What is Omnichannel Customer Service?
"Omnichannel Communications"
It's a term we've all heard thrown around in the customer experience and service industry, but what exactly does omnichannel mean?
To provide an omnichannel service means providing a unified experience across all channels your customers may use to contact you and your company. Your agents must be available to customers on any channel they want to use, ensuring that your service is convenient for them.
Now, we know this sounds strikingly similar to multichannel service; however, there is one key difference...
Not only must your agents be available on every channel your customer wants to use, but your customers must be able to seamlessly transition across all of these channels whenever they need to.
For example, your customer may be experiencing an issue with a computer they've purchased from you. They go to your website and start a live chat with one of your agents, asking about their problem, but the agent can't deal with the problem over live chat; they need to be able to transition the customer to a phone or a video call, without causing any extra effort to your customer.
Now that you know what omnichannel customer service is, let's discuss some benefits of adopting this approach.
Happy Customer, Happy Life
The first benefit of omnichannel customer service is possibly the most obvious one...
Increased Customer Satisfaction.
In their 2021 Customer Expectations report, Gladley found that 73% of customers are frustrated when they have to explain their issues multiple times to multiple different agents.
Adopting an omnichannel customer service model allows you to provide your customers with exactly what they need when they need it, using only one agent. This means that not only will your customers be happy because they are using their preferred communication channel, but because they are dealing with only one agent across their entire journey, they won't have to explain their problem multiple times.
Increasing your customer's satisfaction could also lead to them becoming ambassadors for your brand and them telling their friends about how you dealt with their problems quickly and efficiently.
Any Time, Any Place
The second benefit of omnichannel customer service is that it gives your customers multiple options for how they want to interact with your brand.
Adapting an omnichannel communications approach provides your customers with a massive range of possible touchpoints. You can reach them through phone, web chat, chatbots, social media, and even in-app communications. This massive scope of channels provides you with as many touchpoints with your customers as possible.
This means you can meet your customers where they want to, and when.
For example, if you implement chatbots into your customer service, they can help you to handle customer queries when your agents aren't online. And if the chatbot can't solve your customer's issue, it can open a ticket and send it to your agents to handle as soon as the next working day starts.
Data Is King
The next benefit builds upon all those touchpoints we mentioned previously!
You can use those touchpoints to develop truly data driven marketing strategies.
Knowing everything you can about your customers is key to developing effective marketing campaigns. If you offer your customers this wide range of touchpoints, you can start collecting data on their preferences. You can learn their preferred platforms, and funnel your marketing budgets into these platforms, ensuring you're reaching potential customers where they are.
Destroying Data Silos
The final benefit of implementing an omnichannel customer service approach is moving away from siloed data.
Siloed data is the bane of all customer experience professionals' lives!
How can you be expected to provide excellent service to your customers, if your agents don't have access to all their data?
Most tools that help you to provide omnichannel service, like a well developed CRM system (which we can help you with), allow for integrations across all your apps and tools. This means you can store all your customer's data in a single database. Your agents will have access to all this data whenever they're dealing with the customer.
So what's next?
That's it!
We've told you everything we can, so it's up to you to make the move towards omnichannel service.
Need help with that? Reach out to us.
Here at CX Consultants, we have over 25 years of helping people upgrade their CX offerings.
Why not get in touch if you need help making the transition, and find out how we can help you today?
If you have any questions or want to discuss your customer experience strategy, get in touch, we're here to help.
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