People use a variety of channels to communicate with one another today. You are likely to have both personal and professional communication all day long through messaging apps, emails, SMS, calling, video chats, social media platforms and so on. Such communication habits have also influenced the expectations people have as customers.
In the competitive landscape of today, customers are the ones driving the buying experience. As a brand, you are likely to have multiple interactions to manage throughout the customer lifecycle. It doesn’t matter whether you interact with them through a phone call, email, chat or even a tweet, you need to get the questions of the customers answered in time, across diverse communication channels.
To be a successful business, you need to understand that your brand has to be available where and when your customer wishes to reach out. This would typically imply to moving beyond traditional phone and email support, and enabling customers to connect with your brand on their terms, regardless of the platform they are the most comfortable with.
While this multi-channel approach is great for the customer, it can be challenging for the brand to ensure a consistent experience. This is where omni-channel customer service comes in. It helps in unifying customer experiences across all channels. If customers change communication platforms while wanting to continue the same conversation, by following an omni-channel approach, your support team can track all these channels, each with their distinct pieces of the conversation. As you have all the context of customer interactions with the brand on hand, your service teams shall be empowered to deliver consistent customer service to them, thereby meeting their communication expectations.
What exactly is omni-channel customer service?
Omni-channel customer service is a process of creating a unified and seamless communication experience for your customers across an expansive variety of service channels. This generally is accomplished with the usage of technology that aggregates support conversations for each and every customer, from all communication methods available. Your customer service representatives can always add context and notes to the unified customer history files. Such an approach makes information available to other agents for future customer touchpoints. With this historical context, your team would be in the position to respond in a manner that helps solve customer problems swiftly and makes them feel important to the brand.
Advantages of omni-channel customer support
More options for interaction: Hardly any customer will be willing to wait in the modern market. They want to engage with brands through channels they want, and at the time of their liking. With the growing use of smartphones, delivery of customer service through multiple channels like social media, chatbots, emails, live chat and more, has become a common notion. Omni-channel customer service helps you to expand the scope of customer engagement, while facilitating a smooth transition of communication between multiple channels.
With an omni-channel customer system in place, you can treat your customers as individuals and cater to their particular needs, interests, and preferences effectively.