;)
Let’s imagine: a customer is trying to reach your company. He/she first calls your customer support department but after being put on hold for a long time, he hangs up. Then he writes an email, only to receive a generic auto-reply. Frustrated, then he turns to social media, hoping for a quick response, but also his query seems lost in the noise.
This fragmented customer experience is all too common. Your customers expect seamless, instant assistance from your brand no matter which channel they choose to interact with you. When businesses fail to provide this, it not only frustrates customers but also risks losing their loyalty.
Omnichannel customer service is the hero here that connects every communication touchpoint into a cohesive, integrated experience. Whether customers reach out via phone, email, social media, or live chat, omnichannel customer service ensures their journey is smooth and unified. It empowers businesses to meet customers where they are, delivering consistent and personalized support.
Studies show that companies that delivered strong omnichannel customer service retained 89% of their customers. Hence, it becomes crucial for businesses to make it convenient for customers to get in touch with them.
So, how do you plan your omnichannel vision to enhance the overall customer service standards? In this blog, we will discuss the practical steps to implement it effectively. So, keep reading
Things we will cover in this blog:
Omnichannel customer service is a strategy in which all the communication channels are integrated to deliver consistent support across all touchpoints.
In an omnichannel approach, businesses effectively operate as a single channel, delivering high-value customer experiences across all the communication touchpoints. Unifying all channels under one platform ensures consistency regardless of the touchpoints used by the customers. It helps customers to interact whenever, wherever, and however they want.
According to recent research by Forrester, digital touchpoints are projected to influence over 57% of US retail sales by 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic also made this clear that being digital is a must for all businesses across different industries.
To cope with such situations, both B2B and B2C businesses have had to restructure their fragmented sales strategies and streamline purchasing processes to offer seamless customer support and experiences across different touchpoints. So, providing omnichannel customer service is no longer optional for you—it has become a necessity.
Multichannel and omnichannel customer support are often used interchangeably, but the concepts are a bit different. You need to understand the difference between these two approaches before you develop different strategies to offer best-in-class customer engagement and service.
Multichannel refers to the use of multiple communication channels to reach customers, each operating independently. For example, customers can reach a brand’s support department through live chat, phone, or SMS, but they cannot seamlessly continue the same conversation across different channels.
With Omnichannel you go a step further by integrating these channels to provide a seamless and unified customer experience across all communication touchpoints. An omnichannel experience ensures that the conversation history and context follow the customers across all channels used by them enabling support agents to deliver more personalized and efficient support.
In multichannel customer communication, each channel functions separately.
The omnichannel approach focuses on integrating all channels to create a cohesive experience. Whether a customer starts his journey on the website, continues it through a mobile app, or finishes in a physical store, his experience remains consistent and connected.
In a multichannel setup, data collected from different communication platforms are not interconnected and are often siloed. Each channel may have its own set of customer data, leading to fragmented insights.
Omnichannel strategies centralize data from all channels, creating a unified customer profile. This enables businesses to understand their customers better, check all the conversations and info at a central point, and provide more personalized interactions.
| Aspect | Multichannel | Omnichannel |
| Concept | Refers to the use of multiple communication channels to reach customers, each operating independently. | Here the channels are integrated to provide a seamless and unified customer experience across all communication touchpoints. |
| Channel Integration | Each channel functions separately. | All channels are integrated. |
| Data Management | Data collected from different communication platforms are not interconnected and are often siloed. | All data is centralized from all channels, creating a unified customer profile. |
Omni channel customer service is all about delivering a more cohesive, integrated customer experience, free of restrictions no matter how a customer reaches out to you. It allows a seamless transition between channels and having the same experience the whole way through. Here are the benefits it offers for your business:
Through omnichannel integration, you can manage all customer interactions on different channels from a single place. A unified view of customer interactions across channels also simplifies the process of maintaining a consistent brand voice. By streamlining customer communication, you can ensure a cohesive experience at every touchpoint, and offer better customer service and experience.
Businesses that have already opted for omnichannel customer service have a competitive edge over others as they can quickly design and launch other new channels. With the existing omnichannel framework, its easier to integrate new channels. When customer experiences and interactions are already seamless, adopting additional channels becomes more straightforward, eliminating the need to start from the ground up. With more modes of communication channels added, customers get happier.
When customers feel valued and understood, they are more likely to stick with a brand and be loyal. Omnichannel strategies help businesses provide timely and accurate responses, which can significantly improve customer retention rates. By meeting customers where they are and providing consistent services, you can build stronger relationships, reduce churn, and increase repeat business.
Omnichannel customer service tools integrate various communication channels into a single platform. It lets customer service reps access all necessary information quickly and send prompt responses from a centralized point improving their response times and reducing the need for repetitive tasks.
Customers expect instant response and when they get assistance across all their preferred channels in real-time, there is a significant reduction in the overall customer churn rate. When customers feel valued and understood, they are more likely to stay loyal to a brand.
With omnichannel customer service, businesses can collect more relevant data from multiple communication touchpoints, gaining a comprehensive view of customer behavior and preferences. This data can be stored and analyzed in a centralized section to identify new trends, measure performance, and make informed decisions.
While initially, you need to invest in your omnichannel infrastructure, eventually, it will help you save costs in the long run. Centralized platforms reduce the need for multiple, separate systems and streamline processes, leading to lower operational costs. Additionally, improved efficiency and faster resolution times can reduce the overall cost of new customer acquisition.
It’s not necessary to integrate all the available communication channels out there. You can do your survey, find out the most preferred channels of your customers, and integrate those. Some of the most popular channels are:
Key Channels in Omnichannel Customer Service
Email remains one of the most popular communication platforms due to its flexibility and wide accessibility. It allows customers to describe their issues in detail and attach all necessary documents. Email support is important because it provides a written record of all interactions, making it easier to track and resolve issues over time. To enhance the customer experience, make sure that you add email communication to your omnichannel customer service strategy.
We all use mobile phones to browse various company websites and also expect a company to have its own mobile app where we not only can place orders but also get in-app support if required. By integrating various features like live chat, FAQs, and push notifications companies can make sure that they offer best-in-class services and assistance on their mobile apps too. These apps provide a seamless user experience and allow businesses to engage with customers in a personalized and efficient manner.
For many businesses, traditional brick-and-mortar stores serve as the primary communication channel for engaging and delivering products to their consumers. Despite the rise of digital communication alternatives, many customers still want to see and evaluate products in person before making a buying decision.
Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram have become integral parts of our lives. We also contact the customer support of any brand through social media. These channels are ideal for handling customer inquiries, addressing complaints, and collecting feedback. So, make sure to integrate these platforms when you offer omnichannel customer support.
As the digital face of a brand, your website is often the first point of contact where customers land to get more information about your product offerings or resolve issues. In the customer journey, the website serves an important role offering self-service options, live chat, and access to other support channels. So, make sure you integrate the website as a major communication channel in omnichannel customer service.
Messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Viber are becoming increasingly popular among customers and they have started using these platforms for communicating with brands too. These platforms allow for quick, real-time interactions and support multimedia messaging, such as photos and videos. They also enable businesses to automate responses for common inquiries and offer personalized services to their customers.
To provide a truly omnichannel customer service experience, it’s essential to integrate all the communication channels your customers use. You can start by connecting a few, like social media and email, and gradually add more channels over time.
REVE Chat simplifies this process, by seamlessly integrating all these communication channels including LinkedIn, YouTube, Google Business Messages, YouTube, Play store and Appstore. This ensures consistent service across all touchpoints, allowing your support team to manage and respond to customer interactions from one centralized platform.
Once you are convinced of the benefits of omnichannel customer service and are ready to offer it to your customers, it’s essential to plan carefully. Avoid rushing in without a well-thought-out strategy. Let us help you create a smart, effective strategy tailored to your needs!
“The very first step in exceeding your customer’s expectations is to know those expectations.” Roy H. Williams
To know customer expectations, you need to understand their journey and their entire lifecycle as buyers. Customers expect contextualized engagement and seamless transitions between channels. As per Aberdeen Group Inc. businesses that choose an omnichannel customer service strategy have gained an 89% increase in customer retention and a 9.5% year-over-year increase in annual revenue.
When you understand how customers interact with your brand across multiple channels, you can begin to optimize your processes to reduce customer frustration, bridge the gaps, and help nudge customers toward conversion.
Every business has a specific target audience. As you try to figure out their needs, you need to identify their preferred channels of reaching your business too. You need to consider both reactive and proactive channels in order to make your omnichannel customer service approach successful.
There are multiple channels a customer can use to reach you such as your website, mobile app, physical store, live chat, or social media channels.
Customers interact with brands through various communication channels—social media, live chat, email, website, or phone. A key element of this omnichannel strategy is ensuring consistency across channels. Try to offer the same messaging and the same level of customer experience across all these touchpoints.
Customers expect a seamless experience regardless of the platform they choose to communicate with you. Achieving consistency not only enhances customer satisfaction but also builds trust and loyalty.
REVE Chat enhances this experience with its powerful instant messaging feature, enabling businesses to provide real-time support across multiple platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and more. Its omnichannel inbox further streamlines customer interactions by consolidating all messages from every communication touchpoint into a single interface, allowing your support teams to manage and respond efficiently. This not only improves response times but also ensures a cohesive and personalized customer experience.
Omnichannel Customer Service with REVE Chat
Your customer service team is the face of your brand across all communication channels. Train them properly with communication skills, technical skills, product knowledge, and customer service etiquette to make sure that they offer consistent and efficient service across all customer touchpoints.
Businesses are recognizing the benefits of reliable self-service portals for improving the overall brand image. It also allows businesses to stay ahead of the game and adapt to new ways of communication rather than just following the traditional rules.
Self-service portals provide customers with instant access to information, allow personalization, save valuable time, and business resources. According to a recent study, 67% of customers prefer to use self-service options instead of speaking with a company representative.
There are many ways you can build a content hub in the form of tutorials, manuals, and videos to help customers solve their problems on their own. They effectively engage customers in the following ways:
One of the topmost frustrations of customers is the long wait time when they reach out to you for support. A single bad experience is good enough to demotivate customers and leave your brand permanently.
Live chat is a perfect solution to combat customer frustrations. This communication platform helps to significantly reduce the queue time by providing real-time sales and support assistance to customers. Businesses that offer live chat witness a 34% rise in customer satisfaction rates.
REVE Chat is a great AI-powered live chat tool that offers real-time assistance to customers on your website, mobile app, and other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Viber, and WhatsApp. The best part is that REVE Chat also integrates all these channels seamlessly and lets you manage and reply to all customer queries on every channel from a single point. Want to experience REVE Chat firsthand? SIGN UP for its 14-day free trial today.
Social media is considered to be a great customer service tool that helps to drive customer satisfaction rates. 80% of consumers use social channels to engage with brands. Over 34.5% said they preferred social media over other support channels like phone and email.
Having an omnichannel support strategy in place helps brands achieve social media customer service objectives in the following ways:
Hybrid support is becoming a key attraction of the modern customer experience. Through AI chatbots and human support, businesses can enhance their services by offering the best of both worlds.
Adopting a hybrid support model requires a deep understanding of when to use live chat versus chatbots, considering the strengths and limitations of each channel. This balanced approach allows businesses to allocate resources effectively, focusing human agents on more complex tasks while leveraging chatbots for various business operations including customer service.
REVE Chatbot for example is an AI-powered multilingual chatbot by REVE Chat that offers prompt and accurate responses to customer queries 24/7 and helps you to automate many of your other operations in business like inventory management, billing, shipping etc.
Additionally, REVE Chat’s ticketing system automatically directs incoming requests to the right team for resolution, ensuring clear and consistent communication between customers and support agents. It also offers a centralized platform for effortlessly managing and tracking customer inquiries and issues.
Regular monitoring is important to ensure that your omnichannel support strategy is effective and meeting customer expectations. The key customer service KPIs or metrics used by businesses to monitor and analyze customer relations are as follows:
In today’s time, mobile accessibility is everything. If your website is not mobile-optimized, then your business is in trouble. Customers tend to complain when a site is not displayed on mobile properly, delay in loading, or is difficult to navigate.
Akamai research reveals that a 1-second delay in page response can lead to a 7% drop in conversion rates. This highlights how even slight delays in website loading or poor optimization for mobile users can harm user engagement and conversions.
Since omnichannel support also includes mobile app support, both your website and mobile applications should load fast, show accurate search results, and clear displays.
Customers don’t like to repeat their problems every time they get in touch with your support department. An omnichannel customer strategy ensures that you can eliminate this issue by integrating multiple communication channels into a unified system. Your support reps get all the details of the interactions that happened with customers on multiple platforms from a single dashboard, take references, and offer personalized services.
But there are some challenges too. Let’s discuss!
For being omnichannel, you need substantial time and resources to set up and run which can initially feel tiring and complicated.
Our Tips: Stay in there! With time, you will see good results and maintenance expenses will decrease. Work on making a good strategy, plan wisely, and focus on long-term success.
Delivering a uniform customer experience across all communication channels is tough. Customers always expect the same level of service and personalized interactions with your support reps, regardless of which channels they use to contact you.
Our Tips: You can opt for omnichannel customer support tools that seamlessly integrate all the customer touchpoints and you can see all the details from a single dashboard enabling you to offer personalized customer service.
Collecting and consolidating customer data from all channels while maintaining accuracy can be quite challenging. Customers contact a support department through many channels like websites, mobile apps, emails, live chats, and social media. All these channels will have separate data that you need to collect and manage effectively.
Our Tips: Stay organized and focused. Use customer communication tools that offer advanced analytics and help you to manage all this info efficiently.
You need to have resources including employees, technology, and time to manage omnichannel customer service efficiently. For startups or small businesses arranging such resources can be challenging.
Our Tips: Start with integrating a maximum of 2-3 communication channels at a time and take slow steps. Once you feel confident and start seeing positive results, expand by adding more channels.
Most retailers are already in omnichannel eCommerce, but managing inventory in real-time is challenging. They need to manage and keep a record of the inventory for both online and offline stores.
Our Tips: To avoid overselling and customer support issues, get help from chatbots. Bots automate inventory management and centralize your inventory data for real-time visibility across all sales channels.
Here let’s look into some of the standout examples of companies that have mastered the art of omnichannel customer service, offering best-in-class services and experiences to their customers.
Saudi Telecom Company (STC) is the leading telecommunications provider in Saudi Arabia and a key player in the Middle East’s telecom and information technology (IT) sectors.
With REVE Chat’s omnichannel customer engagement platform, STC is offering seamless customer service to 2.5 million people across multiple communication channels including their website, app, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Google Business Messages, YouTube, Playstore, Appstore, LinkedIn, and Twitter. REVE Chat ensures that all the customer data is centralized allowing their teams to monitor, respond, and engage with customers across multiple touchpoints from a single dashboard without missing any important messages. Additionally, REVE Chat’s AI-driven chatbot sends prompt replies and resolves customer inquiries instantly, improving response times and enhancing the overall customer experience.
Zappos is an online shoe and clothing retailer that has won the hearts of millions because of its exceptional customer service. It provides customer support through multiple channels, including Twitter, text messaging, and a 24/7 call center. Regardless of the channels used by customers, their support agents have all the necessary information to seamlessly continue with any customer interaction.
One of the key drivers of Zappos’ success is its generous 365-day return policy and free shipping, making it a top choice for customers. Their customer service is widely praised for consistently going “above and beyond” for the happiness and satisfaction of their customers.
Casper is a popular online mattress and sleep products retailer known for offering outstanding shopping experiences. It has smartly crafted a seamless omnichannel customer service experience by integrating its website, mobile app, customer support team (called as Sleep Specialists), and physical stores.
Customers can easily explore and buy mattresses through their website. Those who prefer a hands-on experience can visit their physical stores to check the products personally. Additionally, Casper offers a 100-night trial with hassle-free returns. Throughout this journey, anytime if required the customers can get in touch with Casper’s Sleep Specialists via phone, email, or live chat on the website.
Casper’s mobile app also offers outstanding features like sleep tracking, integration with other health apps, and personalized sleep advice. The deadly combination of convenience, flexibility, and comfort creates a truly holistic shopping experience. Impressive, isn’t it?
Omnichannel customer support is more than just a tactical move—it’s a strategic direction for businesses. To provide exceptional support at every customer touchpoint, companies must train their customer-facing teams to effectively interpret customer inputs and deliver accurate solutions to their issues.
Combining a robust omnichannel platform with a well-trained, dedicated support team is important for companies if they want to stand strong in the competition. With REVE Chat, you can turn the promise of a truly omnichannel experience into reality.
Start a 14-day free trial, no credit card required
Stay updated with the latest trends and ideas we share
What if you could transform customer service from a cost center into a competitive advantage—delivering instant, and personalized support with...
Generative AI isn’t just about creating art, writing songs, or drafting clever captions, it’s about reimagining what’s possible for businesses....
Companies face many struggles in customer service such as language barriers, lack of personalized support, unable to solve issues swiftly,...
