We’ve all groaned in frustration after taking the time to call an organization for whatever reason only to hear:
“Your call is important to us, please hold and an advisor will be with you shortly.”
So when a customer makes the effort to contact your business, regardless of the medium, they quite rightly expect you to reply-in-kind and actually take the time to engage with them. If their call really is that important, you need to prove it!
Customer loyalty is a rare commodity in today’s fast-paced world. So providing a swift, seamless response across a broad range of channels is the key to customer loyalty, increased lifetime value and ultimately increased profits.
Customer experience drives business profits
Your customers become loyal to your product, service or brand when you provide them the best possible experience. This starts from the moment they first discover your brand and continues right through to their sales experience, related questions, help requests, complaints and every other point of contact that they make during their ongoing customer journey. Every single interaction is an opportunity to turn your customer into a loyal brand advocate who will increase profits, build your customer base and help your business to grow.
Get it wrong and you will simply create somebody else’s customer!
- 66% of customers stop doing business with a brand post a bad service or experience.
- 72% of customers expect complaints on Twitter to be answered within an hour.
- 89% of customers get frustrated if they are asked to repeat their issues to multiple representatives.
- 95% of customers talk about their poor customer experience on social media.
It is quite clear that the consumers of today, don’t believe in giving a brand a second chance. If they have a bad experience, they hop on to the next brand and never look back. All businesses must strive to differentiate themselves from their competitors by enabling a compelling service.
Make way for omni-channel communication strategies
There is currently a diverse range of communication channels such as voice, email, SMS, web chat, social media, call-back and more through which customers can interact with businesses.
By offering a true omni-channel choice in how customers communicate with your business, giving them relevant information and making better use of your support staff through intelligent routing, you can capitalize on this connection and let your customers know they are important to you.
“Companies with the strongest omni-channel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, as compared to 33% for companies with weak omni-channel strategies.”
Here’s the top 3 ways in which omni-channel customer experience can have an immediate and lasting effect on your business
1. Create a seamless omni channel experience
42% of customer care officers are unable to efficiently resolve queries because of multiple applications, disconnected systems and archaic user interfaces. With this inconsistent form of communication, the customer can’t be offered a unified experience across all channels.
Using a high quality, fully integrated contact centre technology, organizations can effectively unify the customer and agent experience. Collecting customer data ensures agents are always equipped with updated customer information to strike a relevant conversation.
2. Build an easily accessible history of customer conversations
Customers want to be able to pick up the same conversation on different platforms. Unfortunately, 61% of them are unable to smoothly switch from one channel to another when interacting with customer service.
For the omni-channel approach to be successful, it is important to keep track of your customer conversations across different platforms. Therefore, by fully integrating contact centre technology directly into your Customer Relationship Management software (CRM), customer service agents can automatically access an invaluable record of all previous interactions.
3. Preparation for the future
Omni-channel communication is the future – it’s that simple. Whilst there is still a place for telephone and email conversations with customers, the vast majority of customers today are not limited to these traditional methods. In fact Millennials, who now constitute the largest consumer demographic in history, expect a fast and seamless omni-channel customer experience.
“Text messages now outrank phone calls as the dominant form of communication among Millennials.”
– Gallup –
By building customer-centric, omni-channel technology into your sales and support structure, your organization will embrace the myriad of emerging technology and methods of communication. For a successful, forward thinking business, meeting the expectations of your customers is not an option, it’s a requirement. If you don’t offer what your customers are looking for, your competitors certainly will!
Over to you,
A business is successful when it accommodates omni-channel communication with the right kind of customer experience technology.
Whether you have an office in just one city, across various geographical locations or function on a remote model – the need for integrated customer experience and contact centre technology is paramount to staying relevant in an ever changing business landscape.
In fact, by 2020 the demand for an omni-channel customer experience will be amplified by the need for nearly perfect execution? Therefore, now is the right time to install omni-channel contact centre technology to offer a more streamlined and enjoyable experience to your customers.
Find out more about the benefits of omni-channel communication here.
