Omnichannel Customer Service Best Practices

We can’t blame the millennials for their desire for fast-paced and easy customer service. They’ve been raised in a fast-paced world and expect this speed everywhere. These expectations are only going to increase as the millennials become the largest customer segment, surpassing the Baby Boomers, in 2019. The following blog details the leading omnichannel customer service best practices.

Customers expect businesses to respond consistently, effectively, and naturally, on every channel, they expect the best regardless of the channels. Omnichannel Customer Service is a modern way to serve customers, encouraging them to stay with the business and attract new customers.

Your business is competing with others for the attention of a limited audience, so it’s essential to focus on standing out when it comes to Customer Experience.

According to a PWC report from 2020, the number of companies investing in the omnichannel experience has jumped from 20% to more than 80% in the last few years.

What is Omnichannel Customer Service?

Omnichannel Customer Service is a strategy of unifying all digital and traditional channels on a centralized platform to deliver a better customer and agent experience.

Providing a consistent, positive experience across all channels in an omnichannel environment is key to increasing customer retention.

Omnichannel customer service can empower your agents by making it more streamlined to handle tickets.

Customers can conveniently navigate across channels and agents can deliver integrated, cohesive, and holistic experiences through the entire customer journey.

The primary goal of omnichannel customer service is to deliver a unified and memorable customer experience.

Omnichannel customer service helps you capture customer data from across sources, giving you a more comprehensive understanding of customer experience.

Best practices for omnichannel customer service strategy:

 

1. Deliver better conversational experiences on social media

Ensure your agents can reply to customers across channels, consistently by maintaining context and brand tone. Even if a customer follows up on a different channel during the conversation your agents can respond to them from a single inbox.

Leverage a unified inbox to increase agents’ productivity by providing them with easy access to past customer conversations across channels.

The current trends show that customers prefer to contact businesses using social media or messaging apps like WhatsApp. You can deliver consistently great customer experiences across channels with a unified platform. Provide agents with AI-based suggested responses to reply faster to messages. You can integrate existing or new workflows that route the right messages to the right people with the right platform like Simplify360.

A single omnichannel platform streamlines the process by removing the need for multiple dashboards. Your agents save time by not having to toggle between dashboards.

2. Provide better mobile experiences

Mobile phones have changed the way that people live their lives. One of the most significant changes is how people shop online. Until recently, mobile phones were used primarily for calling others.

Research suggests that 9 out of 10 customers are dissatisfied with the customer service on mobile phones. The most common challenges faced by customers were user experience problems like website design, slow loading on the mobile, and poor user interface.

If you have not optimized your website for mobile use, then you are most likely driving customers away.

3. Provide your customers with a live chat option

Live chat helps customers communicate with customer service agents and get their questions resolved in real-time. You can make any channel your primary live support channel, it could be integrated with support email or any social media handles.

Agent-assisted automation frees your customer service team not only to handle more chats but to be able to deliver instant responses, improving customer retention.

The live chat icon should be visible on every page of your website, to could be a web chat or linked to your WhatsApp. You can add personalized touch automation messages addressed to customers. 

4. Reply to customers with accurate solutions

Omnichannel customer service is going the extra mile and accessible to all your customers no match the channels they use, but this doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice routing messages to the right teams.

AI-powered omnichannel platforms can integrate with multiple approvals and routing workflows.

Agents will find it easier to collaborate and communicate with different teams. Additionally, in case of a sudden surge in messages from one channel, agents can deflect conversations to other channels, including those with automation capabilities.

Customers expect companies to provide multiple, easy-to-access communication methods, so they can pick the one they’re most comfortable using.

5. Give customers delightful experiences everywhere

Customers like businesses to deliver consistent and personalised messages to them. Customer retention rates will automatically increase when customers have more enjoyable experiences. And the best way to do that is by delivering hassle-free and fast customer service.

Customers are willing to pay 68% more to do business with companies that are great at customer service.

Analyzing your omnichannel data can help you send customers personalized offers and relevant content based on their preferences and where they are in your customer lifecycle.

This focus on their preferences and buying patterns will go a long way and lead to brand loyalty.

6. Give your customers self-service options

Most customers currently prefer self-service, it allows them to help themselves at their convenience.

So despite providing support across channels, you can direct your customer to one knowledge base, where they can find the solutions they need when they want.

Your knowledge base should be comprehensive and easy to understand, if it doesn’t have answers to your FAQs, it would be counterproductive.

7. Deliver the best support on the channel customer use most

With an omnichannel customer support strategy, you are free to prioritize one channel as your focus to resolve complex issues.

You can observe which channel customers use most frequently to contact you for complex questions, then make that your primary and live support channel. You can automate responses on other channels and direct those that need live support to your primary channel.

Wrap up

The critical ingredient to collection and understanding customer data is being omnichannel.

A seamless and effortless transition between your brand’s most-used channels will lead to better customer experiences, more significant revenue, and higher brand loyalty.

Ensuring that customers receive excellent service across all of your online and offline touchpoints is essential for your business growth. Doing so will increase profits, solidify your brand reputation and company growth.