How to deliver an omnichannel customer support and service experience

Customers today expect access to support via a range of different communication channels. It’s therefore key to make sure you offer an omnichannel support service to deal with any issues customers have, however they want to reach out to your brand.

Overlooking the importance of omnichannel support is likely to have a damaging effect on customer experience, retention, and loyalty. In this blog, we’re going to explore the benefits of omnichannel customer support and service and consider the best ways to deliver it to keep customers happy and your bottom line healthy.

Providing customer support across multiple channels – from phone to email, chat, social media, and more – has significant benefits for your business, including:

When using an omnichannel approach for customer support and service, it’s vital to consider the user’s overall experience across all channels through which your customer service team is available to them. This includes the interactions they have with your customer service representatives, the information they access on your website and other platforms, and the way they interact with your products or services.

Effective omnichannel customer support, as mentioned, needs to be seamless and consistent across the board. Without this, pain points and frustrations will arise, which will harm the customer experience and your brand’s chances of building customer loyalty.

The benefits of engaging with customers via multiple channels have been outlined above. And really, they come down to creating a better customer experience while improving operational efficiency. Your business needs to do both of these things to build relationships and a loyal brand following, and to ensure that the sales pipeline remains healthy.

Here are a few tips for optimizing omnichannel customer engagement:

If you conduct thorough research you can get to know your customers’ preferences, behaviors and preferred communication channels. This allows you to ensure you’re available in the way they want to reach you, boosting customer satisfaction. Customer feedback can be invaluable too, so seek it out and use it to optimize your strategy.

All customer information and communication history needs to be accessible across all channels so your team is up to speed on whichever platform they’re on. A lack of integration can lead to unnecessary repetition and frustration. With Infobip, natively-integrated customer information is stored in our People CDP customer data platform, giving agents instant access to valuable data and context.

If you’re not available on mobile devices, customers trying to get support could quickly become frustrated. It’s therefore vital to make sure whatever channels you’re using are mobile-compatible.

Offering FAQs, knowledge bases, chatbots, and other resources can give customers quick access to solutions while taking some pressure off your support team.

Personalization can boost engagement and the customer experience, so make sure to use omnichannel customer data to deliver personalized interactions across all channels. Much of this can be automated.

The best way to provide a first-rate service is to make sure your support staff are properly trained in responding to customers effectively across different channels A knowledge base within your contact center solution can help with this.

Customer data management and analysis can identify potential issues before customers even encounter any problems. Make sure to engage with them in appropriate situations.

Establish KPIs and measure your success, while continually looking for areas of improvement.

The customer journey is a little messier than it used to be. Whereas sales teams and ads used to be where customers learned about a product or service, before then either purchasing or not, today customers have a plethora of ways to gather information about what you’re offering.

The modern customer journey includes all the interactions someone has with your brand, both online and offline. It’s often a meandering route with multiple touchpoints across various different channels, from in-person conversations to social media, live chat, email, mobile apps, and more. Customer service professionals need to understand this contemporary version of the customer journey in order to optimize the customer experience and drive sales. If your brand doesn’t do a good job at this, customers will find one that does.

Let’s look at some real-world examples of how an omnichannel approach can work.

You can access the customer’s account information and see that they have already submitted a ticket through your website. This avoids asking the customer to repeat any information they’ve already shared and the frustration that would likely cause.

You can use email to respond to the customer and answer their questions. Or you may be able to resolve the issue quicker by emailing the customer a link to some relevant information on your website.

You can use Twitter (aka X) to quickly respond to the customer and offer to help them resolve the issue. You can also use this channel to share tips and advice with customers about how to get the most out of your products or services.

You can use website content to provide customers with information about your products and services. You can also use a chat feature to engage the customer and then respond to any questions they have in real-time. This can also be a great way to collect customer feedback, and website analytics will enable you to track customer interactions.

When your call center is overburdened, you can easily deflect your customers from voice calls towards a chat app. This gives your agents a chance to handle more than one issue at a time, and it allows you to record a history of everything your customers have said.