichannel experience for their customers.

Here’s an amazing example of why providing an omnichannel experience is the need of the hour. Here’s a quick story about Robert Fransgaard’s customer service experience with Virgin Atlantic.

In his anecdote, he shares his story about how a representative named Dan offered him a personalized experience. After listening to Robert’s frustration over a missed engineer appointment, Dan encouraged Robert to reach out to him directly for any future issues. Dan did not ask Robert to call customer support or post another tweet to get attention like any support representative would usually do. Instead, Dan reached across the company’s different channels to give Robert a personalized service experience.

When it comes to consoling customers who have a poor experience with the company, a personalized touch always works. Virgin Atlantic leads the way in multiple aspects of omnichannel support. It shows what all can happen when all channels and employees work together seamlessly.

Customers of 2021 want a singular experience – not a siloed, repetitive one. Imagine you have to book a flight ticket just a few hours before the plane takes off. To be able to make it to your flight, it may take a few tweets, a visit to their website, contacting the airline’s customer support, and a quick check-in once you’re at the gate. Sounds too much, right? Imagine how happy you’d be if this kind of interaction goes smoother than you expect. Your needs are met quickly and painlessly. This is precisely the omnichannel customer experience that brands need to provide across industries.

In this article, I’ll go over how you can use the omnichannel experience to create profitable customer support strategies. Let’s get started!

Omnichannel Customer Support: A Quick Brief

Be it retailing, marketing, customer service, or anything else; omnichannel is everywhere! Omnichannel customer support is referred to when it comes to omnichannel retail, omnichannel marketing, omnichannel customer service, and more.

So, what does it mean?

Omnichannel gives your customers a completely integrated, unified buying and customer support experience with your brand across all available channels. The goals of omnichannel customer service are:

• To be available everywhere to your target audience.
• To capture as much customer information/data as possible.

Providing an omnichannel experience allows your business:

• To create a cohesive, seamless, personalized support experience.
• It makes interactions consistent, easy, and fun.
• Align your efforts in a better way to deliver the best customer support.
• To build brand loyalty by giving customers multiple ways to interact with your brand.
• Provide a seamlessly unified customer experience.

Your company will need to monitor customer interactions from various channels like:

• Your website
• Social media
• SMS
• Email
• Retargeting efforts
• Chatbot conversations
• Brick-and-mortar transactions

Multiple brands have already established their presence on multiple channels. It is important to tie them all together to be called omnichannel.

Difference Between Omnichannel and Multichannel

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Most businesses have perfected a multichannel customer support approach. Multichannel customer support uses several different communication channels to interact with customers separately. Each platform has its own individual strategy, targets, and supports messaging goals, response team, user experience expectations, and protocol.

But statistics show that customers are not entirely into this approach:

• 90% of all customers expect a consistent experience across all channels.
• Customers do not want to repeat their issues and talk to multiple agents to explain their problems.
• 61% of customers have difficulty switching from one brand channel to another. This makes the entire support process harder.
• 87% of customers believe that brands must put effort into providing a seamless experience.
• 94% of industry experts believe that providing an omnichannel experience is crucial for business success.

Take an omnichannel approach now! Your team no longer needs to consider your channels as a separate island. Use each channel as one to foster and develop a relationship with customers on their journey through your funnel. For you, it may take a bit of legwork to get off the ground. But we’ve got you covered.

DeskXpand is an omnichannel customer support software that helps you collate all your channels. You can set up well-orchestrated support workflows and monitor everything from a unified interface. Take a deep dive into the expectations of your customers with our omnichannel customer support software.

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Benefits of Omnichannel Customer Support

Imagine you’re given two scenarios to choose from:

• A product from a brand that pulls your personal information from your previous online experiences and doesn’t ask too many questions.
• A company that will ask you to spend time filling out multiple forms.

Customers like to do business with companies that know what they are doing and use pre-collected information to make life easier. In fact, 70% of customers believe that connected processes are utterly crucial to win their trust. Over 80% of customers are willing to give relevant personal information in order to bridge the connection between their online and in-person experiences.

A successfully implemented omnichannel customer support offers myriad ways to prevent disconnected processes and departments. This brings representatives from all the departments together to fulfill a specific customer requirement.

For instance, if a customer begins messaging through your website’s integrated chatbot about an issue but then decides to continue through a phone call. They’d at least hope that the company already has information about their issue and that they won’t have to explain their problem again to someone else.

Omnichannel customer support focuses on overall customer satisfaction and makes the experience smoother, consistent, and highly personalized for customers.

Here are some significant benefits of serving an omnichannel experience:

• Customers get more options to interact with your business.
• Support reps can deliver solutions backed by context.
• Improves customer satisfaction rate (CSAT) and eventually customer retention rate.
• Increases sales and the related online and offline experiences.
• Improves the quality of customer information and allows companies to collect more relevant data.
• Businesses can cater to a wide range of audiences through omnichannel customer support.
• Customer convenience improves the lifetime value of a customer.
• It helps drive consistent resolution and prevents agent collision.
• It helps you deliver a standardized experience across channels.

What Can Companies Do To Achieve an Omnichannel Customer Support

What can brands do to achieve an Omnichannel Customer Experience?

According to a study by the CMO club, 55% of companies have no cross-channel strategy in place. The most basic reason for this is the lack of resources, budget, time, or expertise. So, it is natural to get overwhelmed by the challenge of creating an all-encompassing omnichannel method for your brand. The key is to start out small with omnichannel and work your way to building your support across all channels one step at a time. Here are a few tips to help you through:

1. Think About All Aspects of Your Customer Journey

Finding out what your customers want requires a deep understanding of their daily activities, goals, challenges, purchase behavior, communication channels, and touchpoints through your funnel. So, if you don’t have an upgraded version of your buyer personas, you will need to work on it before thinking about implementing anything!

Gather details about your target audience. Map out all the interactions your customer may make with your brand. Find out what type of content they’ll encounter and when and where they will engage with it. Create a roadmap of potential interactions that you can set up to flow naturally between channels.

The cross-channel interactions will embed your brand into your customer’s everyday life. This will give them more opportunities to fall in love with your brand.

2. Optimize Multiple Touchpoints to Build a Consistent Brand Experience

For example, let’s say Adam buys your product online from an ecommerce store. Along with his purchase, you sent a seasonal discount code for selected items that are only available for purchase on your website. You also send a link to a customer knowledge base that provides comprehensive information about your loyalty program and how to avail of these offers. Adam checks out the link and buys more from your website to avail of the offers. He then receives an email with discounts or loyalty points he’ll be eligible for if he:

• Refers your brand to new customers
• Use hashtags to share your products on social media
• Opts into your newsletter or SMS
• Downloads your mobile app

This way, you can make sure that Adam keeps engaging with your brand. By sending him invites for exclusive in-store product releases or trigger notifications at the time of a sale, you’re making sure that Adam is engaged with your brand constantly. If you look at the overall journey of Adam, he went from a single eCommerce store purchase to your website, social media, email, newsletter, and at last in-store experience.

Just one of these channels handled correctly at the right time in your buyer’s journey can lead to massive profits and conversions. When combined, they create even better odds. All you’ve to do is determine which touchpoints will work best for your brand. Learn how to optimize these touchpoints, and create a consistent experience that shows off your brand’s personality and USP.

3. Develop a Clear Brand Image and Build a Unique User Experience

Customers don’t have time to familiarize themselves with how things work across various channels. They expect everything to connect and work consistently. Every channel needs to work together in the larger scheme of your user experience.

The user interface for each perspective channel should be optimized using best practices for that platform. Your on-site content should align with your social media, website theme, etc. Your color palette should match with carefully selected filters and steps to find products. Your transactions should remain the same whether made from a smartphone or laptop. You’ll need to guarantee killer interactions consistently for your customers.

4. Unite All Departments on a Singular Goal

If your teams work in multiple silos disconnected from each department, you need an omnichannel approach to streamline and unify them. Your customer support teams need to work together with sales, mobile, marketing, development, and IT teams to create a consistent customer experience and increase engagement.

With a unified omnichannel customer support software in place, you can gather your reps and define roles within each department. If everyone is focused on the same goal, everyone will contribute their expertise to support the rest of the team. You need to set clear expectations and then facilitate communication to keep everything on the same page.

This way, you can figure out how they can:

• Unify touchpoints
• Reduce pain points
• Integrate channels
• Improve and speed up the buying process

The Bottom Line

If you can create a seamless and effortless segue between your brand’s most-used channels, your brand will lead to better customer experiences and higher brand loyalty. Plus, all the data you collect will improve your outreach efforts to increase brand awareness and convert more often.

All you’ll need is a coordinated upgrade of your current customer support software so all your customer touchpoints can be managed seamlessly. Helpdesk tools integrated with the latest features can help you effectively create an omnichannel experience. DeskXpand is one such tool. It is a robust omnichannel customer support software that lets you merge all your customer-facing channels into a single platform. You no longer need to switch multiple channels/accounts back and forth. It lets you integrate a comprehensive knowledge base (a self-service channel) to strengthen your support process.

We are ISO27001 certified portal experts with 14+ years of industry experience. We aim to help you achieve complete visibility and attain a high-resolution rate through omnichannel customer support software. So, would you like to take a trial?

The Article is Originally Published On:

https://www.deskxpand.com/blog/why-omnichannel-is-the-future-of-customer-interaction/