The omnichannel customer experience (CX) refers to creating a seamless and integrated experience for customers across various channels and touchpoints. It involves delivering a consistent and cohesive experience regardless of the customer’s interaction point, whether it’s via a conversation with a live agent, an email exchange, live chat functionality using an AI-powered chatbot, co-browsing and screen sharing, interactive voice response (IVR), and more. Providing an omnichannel customer experience is increasingly crucial for a successful modern business to meet user service expectations, and every organisation should consider how they can diversify their offering to ensure customers have multiple options.
How an Omnichannel Customer Experience is Beneficial to Your Business
There are multiple advantages to offering your customers multiple ways to get in touch with your organisation. The modern customer expects to be able to contact a business – for assistance, information, purchasing and other reasons – outside of traditional business hours. They also want to be able to engage with a business in a variety of ways that suit them and their preferences; whether they prefer talking to someone on the phone, instant messaging online, or being guided through a process virtually.
Some of the ways that an omnichannel approach can benefit your business include:
- Growing sales and profitability: omnichannel options allow for a more convenient and efficient experience, leading to higher value transactions for customers.
- Increasing customer satisfaction and retention: customers who are able to get in touch to problem-solve, find out more and deliver feedback are more likely to have their needs met and to be return customers.
- Improving brand reputation: providing an easy and enjoyable customer experience builds a brands reputation and improves consistency and a sense of trust.
- Optimising operation efficiencies: integrated systems across multiple channels streamline customer journeys and make it easier for customer service agents to provide a seamless experience.
- Providing data and insights: many of the channels mentioned below generate data that can be analysed to gain insights into customer behaviours, preferences, and trends. This allows a business to make more informed decisions and refine their strategy.
Omnichannel Approaches and How They Work
AI-Powered Live Chat
Conversational AI solutions drive customer conversations and sales. It provides an unparalleled experience in terms of 24/7 availability, allowing customers to get in touch at any time of day and from anywhere in the world. Conversational AI chatbots give you the ability to customise responses for a more personalised customer experience, with instant response times and easy scalability to meet greater demand. Additionally, the technology represents a significant cost saving to a business who can use AI to answer simple queries and focus resources on specialised cases.
Co-Browsing
Co-browsing (collaborative browsing) works by enabling customer service agents and customers to navigate through a website or mobile application in real time. This customer experience tool gives businesses the ability for live agents to visually assist customers, improves customer support and issue resolution, and provides collaborative problem-solving and customer education opportunities.
Interactive Voice Response
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) contributes to a positive customer experience, operational efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. It improves operation efficiencies by removing repetitive tasks and reducing the workload for live agents, as well as allowing for greater specialisation of live agents, leading to better job satisfaction.