Multichannel customer service intends to offer its customers with various options for how they communicate with the company— either to seek assistance or to register a complaint. It is all about providing a seamless customer experience irrespective of the channel that the customers wish to use.
Quite simply, your customers want to accomplish tasks and resolve issues as quickly as possible. The inability to share information across channels – and across your organisation – can create a truly disjointed customer experience.
It is essential therefore to understand what makes multichannel customer service so important.
For many companies, the primary reason to offer this service to its customers is to tap into increasing customer satisfaction and a considerably higher retention rates. Some other companies do so to provide its customers, the services they require on a more individualistic and personal level. This also has improves marketing communications for the company as the data and insights gathered from customers are streamlined, more efficiently.
When prices and products are often very similar between competitors, then customer experience is one way to differentiate your brand from its rivals.
So how do you streamline your customer services across multiple channels?
Your ability to value your customers’ time is the key to delivering the experience they expect.
Extending customer service on social media, website, telephonic consultations, emails and live chats are surfacing to be the best ways to directly address your customer’s needs. The key here is to present a unified face to the customer. You may be a company with thousands of employees that sells online and offline, but remember that the customer just sees one company. It remains important that patient’s information, earlier interactions have been safely secured to avoid repetitive enquires.
The use of social media and technology for customer service is still relatively new, but it offers a great opportunity for brands to be proactive in dealing with customer complaints, and can also show others (potential customers perhaps) that a brand is listening and willing to engage with its customers.
Great customer service makes people talk about a brand. Customers will become advocates, recommending a company to friends and colleagues purely based on receiving first class service.