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Having just one or two channels for support is never an ideal strategy in times when brands are expected to be present on different channels together and deliver a seamless experience.
Customers too have gone quite demanding as they now want a choice for the channel to receive support.
90% of customers expect consistent interactions across channels.
This is where multi-channel customer support enters the scene and becomes a major differentiator for companies of all sizes.
It’s also becoming the key to offering quick, convenient experiences on the preferred channels of your customers.
So, your business needs to adopt a multichannel approach for digital engagement and maintain consistency across channels.
By definition, multichannel support is the strategy of using different methods of communication together for customers to reach a business.
The value of this type of support is required because every customer has their own ways of interacting with brands and may not use the same channel to contact a business.
In general, multichannel customer service can combine a variety of platforms together or a few of them separately such as live chat, social media, email, knowledge base, etc. to enhance the digital experience for clients.
Brands now realize the value of having a broad presence across channels to handle customers successfully and delivering them great experiences. 51% of companies today use at least eight channels to engage, communicate and interact with users. When your business is available on multiple channels, it always ensures value to customers.
Multichannel support can add value to your business in many ways.
Enhancing customer experience is mostly the driving force behind the strategy of being present on various channels at the same time. Your business can make it successful only when the resources and energy are streamlined together. Plus, more channels mean your business needs to take more responsibility to ensure value to customers at every stage of the support journey.
Many things are there to consider when your business decides to offer multichannel customers support.
Let’s look at each of the ways;
Customers prefer to interact with brands that offer support on many channels. This gives them the choice to switch to any channel and get value with the interactions.
Keeping this in mind, your business must have a mix of channels to attract customers and show them you understand their preferences.
With so many popular channels around such as live chat, social media, email, knowledge bases, and self-service tools, etc, the key is to identify the channels that are incongruent with your brand vision and leverage its potential.
Customers want quick answers to their queries. If you keep them waiting even a little longer, they might feel frustrated and even switch over to your competitors.
With so many channels and responses to handle simultaneously, your agents may feel constrained at times and this can adversely affect the response time.
To avoid that situation, your business should link all the support channels to the same interface such as live chat, social media, messaging app, video chat, and let the agents become more productive in dealing with customers.
50% of consumers don’t mind whether they are dealing with humans or AI-enabled assistants.
A growing number of brands are choosing chatbots as an integral part of customer service to automate responses and free up agents to focus on other equally critical tasks.
Bots can give your business the freedom to provide prompt assistance at various touchpoints of the customer journey.
When bots are used for multichannel customer engagement, it not only saves operational costs but also improves response, therefore, enhancing the customer service experience.
HDFC Eva banking chatbot for customer service is a great example of how to provide multichannel service to customers in an efficient manner. It uses the latest Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand the user requests and offers information in zero wait time.
Customers like to switch between channels when interacting with brands. They also wish to get the same type of experience across different channels.
For that reason, your business should first try to clearly understand customer service trends and then strive to maintain context across various channels.
When you do that, customers are spared the inconvenience of repeating their problems every time they change channels.
Bots handle 85% of all customer service interactions without the involvement of any human intervention.
Even when automation is taking center stage in customer service and Artificial intelligence (AI) driving customer service interactions to digital platforms, it would be a mistake if the human touch is completely removed from the support delivery.
There will always be certain complex situations where customers would want to speak to someone to get their doubts removed.
To include a human touch, you need to:
Involving your customer support team at the right time is always the key to minimizing excessive reliance on AI-powered technology and include a human touch to support.
For your business, not all channels will be equally rewarding. While some may maintain their usability for long, others might lose their relevance with time for customers.
Well before any channel ceasing to matter, you need to regularly evaluate all of them and see how they fit in with the continuously changing contours of customer demand.
Based on the analysis of customer channels, you will be in a better position to identify the key customer and team metrics and then improve upon them.
The evaluation will also give a deep insight into what customers want and how to train the team to bridge the gap between what is delivered and what is expected.
One-third of all customers use their mobile devices to reach out to businesses or get in touch with the customer service team.
With smartphone usages skyrocketing across the globe, not offering mobile support experiences could be a huge loss for any business that sets high standards for itself.
Mobile traffic is something you just can’t ignore, so your business needs to devise the right support strategy to benefit from one of the key customer service channels around.
Deloitte is a large multinational professional services network that shows how to get mobile multichannel support strategy right. Through Deloitte Insights, an educational hub, it produces mobile-friendly content and smoothly delivers a better customer experience.
Understanding customer interactions on a regular basis is always one of the key aspects of customer service.
If you’re not reviewing all the calls, emails, social media messages, live chat history from customers, it means you’re not evaluating the quality of your support.
You need to review the customer conversations:
So, make sure you’re aware of customer expectations through regular analysis of their conversations as only this can give you a reason to improve the value of support.
Gaining customer insights and understanding their behavior or sentiments is always a challenging task. Many businesses have a poor idea of customer actions across multiple interactions. So, you need to know about omnichannel vs multichannel support strategy and how it fits better for your business.
Implementing multichannel support is now essential to keeping pace with the changing aspirations of customers who expect brands to have a presence across various channels. Your business needs to identify the right channels, link them all to the same interface and regularly evaluate channel performance to ensure value to customer engagement.
With more brands looking to invest in different channels to reach out to customers, you should not lag behind and adapt to the current trends in the market. And this is where a multichannel approach can fit in and help you delight your customers across touchpoints.
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Suvashree Bhattacharya is a researcher, blogger, and author in the domain of customer experience, omnichannel communication, and conversational AI. Serving as a content marketing strategist at REVE Chat, she develops contextual and interesting content for customers from different industries and segments like customer service, customer satisfaction, engagement, messaging platforms, etc. Passionate about writing and designing, she pours her heart out in writeups that are detailed, interesting, engaging, and more importantly cater to the requirements of the targeted audience. Her interests include reading, painting, and traveling.
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