Omnichannel customer service

Most consumers expect a consistent experience when they contact businesses, whether it’s through phone calls, text messaging, or social media channels like WhatsApp.

But with so many different touchpoints and service channels, it can be hard for customer service agents to pull past conversations and data from all these sources quickly enough to answer questions in real time.

So, how can businesses organize all this data and provide truly omnichannel customer service—and a better overall customer experience?

Dialpad Ai Contact Center: A robust, easy-to-use omnichannel customer service platform

What types of features will help you provide an excellent omnichannel customer experience? Here are a few.

The benefits of being able to provide omnichannel customer service

It makes it easier to meet customer needs

It used to be that “customer interactions” meant either an in-store visit, a phone call, or an email. Not anymore. Customer expectations are getting higher and higher. They’re reaching out to businesses through various channels and expecting (seemingly) shorter and shorter response times.

Call centers have transformed into contact centers. All because businesses have realized that if they’re not on their customers’ preferred channels, it directly affects the customer experience—and can lead to lost business.

Done well though, an omnichannel approach can help you become truly customer-centric, improve customer retention, and ultimately, boost your bottom line.

It gives you access to much more conversational and customer data

On a related note, because customer journeys have taken on so many new forms, it’s also become much harder to keep track of (and organize) customer data.

Can you easily monitor metrics in real time? Can you see which communication channels your customers are using the most when they try to reach you?

If you’re able to harness all that data, you’ll have an incredibly useful source of insights and firsthand feedback that will help you improve your products and your customer experience. Before, with just phone calls, you had only one source of insight. But if you can provide omnichannel customer service, how many more conversations containing golden nuggets could you uncover?

Having a truly unified communications platform isn’t just more convenient (which is the most cited benefit you’ll see), it also removes data silos. When you’re managing one tool instead of four or five different tools, you know that all your customer data is in that one place. No digging around in different windows and accounts to find out what that customer said two weeks ago.

It improves your brand reputation

This one sounds fluffy, but omnichannel customer service is expected now in many industries. That means if your customer support or contact center can’t keep up with those expectations, you’ll probably start seeing it talked about in channels you can’t control.

Customer reviews. Online communities. Reddit.

Being able to provide a seamless brand experience that doesn’t make people repeat their account information every time they get transferred, that helps support agents find answers quickly—this is no longer a “nice-to-have.” It’s a must for many businesses today.

5 omnichannel customer service strategies to implement

Now that we’ve looked at what features to look for in omnichannel customer service solutions, it’s time to move on to some examples of omnichannel customer service strategies to consider.

1. Monitor your metrics regularly

How is your support team’s response times on different channels like social media and phone calls? What are your latest CSAT (customer satisfaction) scores?

Ideally, you’ll be able to easily access both real-time and post-call metrics without having to jump through too many hoops.

2. Have self-service options…

Whether you’re running an ecommerce contact center or a regional airline call center, it’s highly likely that most of the questions your reps get on a daily basis are very simple or straightforward requests.

You know, the type that can be handled by a chat bot. Unless you have unlimited funds to hire a huge support team, this is a great opportunity to be more efficient with how you handle those inquiries.

Use a platform like Dialpad Ai Contact Center that has self-service functionality—as a starting point, you can look for common questions that come up repeatedly and create dialogue flows to answer them.

3. ... But don’t make it impossible for someone to escalate to a support agent

That being said, the goal isn’t to completely remove humans from your customer experience. Most people don’t like that. It’s also a big reason why chat bots have gotten such a bad rap. You have to recognize that not every single question or issue can be resolved through self-service.

Make sure your chat bot flows include an option for customers (or potential customers) to reach a human—as painlessly as possible.

4. Make sure your customer support agents are on the channels that your customers are on

This is sometimes an overlooked part of putting together omnichannel customer service and support strategies, but your contact center agents shouldn’t be on every single channel.

They should be on every channel your customers are on. After all, if your customers don’t ever use social media or SMS text messaging to reach out to you and only ever use phone calls, then hiring a social media manager to manage digital channels would probably end up being a waste of money.

On the other hand, if you’re a dentist in a neighborhood of young families and you know that your clients are glued to their mobile devices, it’s probably a good idea to send them, say, appointment reminders and other notifications via SMS text messaging.

Fun fact: With Dialpad, you can send SMS messages to clients or prospects from the same desktop or mobile app you use to make phone calls and have video meetings:

5. Empower your support team

Agent churn is one of the biggest challenges that every contact center faces. Apart from gamification and engagement tactics, how are you empowering your support agents or contact center agents to do their best work while minimizing the repetitive low-value tasks that take up large chunks of their day?

Omnichannel customer service doesn’t have to be complicated

Want to provide a more personalized experience for your customers across not only digital channels but also voice and video?

With Dialpad Ai Contact Center, you can do that—along with communicating internally with your team—in a single, intuitively designed platform.

Try it for yourself!