Creating an omnichannel customer experience has become a celebrated cause among companies today. That is because it is a clear, effective strategy for success in the ever-changing global marketplace. Omnichannel experiences are about leveraging new and emerging technologies into ways that vastly improve the customer experience, and in tandem, your company’s standing and share within the marketplace.
What Is the Omnichannel Customer Experience?
A true omnichannel customer experience is when all of your customers are able to interact with all of your company’s interconnected channels. An omnichannel service strategy could be carried out in a number of different ways—voice, text, e-mail, social media, live chat—but to the customer, the integration of channels is seamless.
Reasons Why Your Customers Needs an Omnichannel Experience
Many brands have read the writing on the wall regarding the pressing need to provide an omnichannel customer service experience. Business is always about recognizing the need to look for new and exciting ways to cater to your customers’ needs. The omnichannel experience is a fantastic way to make customers feel valued at the exact time and place when they rely on your company.
Instant Reachability
Everyone wants things as quickly as possible today: Instant messages, instant service, instant oatmeal—and instant gratification. Learn how to capitalize on this trend by finding engaging methods to reach your customers that don’t leave them waiting so that they can make decisions about purchases without costly delays. A customer who can readily access help or information from your company will also be grateful that you value their time. Providing a true omnichannel customer service experience shows that you care about saving your customers from the aggravation and irritation of being put on hold, long wait times while on the telephone, or unresponsive and/or delayed responses to their e-mail inquiries.
Accessibility
Customers want to be able to have access to different options no matter where they are. For instance, customer loyalty applications that reside on a smartphone save the need to carry numerous cards everywhere. Being able to reach out and contact your brand for key information at any time is something most consumers need today. Ask yourself how you tend to interact with the brands and companies that you use the most. The ones with easy web site access, 24/7 telephone lines, quick e-mail response, or live chat tend to be industry leaders who have responded to customer needs. Providing greater accessibility options also perpetuates success in the marketplace.
Personalization
It is possible to grant each individual customer a unique experience tailored to their wants and needs. Web sites that use cookies to display products similar to recently browsed items are just one example. Think about the old days when you walked into your local restaurant and the people working there knew you were a regular. They treated you with familiarity and the joy of seeing an old friend. That is the kind of personal approach that a skilled contact center agent can provide through telephone, e-mail, or live chat services.
24/7 Availability
Make sure that your customers are able to reach out and contact your brand 24/7. This means utilizing all channels available—e-mail, telephone, live chat, social media, etc.—so that your customers know they can reach out and talk to you anytime. Greater availability readily translates into more sales, as customers will like being able to order when they find it convenient. Furthermore, an omnichannel customer service approach that is proactive in resolving customer issues builds trust and increases business due to higher customer satisfaction.
Ways to Improve the Omnichannel Customer Experience
Having more ways to reach customers is like a superpower—you must take care to use it responsibly. Like any great ability, there must be specially tailored ways to use an omnichannel customer experience in order to avoid overwhelming customers. Remember that oversaturation or repetitive messages will be seen as annoying, or worse, as an intrusion of your customers’ privacy. Rather, companies can use the omnichannel experience as a tool to engage and inform customers. This can be done by providing incentives for engaging with your brand, which is ideal because it allows the customer to feel in charge of their experience.
Understand Your Customer’s Journey
Are you tracking how your business generates leads? Sure, many companies can follow up with surveys that ask how a customer heard about them but an even better method to learn about your customer’s journey is simply by automatically tracking the leads that are coming in through different areas of your business, including web sites, social media, calls, and chat. Better yet, utilize the kind of contact center that can record all of this information for you and then promptly consolidate into a report that gives you actionable ways to improve the customer experience.
Personalize the Customer Experience
The ability to collect data on your customers has never been more sophisticated. Once trends are observed and understood, this can be translated into a personal customer experience. Offering your customers special offers, deals, promotions, and other opportunities based on what they want is a superior way to market your company’s offerings. Within an omnichannel customer experience, this means using insights from purchasing habits, web site analytics, and other methods in order to specially target opportunities for your customers.
Empower Your Customers
Give your customers new and different ways for them to feel in-charge of their shopping experience. Look at the rapid proliferation of social media and applications that allow people to feel empowered because of their greater ease of use, convenience, and efficiency. Now imagine what can be accomplished when you use an omnichannel approach that offers the same prospect of instant issue resolution, savings, effectiveness, and the implied knowledge that your customers are valued. Your customers can be kept updated by allowing them unfettered access to their accounts from different access methods. This will allow them to feel empowered with both knowledge and the ability to choose the products that they want, when they want them.
Unify/Coordinate All of Your Customer Support Channels
Have you unified all of your customer support channels together? Make sure the right hand knows what the left is doing by maintaining a consistent database that is accessible to your customer support agents across all platforms. Customers need to be able to update accounts, order, and track their status through multiple methods like e-mail, telephone, etc. This makes ordering, purchasing, and many other actions as uncomplicated as possible.
Focus on Existing Customer Relationships
Returning customers spend more and are easier to sell to than new customers. Furthermore, it costs much more to get new customers than it does to maintain an existing customer relationship. Therefore, even if there are issues or problems, a focus on customer retention represents a significant opportunity. Use skilled agents that can rebuild trust, solve problems, and give your customers what they want. Retention means that not only do you maintain your customer base, but you also have a chance to earn glowing referrals, testimonials, and reviews for being a problem solver.
Omnichannel Customer Support
Being able to give your customers a 24/7 support option that is available across all channels is far more valuable than many realize. Companies that are able to provide superior customer support see far greater retention rates. Leading brands have used significant resources with the goal of providing customers with omnichannel customer support. This, in turn, has won them greater shares of the market.
How Call Centers Help to Improve the Omnichannel Customer Experience
Consider 3C Contact Services, an omnichannel contact center, to help improve your brand’s customer experience. What is an omnichannel contact center? We have the ability to optimize your customer service approach in ways you may not have known were possible. Giving your customers more options for contacting your brand is guaranteed to result in stronger relationships, a better rapport, higher customer satisfaction, and most importantly, better overall service.
Whether you already offer multichannel support in two or more areas, you can now consolidate your approach to give customers a seamless experience in customer experience. Your customers will appreciate greater consistency and stronger service that more readily meets their needs. As a business, there are great benefits to our contact center, as we are able to provide more useful metrics, operate more efficiently, and effortlessly up-sell/cross-sell products.
By acting as an industry leader, we’re able to provide support in a number of areas that include customer service, customer care, B2B/B2C, quality assurance programs, e-mail management, and customer retention. Our inbound and outbound call center support boasts top-tier onshore agents who are highly trained in order to provide a superior omnichannel customer experience.
If you are looking for a contact center that places priority on giving your customers an extraordinary customer experience, then we can help. Contact us today to learn more about us and the exceptional customer experience that we can provide for you.
