Chat with Customers Like Friends

Being available on your customers’ preferred channel is the most valuable feature of customer support. It is therefore important to manage this digitally and make it accessible throughout the company – so you can chat with your customers like they do with their friends.

Over 5 billion people use SMS and more than 2 billion people use WhatsApp as a communication channel. This is exactly why omnichannel engagement is now a must-have for all forward-thinking businesses. 

Discover how omnichannel customer support can be your CX gamechanger with our VP of Strategic Partnerships, Veselin Vuković; Regional Head of Partnerships, Aleksandar Daic; and Managing Director of venITure, Alexandar Post.

Veselin Vuković: Let’s first define omnichannel versus multichannel. So, first of all, for the customer, be it an external IT services user, service desk user, or an external customer, they want more choice. So the platforms today need to be channel-agnostic. It’s the customer’s choice, what they’re going to use. And it shouldn’t be a platform choice.

Omnichannel versus multichannel provides more context because it’s threading and providing context about all conversations independently, which channel has been used, during the asynchronous type of a conversation that the customer had with the service desk. And this is where, for both the agent and the end customer, this is the right type of solution.

Alexandar Post: It’s basically the different side of the coin. So the customer expects the communication channel they usually use, but the agents want to have faster feedback. So if you think about emails, it takes a while until the customer reads them and answers them. If the agent uses the same channel, the customer usually gets faster feedback, improving the whole process in quality, speed, and time.

Aleksandar Daic: We are combining changing the processes. Let me try to answer with an example, we have all engaged with customer support, and those agents on the other side are usually very professional. They are very polite. Sometimes they successfully resolve your issues, and sometimes they’re not. But you can’t get rid of that underlying urge of urgency. They are trying to move these tickets to the next stage. They are trying to engage in as many conversations as they can.

And it’s no wonder the KPIs for those agents revolve just about around that. I think that’s a legacy setup in process-wise. It’s coming from the era when the communication happened on the channels where you could not extract any meaningful information out of those conversations to feed them back into legacy systems, whatever those might be, and then create the actual action items based on those insights.

When I’m looking at a market, you know, I rarely see sales thinking beyond marketing, which is their natural ally in a corporation — and looking at customer support as the extended sale. With a bit of KPIs, processes, perhaps a little bit of training, this definitely can be an extended arm of the sales. Remember that retaining the customer is five times less expensive than acquiring the customer. Remember, every interaction with your customer is golden. It can improve the net promoter score and customer satisfaction to new cross-sell and upsell opportunities. It can lead to churn. I think that the enterprises need to utilize them to change those processes to get the advantage of the technical capabilities of the new channels at their disposal.

Alexandar Post: I can’t remember when was the last time I sent a mail to a friend. So I prefer easy communication, like WhatsApp or even calling somebody. But why do I need to write an email to a company? It could be that easy to WhatsApp the company, get direct feedback, maybe get some images directly, information, links, etc. And I can easily get to my needs, what I want from the company. And with mailing, it takes a while.

I need to put in the effort, making me slower in communication. And I want to have the possibility to communicate the same way with a friend and the company. And that’s the future of communication. And with OmniChat for Atlassian, we implemented this for service management customers to contact companies the same way as friends.

Discover how Infobip and venITure’s partnership became a gamechanger for all Atlassian Jira Service Management users with OmniChat.