Conversation Killers: Reasons Your Omnichannel Strategy Is Failing

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Research by Aberdeen Group reveals that organizations with the strongest omni-channel strategies retain nearly three times as many customers as companies with weak omni-channel strategies.

Findings such as these have created an “arms race” of companies building a presence on every conceivable channel to reach customers.

But, in the battle to be everywhere, some businesses have forgotten that customers care more about experiences than channels.

Ease, simplicity, and resolutions that leave a positive impression are what your customers really value.

That’s why — no matter how many channels you have—if you can’t adequately solve your customers’ problems in ways that make them feel good about the support your brand provides, your omni-channel strategy will fail.

The Power of a Great Conversation

In the whitepaper Serial Switchers Swayed by Sentiment, NewVoiceMedia discovered that 56% of people still believe calling a business and speaking to a live agent is the quickest way to resolve issues. The research also revealed that 67% of people will leave a business because of poor customer service.

Self-service technologies currently can’t connect with customers in ways that aren’t hardwired into their code. This means that when a conversation requires emotional intelligence, customers will prefer speaking to a real person.

Chatbots may have simplified pathways to purchases and support for many customers, but if your business has lost its human touch, the gravitational pull of a competitor becomes that much greater.

Building escalation paths for customers to speak with an agent when their queries become complex or emotional is a crucial part of creating the complete omni-channel experience.

Keeping Track of Customer Conversations

Engaging with customers in this ultra-connected era means providing a seamless experience across email, chat, SMS, video, social, and an ever-increasing number of other channels.

Most customers enter and exit conversations interchangeably across channels, which means relying on escalation paths from digital channels to live assistance solely is not enough.

To truly unleash the power of seamless, emotive conversations within your omni-channel strategy, you need to ensure context between interactions is maintained.

If your agents don’t know the person they are speaking with has already emailed or dropped your company a message on social media, discussions will fall flat, and your customer’s experience will falter.

Consequently, matching your agents with the right data is crucial to productive sales and service conversations, as well as key to unlocking the full potential of your omni-channel strategy.

By unifying customers across all these touchpoints, an omni-channel strategy is essential. However, forgetting that customers value ease, simplicity, and positive problem resolution more than the number of channels you have puts your omni-channel strategy at risk of a failure that can easily be avoided.

NewVoiceMedia’s Omnichannel Solution

If you use Salesforce to manage your customer relationships, you will likely need a way to effortlessly transfer interactions from digital to voice.

With an omni-channel contact center solution fully integrated for Salesforce, NewVoiceMedia integrates all your customer contact channels with your CRM data, providing the capability to personalize conversations, regardless of location, device or channel.

“Salesforce empowers businesses to offer customers a rich, connected omni-channel experience, and ensuring that the contact center is part of that experience is critical to business success,” said Tony Bone, Regional Vice President of Service Cloud at Salesforce.

“The NewVoiceMedia platform offers Salesforce customers the ability to deliver that experience across both voice and Salesforce-implemented digital channels.”

“Unified routing coupled with tight integration with Salesforce enable customers to leverage their existing Salesforce implementations and obtain deep visibility and management across all their interaction channels.”

Additionally, up-to-date engagement records from every channel put a full history of every customer interaction at your agents’ fingertips.

Giving this power to your reps means they know exactly what’s happened in the past while feeling informed in the present.

Author: Guest Author

Published On: 7th Aug 2018 - Last modified: 18th Feb 2019
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