Meeting the modern customer's expectations (VJD Portfolio)

Meeting the modern customer’s expectations How to use omnichannel solutions to achieve superior customer experience and increase ROI

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Contents What is an omnichannel solution?

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Customers love communications through apps

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The importance of great customer experience

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How does an omnichannel solution deliver superior customer experience?

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How can an omnichannel solution reduce costs?

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How can an omnichannel solution help to generate revenue?

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What to look for in a omnichannel provider

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Executive summary Information and communication technology has rapidly changed over the last 30 years. The internet, email, social media, messaging apps and mobile devices (all now part of everyday life) have revolutionised the way we communicate and interact, not just with our friends and family but with businesses too. The pace of change continues to accelerate as communication continues to evolve and we transition from a multichannel world, to an omnichannel world.

As modern consumers, we quickly embrace the latest and greatest communication tech. From web chat to WhatsApp, iMessage and Facebook Messenger, we naturally choose the method of communication we like the best, resulting in communication through a myriad of channels on a daily basis.

Businesses, however have struggled to keep up with the new world of omnichannel and fail to enable customers to interact with them through all of today’s relevant channels. Many companies struggle with disparate communications, delivering a poor customer experience. To ease the pain, they focus on one or two channels, in turn creating frustration for their customers, who want to interact via their preferred channel.

For businesses that adopt a true omnichannel experience (one that is seamless and intelligent), there is huge potential for growth stemming from customer acquisition, customer retention, and operational efficiency. Consumers who are impressed with the superior experience that an omnichannel solution provides are more likely to convert, spend more and be more loyal, but an omnichannel solution that is poorly implemented and managed can create more problems than it solves for both your staff and customers.

This ebook highlights the advantages of an omnichannel experience for consumer and company alike, and identifies common issues that businesses face when adopting omnichannel strategies that often roadblock routes to superior customer experience. We will explore how to resolve these issues in order to put your company on track for stand-out success.

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What is an omnichannel solution?

We know you’ve heard the word before. And we know you were smart enough to figure out the first time you heard it that since omni means ‘all’ or ‘every’, omnichannel must just mean every channel. But is that all an omnichannel solution is? Offering your customers the ability to communicate with you across any channel? Well yes and no. It’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Let’s say you set up accounts for your company on every channel out there, and advertise that your customers can use these to chat with you about your products or services.

From SMS or Facebook Messenger, to Twitter DM and web chat, the enquiries and opportunities begin to pour in. Managing multiple channels, however, without the right tools can be tricky. Let’s explore three examples of how the best of intentions can go horribly wrong...

1. The lights are on, but no one is at home You’ve lowered costs by reducing phone calls but now you’re trying to manage multiple messaging channels.

As messages come in across disparate systems and channels, it becomes apparent that response times are slow or non-existent as chats are missed by agents.

Without unified communications, agents are struggling to monitor all the new messaging channels customers can contact them on, putting you at risk of losing at least the 45% of consumers who Forrester found abandon an online transaction if their questions or concerns are not addressed quickly.

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2. Poking the bear -

3. Your customer journey is coming

a very frustrated customer

apart at the seams

Joe, an existing customer, has a

Anne has a question about a product she wants

complaint, but all is not lost. After all,

to buy online and starts a web chat with one

eight out of 10 consumers say that

of your agents on her desktop at home. She

getting an issue resolved quickly is

starts the conversation, but then she has to

the number one factor that defines

leave to catch a train. Anne wants to continue

‘great’ customer experience (the fact

the chat on her phone, but with spotty mobile

that there was an issue at all becomes

internet coverage, she opts for using SMS. Like

a distant memory). Joe’s complaint

61% of customers (in a report by Aspect), Anne

is something that can be easily fixed,

finds it is not easy to switch from one channel

but he needs to get in contact with

to another when interacting with customer

one of your agents for this to happen.

service. The agent asks to do discovery with

Already irritated, he becomes further

her all over again and repeat herself, which, like

frustrated when messaging the agent

89% of consumers, she finds understandably

and needing to provide them with

frustrating, and it puts her off buying the

reams of information, that in Joe’s

product all together.

view, the agent should already have on file (and in reality, the company will have that data somewhere, just on a different system the agent can’t easily access). We all know that customers are actually likely to recommend companies they have complained to,

You need the right tools for the job

if, that is, the complaint is handled well. Unfortunately, in this example, we doubt Joe will be singing anyone’s praises and he becomes one of the 95% of consumers who talk about their poor customer service experience

All three of these examples were omnichannel experiences, but they weren’t omnichannel solutions. Without the right tools, it’s simply not enough to be omnichannel, or you’re at risk of a plummeting customer experience track record,

with other people, and of the 91% who

and it won’t be long before word gets around

won’t do business with your company

that your customer service is nothing to envy or

again after a bad experience.

aspire to.

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Customers love communications through apps With two thirds of consumers preferring to reach or be reached by brands through messaging apps, you can no longer stick to more traditional channels like email alone if you want to deliver an exceptional customer experience.

Every channel is undoubtedly an opportunity to inform, engage, support and convert, so it stands to reason that with more channels at your disposal, the better you will be able to do this. But if you’re not responding quickly, you’ve not only lost those chances, you’ve possibly alienated a lifetime customer.

Amazingly, 33% of consumers would recommend a brand that provides a quick but ineffective response. That’s not to suggest that quickly responding with gibberish is key to customer success, but it does highlight how speed or response is of the essence.

It’s not just a swift experience that customers would like, but a seamless one.

The modern customer expects contextual communication on the channel that’s most relevant to them.

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The importance of great customer experience Chances are, you may think you already offer ‘superior’ customer service. 80% of companies believe this to be the case. But according to a study by Bain & Co, just 8% of people think these same companies actually deliver on this. But why is customer experience important anyway? The combination of rising customer expectations, the increasing sophistication of technology, and saturated market places has created a perfect storm for the consumer where their preferences reign.

Not only do 70% of buying experiences stem from purely how the customer feels they are being treated (McKinsey), but according to Salesforce, 70% of consumers also say technology has made it easier than ever to take their business elsewhere. Not getting customer experience to a level consumers expect can be costly. It was estimated in 2016 that in the U.S. alone, the cost of customers switching due to poor service was $1.6 trillion.

Getting it right, however, actually delivers more than you would expect, with a huge 86% of consumers not just citing better experience as a buying influence, but admitting they would be prepared to pay more for that better experience. After all, customers aren’t declining the once great pull of brand loyalty for no reason – it’s a pain to switch providers for products or services, no matter how exciting the industry is. But they are seeking the kind of experiences that make them excited about a brand, and by 2020, customer experience is set to even overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator to the consumer.

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How to deliver a great customer experience Great customer experience doesn’t come from the start or end of a customer journey – it should be thought about and present at every touch point. Every one of these experiences, whether they are online or offline, should be an opportunity for personalised service, an on-brand interaction and a seamless way for the customer to reach their preferred goal – whether that is making a purchase, sourcing information, or resolving an issue.

It goes without saying that your staff will be an essential part of this crucial objective.

You’ll hire the best candidates based on their ability to interpret empathise and resolve any number of scenarios. But whilst they have the right skills, in many instances they don’t have the tools they need to deliver an exceptional experience.

42% of customer service agents say they are unable to efficiently resolve customer issues due to disconnected systems, archaic user interfaces, and multiple applications. You don’t just need the right staff, you need the right tools too.

– Forrester

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How does an omnichannel solution deliver superior customer experience?

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Provide contextual communication There is nothing nicer than talking to a sales or customer service agent and having them bring up your details up as if by magic. By using identifiers such as phone number or messenger ID, a good omnichannel solution will be tied to an account that stores key information about the customer which the agent can quickly access, meaning that their interaction will not only be immediately meaningful, it can also be tailored personally in accordance with the customer’s needs and preferences.

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Deliver a seamless experience No matter the channel, or the device your customers are using to contact you on, the cross over from one to another with a solution that enables context should be as seamless as possible. No matter how disparate your company is, an omnichannel solution should centralise these silos of communications so that the customer sees only one face to your brand – a smart face that responds quickly from any channel, can identify customers, and anticipate their needs. It’s not just inbound either. You can use omnichannel, for example, to send a push notification to a user’s mobile app, after a basket abandonment on their desktop. Or send an SMS after you know they have opened an email. You can also automate a pop-up that allows users to continue their web chat on another channel when they go to close their browser or chat widget. And when they speak to your agents in any of these ways, they shouldn’t have to repeat themselves!

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Empower agents and delight customers With access to a central customer profile, no matter the channel they are using, your agents will be empowered with the ability to offer a tailored and personalised experience to the customer every time. Think how nice it is to be offered bespoke service, from a personal shopper, to a thoughtful gift, this is the experience you will be able to offer to your customers with an omnichannel solution, as your agents will have all the customer’s preferences at their disposal to offer this superior service. Despite the trend of brand loyalty declining in recent years, by offering this experience to a first-time customer, and then every time they come into contact with you from thereon after, it’s hard to think why they would go elsewhere, and you just may well end up with a lifetime loyalist who feels heard and valued by you.

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Gain valuable insights on your customers The best omnichannel solutions pull data in from each channel the customers engage on, providing you with a wealth of demographic information. When integrated to your CRM, this gives you the perfect blend of data to drive smarter automations, greater segmentation capability, and more detailed reports. You’ll therefore be able to gain a greater understanding of your customer base and be able to continuously retarget and reassess your communication strategies to better cater to their needs, and align with your goals. Omnichannel solutions should give you insight into a customer’s buying habits, from the devices they are using, to the journey they are taking, and provide you with a holistic picture of the experience they are having.

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Create an enjoyable and immersive experience Typically, with the inclusion of more channels, companies experience a significant increase in customer experience markers such as NPS scores. Consumers enjoy an omnichannel approach, and are impressed when this experience is seamless and consistent, with ubiquitous branding at every touch point. Customers love web chat – it’s proactive instead of reactive offering them assistance in real time. They don’t need to go searching for an elusive support number, or listen to arduous list of departments like with a phone call. Instead they are connected to an agent and receive an immediate response, and what’s more, an agent can handle multiple tickets at once. Perception is everything.

If customers feel you are using outdated or needlessly slow tech to communicate with them, they may feel your company is equally as old-fashioned, whereas a sleek, modern and agile channel selection presents as a more forward-thinking and trust-worthy option.

Demonstrating omnchannel ROI Providing better customer experience is a key objective for any business; it’s imperative for growth, and ultimately survival. But customer experience can be a tricky metric to prove ROI. Fortunately, implementing an omnichannel solution can help you both cut costs, and increase revenue making it easy to build the business case for investment with a better customer experience being the icing on the cake.

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How can an omnichannel solution reduce costs?

Reduce the number of inbound calls By offering web chat at the point of sale, or a number that customers can text into to receive a quick answer, you are reducing the amount of expensive phone calls (which average $15 per every interaction) you have coming in with enquiries that could be answered instead in mere seconds, using other cheaper and more resourceful means. You could even automate responses or have a bot field common queries that could be passed onto a human agent, if required. Centralising and reducing the messages you are receiving (no matter the channel they come in on) to one place for your agents means they can quickly and efficiently respond to all customer enquiries, making the contact centre floor far more economical as a whole.

Reduce staff requirement and cut software seats With so much centralised access to customer data, and the ability to personalise messages to your customer database with ease, your communications will be more efficient than ever, as every message you send will be relevant and appealing to the customer.

Efficiently directing comms to the right place An effective omnichannel solution provides you with the ability to set up different teams for different purposes – for example, customer service and sales, or UK and US offices. But what it also does is empower your agents to quickly hand over these enquiries or conversations between teams, without losing any essential data. This way, you are rerouting communication speedily, and to the correct place, at the click of a button. And of course, more efficiency, equates to more costsavings, as well as faster response times, delivering a better customer experience.

Create more personalised comms With so much centralised access to customer data, and the ability to personalise messages to your customer database with ease, your communications will be more efficient than ever, as every message you send will be relevant and appealing to the customer.

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How can an omnichannel solution help to generate revenue?

More conversions with more channels The maths on this is really simple. Think of every channel as a new door of entry for customers to walk into. The more doors, the more entrants. The more channels, the more customers enquiries, and therefore the more opportunities to convert. That customer who has a few minutes on their lunch break wouldn’t have phoned you, but they will text or use a messaging app. An app user may have forgotten all about your products, but a well-timed push notification on pay day will re-engage that customer, reminding them of your brand, driving them to accept your offer and generate new revenue that would have otherwise been a competitor’s.

Specialised teams to optimise sales By intelligently rerouting inbound communications, you can be sure that messages are meeting the right agents with the right expertise to handle enquiries. This increases the likelihood of converting more enquiries to sales with the help of specialised staff, or creating more satisfied customers who are likely to buy from you in the future.

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Removing barriers to sales Effort is the ultimate barrier to buying.

Amazon knew this as early as 1999 when they patented the ‘1-Click’ trademark. By making the buying process as easy and as effortless as possible, you are removing barriers to sale. Basket or cart abandonment figures are high – SaleCycle reports them to be over 75% across all sectors for 2018.

If a user has an issue making a purchase online, they are unlikely to call you about it, especially if it is an impulse buy, but a simple less-than-a-minute web chat could solve their problem and increase your revenue.

Perhaps a user starts their journey on their work computer but wants to complete it later. A push notification or SMS letting them know that their cart has been saved and that a click can retrieve it would reduce basket abandonment significantly. An SMS or Facebook Messenger communication could also let a user know when an item is back in stock. With nearly a quarter of users abandoning their basket due to having ‘issues with shipping’ (SaleCycle), a welltimed communication offering to reduce or remove this cost could ensure a sale and create a future loyal customer. Depending on the business model, omnichannel solutions have an infinite amount of uses to remove the barriers to a customer completing their order, and generating you profit.

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Reduction in abandonment Omnichannel solutions have been known to deliver up to a 50% reduction in customer abandonment at key points in the customer buying path, increasing revenue by converting them at an effortless point of contact that enables them to continue their journey.

For example, when applying for a loan, customers can start the process of eligibility checking on their work desktop during their lunch break, but arrange a call back via text message or a messaging app to complete the application when they are out of the office. Or a customer may be getting an error message when they are trying to check out. The solution could be as easy as clearing their cache, but unless there is an immediate way for them to find this out, they will not be able to complete their purchase. A simple text could convert this lost browser into a valued customer.

Increasing brand recognition and positive perception We’ve already touched on this a little, but don’t underestimate the power of perception when it comes to generating revenue. Word of mouth is still incredibly powerful for brands – in fact, in this digital age of social media and online reviewing, it’s never been more powerful. An effective omnichannel solution where customers can easily reach you, on a channel that suits them, and where your business is quickly delivering relevant replies to queries or helpful updates about an order or application, is impressive, and likely to make your customer tell their friends, and if you’re lucky, tell the internet.

It’s no wonder that companies that excel at customer experience grow their revenue at typically 4-8% above the market (Bain & Co), and the only way to truly excel at customer experience in an omnichannel world is to adopt an effective omnichannel solution.

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Enabling bot integration and self-serve While your human agents will continue to be a valuable and irreplaceable asset to the customer experience that you offer, it’s also the case that bots will increasingly be able to field, funnel and even convert a large amount of your traffic. Bots can deliver conversations that they have qualified and done discovery for, empowering the agents to more effectively sell. They can provide solutions to common queries and problems, and they can even enable your customers to self-serve, so that they do not even have to interact with a human agent (removing a significant operational cost immediately). Bots can be an expense in their own right of course, but consider this – a bot can work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and requires no salary, pensions or benefits of any kind.

They take no sick days, holidays and their standard of service is always exceptional. The amount of enquiries they can respond to and tickets that they can hold is infinite. It’s no exaggeration that they will rapidly pay for themselves. To unlock the full power of a bot, you need to connect it to an omnichannel solution, enabling it to receive and reply to communication from any channel and then seamlessly pass the customer to an agent when required.

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What to look for in a omnichannel provider When omnichannel first came to market, it was the multinational professional services network PwC that told it like it was in their annual report and declared: “by 2020, the demand for an omnichannel customer experience will be amplified by the need for nearly perfect execution.” Not great, not superior, but perfect. It has to be this way, because the stakes are high. The Aberdeen Group Inc reported that companies with the strongest omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, in sharp comparison to a 33% retention for companies with weaker ones. It’s not just omnichannel you need to bear in mind, it’s the holistic solution.

Let’s explore some key considerations when shopping around for your omnichannel solution provider...

Seamless integrations You’ll need a provider who is not only able to offer you new channels, but one that is able to offer them as a seamless integration that doesn’t cost the earth in development time and hassle.

Agile development process It’s not just the number of new channels, but the number of new features that comes out every day on these channels.

A good provider gives you the ability to take advantage of these new features, with custom body options and an agile development process.

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Are they ready for the future?

Gartner recently reported that by the year 2020, customers will manage 85% of communication with an enterprise company without interacting with a human at all. If your omnichannel solution isn’t bot-ready, that’s a huge segment of the market that you are missing out on compared to your competitor’s. And it’s not just bots you need to keep up with. The speed at which consumers adopt new channels increasing. You’ll need a provider that is ready to quickly integrate business to consumer channels such as iMessage, WhatsApp, RCS and any others as soon as they become available, or you’ll risk being left behind.

Look and feel To offer a truly on-brand and seamless experience, you’ll need a provider with a sleek user interface and the ability to customise features such as web chat to fit your brand. With 87% of consumers of the opinion that brands need to put more effort into providing a more consistent experience (Kampyle), perception is everything for your customers, and this is more important than you think when presenting the face of your company. You will want to be seen as a modern, versatile business, not one stuck in the past.

Actionable reporting We’ve discussed how re-targeting from your omnichannel solution can be the key to offering more optimised interactions and campaigns, but to get there, you need dependable reporting that you can gain real insights from, and ideally, this should be built into the solution that your

Grows with you

provider offers. It should also offer as much

It’s important that you pick a provider that can

information as possible to your agents in a

scale with your requirements. Do they have

centralised customer profile, to empower their

global reach? Are they built on scalable web

interactions making them more effective for

technology? These are vital questions to ask

your business and relevant to the consumer.

yourself in the buying process.

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About Comapi Comapi are a leading omnichannel solutions provider, empowering businesses of any size to deliver holistic messaging experience to their customers. Choose from either our no-code software option, or connect to Hub and integrate the most powerful messaging API on the market to your existing system and instantly unlock your omnichannel potential.

Comapi have been delivering superior customer experiences for companies for over 16 years.

We’re real people, with you every step of the way, from integration to implementation. With a proven track record of delivering exceptional experiences to over 10,000 customers, and millions of messages sent every month, we’re confident we can help you achieve omnichannel success.

Want to learn more about how an omnichannel solution can reduce costs and improve customer experience?

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