Remove the Challenges in Customer Relationships – The Omnichannel Way!

Customers interact with multiple people, channels, and interfaces as a part of their journey with your organization.

You collect so much customer data as a part of their journey. However, do you have a way to gain insights from those and use them to benefit the customers and the organization?

Does everyone in your organization have a single view of your customer interactions?

Only then would you be able to figure out a way to enhance customer relationships.

This brings us to the challenges in customer relationships. With a variety of data sources at your disposal, the challenges can be summarized thus:

1. Decentralized and scattered customer data
2. Lack of unified customer experience due to disparate channels and interfaces
3. Duplication of customer data
4. Cumbersome data management and reporting
5. Lack of a single view of the customer
6. Fragmented systems

This poses a massive challenge in the kind of experience you can provide.

Let us assume you run an online retail outlet. Your customer journey starts with discovering your offerings – it can be the website or mobile app.

Then, your customer visits either of these properties and starts to search your offerings – you get to understand your customer’s preferences here. This allows you to recommend and personalize your offerings per their preferences, buying patterns, and demography. 

Once the customer clicks on the buy button, your automated order management systems capture the customer details, and they work with shipping to deliver the order.

Your customer’s data also gets uploaded to your customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Post sales, your customer will interact with the customer service and customer support teams. The customer details are captured here in the helpdesk system and the contact center platform.

You will also have multiple channels through which a customer can reach your business – voice, chat, email, SMS, WhatsApp, messaging apps, chatbots, and mobile.

All of these capture the overall customer journey.

Look at the number of touchpoints where your customer interacts with you in the above example. It is humungous, and you must bring all of this together to address the customer relationship challenges.

Customer Experience (CX) Platform

The core of the customer experience platform is the contact center, which must be integrated with all your internal systems and the channels through which your customers communicate with you.

This will provide an omnichannel view of the customers for all your customer-facing resources, allowing you to enhance the customer experience.

The omnichannel infrastructure would help you address all of the customer relationship challenges:

• CRM integration – allows your CX professionals to access a comprehensive history of customer interactions, purchases, preferences, and relevant data. CX agents can provide personalized assistance based on past interactions, leading to more tailored and practical support.
• Multi-channel integration – allows customers to reach you through their preferred channel. It also helps agents seamlessly switch between channels while maintaining context, providing a consistent experience regardless of how customers reach out.
• Real-time view of customer information – real-time access to inventory, order status, and other pertinent data. For instance, if a customer inquires about product availability, agents can immediately check inventory levels and provide accurate information without switching between multiple platforms.
• Unified customer profiles – agents can understand the customer’s journey across various channels, preferences, and pain points, leading to more personalized and empathetic interactions.
• Insights – analytics and reporting can provide insights from the collected data. This helps understand customer behavior, identify trends, and optimize strategies to improve the overall customer experience.

For example, imagine a customer inquires about a product on your social media channel. The agent who handles the query not only sees the conversation history but also has access to the customer’s past purchases, preferences, and ongoing issues.

They can swiftly address the query, potentially offer personalized recommendations, and resolve any issues – all within the same conversation.

This holistic approach, facilitating an omnichannel view of customers, empowers you to deliver personalized, efficient, and consistent support. This will allow you to build strong relationships with your customers.