We are in a new age of customer support. For maximum satisfaction, you need to offer support through social media, a website, telephone, and email.
This type of support is becoming essential at a time when communication options are more extensive than ever, and competitors offer different ways of contacting companies to resolve queries. Customers will give you bonus points if they can seamlessly move between these different communication channels when they need to.
This article will cover the top strategies for implementing omnichannel experiences, including leveraging digital advertising and competitor intelligence. By the time you’re done, you will know everything about omnichannel strategies and how they can promote customer support for happier customers and higher revenue.
Understand Your Customer Journey
First, you need to understand the journey your customers go on and the experience you want to give them along the way.
Begin by mapping out customer interactions across several touchpoints. This process means making a chart of what your customers go through from the point they first become aware of your organization to when they end their interactions for the final time.
Between the start and end points are other touchpoints like online advertisements, traditional advertisements, and product catalogues.
When you have mapped out these touchpoints, you can identify the most frequent pain points that customers experience on their journey. Do they hate using chatbots? Do their queries take a long time to resolve? You can use these pain points as exercises to work out how to improve systems and processes to serve customers better.
Finally, analytics can be used to track customer preferences and channel usage to see which channel they use most (telephone, chatbot, email) and which segments use which channels.
Integrate Digital Advertising with Omnichannel Support
Digital ads make up the majority of advertising today. One of their primary purposes is to funnel customers into different support channels.
One of the most important considerations for digital advertising is what your competitors are doing. How they are advertising and why, plus how successful they are with their aims. The best way to collect this data is to use competitor ad intelligence to understand what messaging competitors use and how they link to support resources. You can collect this data with ad intelligence tools.
Once you have this data and have analysed it to transform it into insights, you can adapt your own digital ad approach to align with all your omnichannel goals. These goals might include guiding customers to live chat tools or help centers with human support staff.
Your final step is then to create consistent branding and messaging in both support channels and digital ads. THis process is much easier when you use AI automation, as you will see below.
Adopt AI-Powered Automation for Consistency
Another strategy on the road to supporting customers is to use AI-driven chatbots to deliver consistent support across your entire omnichannel customer service infrastructure.
When you use this technology you are ensuring that customers will be supported by the chatbots in the same way every time, making every customer feel equal and know what to expect. It also makes it easier to adjust every chatbot with updates.
Don’t forget your omni challenge approach: Chatbots are only one rung on the ladder. If the chatbot, with its limited capabilities, does not satisfy a customer query, ensure they escalate it to a human when appropriate.
It can also be a powerful combination when you integrate AI tools like chatbots with your CRM (customer relationship management) tool so the AI has resources to draw upon like customer details and whether the customer has had a similar issue before. This approach gives a seamless experience to customers as they don’t have to keep repeating their details.
Conclusion
The best approach for customer support today is to go omnichannel. Offering customer support across multiple channels like website chatbots, email, telephone and social media gives customers a variety of options to choose from to reach support teams and get their queries resolved quickly.
To achieve this approach you need to begin by understanding the customer journey, their touchpoints, pain points and how to improve them. Next, integrate digital advertising with omnichannel support to signpost customers where to go to access support. And finally, use AI to ensure consistency across channels by using chatbots and updating them regularly.
The omnichannel is your winning ticket to achieving full customer satisfaction. It also marks an effort to adapt and evolve as new channels and technologies emerge and always utilize the latest tech to support customers so they stay loyal and help you increase your revenue year-on-year.
