Consumers want – and expect – a precise, efficient and personalized customer service experience every time they interact with a brand. They need to be able to shop, get information or troubleshoot from anywhere whenever they want. When brands don’t meet these expectations, they can lose their customer base as well as their reputation. By creating and employing an omnichannel strategy, you can provide customers with a reliable, consistent journey across every channel.
Omnichannel seamlessly integrates all avenues of support, including live chat, phone, email, mobile and social media, so that consumers can switch their contact channel midway through an issue and still pick up right where they left off. However, even companies that think they have an omnichannel strategy in place are still making big mistakes.
There are a lot of “blind” channels out there. Omnichannel is all about contact channels communicating with each other, not just two or three channels being able to sync. Having your live chat, email and phone teams able to provide seamless support isn’t good enough if mobile and social media are still on a multichannel strategy. This could mean that a customer could get far along in an issue using two channels, but then lose ground when switching to a third channel, requiring them to explain the issue from the beginning. If you’re going to adopt an omnichannel strategy, it has to be implemented across the board without any blindspots.
Another mistake companies make is not maximizing mobile channels as part of their omnichannel strategy. Today’s customers use mobile devices to do things like read emails or brand newsletters and window shop for items they want to buy later on, possibly from another device, like their computer. An omnichannel strategy should capture customer information when they’re on mobile and then use it to personalize their experience elsewhere.
For example, when a customer clicks an item in a shop’s mobile app, that same item can pop up the next time the customer visits the website from their laptop (where they’re more likely to make the purchase). The customer can get an offer for something like special pricing or free shipping in order to encourage them to make the purchase. In this way, the customer can begin the shopping experience on one channel and then pick it up on another channel at some point in the future.
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