The pandemic has created challenges for retailers at many levels: business viability, supply-chain disruptions, predictability, customer relationships — the list goes on. As businesses move online, quickly adapting to maintain a seamless customer experience has become mandatory. In this context, high-quality relationships with customers are both more demanding and harder to grasp.
Offline support, such as the traditional customer service phone call, remains a great channel for two opposite use cases: to answer quick questions, such as “do you have that shirt in size 10?” and to offer advice: “I love contemporary design —what would you suggest?” However, consumers now have access to various communication methods. To provide an informative and empathetic experience, retailers must offer a truly omnichannel experience.
Using multiple touch points and technologies — from email and live chat to social media forums, phone support and more — will improve your relationships with customers. In a short time, the additional effort you’ve made to connect will result in loyalty to your products.
This more connected and precise experience reassures customers that your company is committed to helping them, no matter what method they use to contact your team.
Advertisement
Here’s how to implement an omnichannel strategy that makes customers feel valued, and enables your team to deliver on the savvy consumers’ increased demands for service.
Take a Down-to-Earth Approach
Many companies are just now building their omnichannel strategies from scratch and taking a very holistic approach. However, this requires managing a lot of moving parts, and relies on comprehensive planning and well-honed execution skills. Organizations that are new to the omnichannel world could become overwhelmed.
When building your own omnichannel strategy, first take an honest look at your goals, and compare them to your current weaknesses and strengths.
Are your workflows well implemented?
Are your tools helping employees work productively?
Then, compare this assessment to your customers’ expectations.
What do they frequently ask?
How are you currently serving those concerns?
Where can you improve?
Once you identify answers to these questions, you can start building your own strategy. Because customers have readily adopted online communication channels, these three service options are essential to your success.
• Chat is essentially the online version of the typical “Let me know if I can be of any help” in stores.
• Phone conversations are best for offering personalized advice or handling nuanced inquiries — tone of voice, pauses and enthusiasm are vital to clear communication, but difficult to express in writing.
• Email works well for intricate customer inquiries. It allows agents the time and resources to provide a complete answer with context, even though some time-to-resolution is sacrificed.
Remember, just because a strategy has worked for other companies doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be right for yours. A competitor may provide an enviable customer service experience, but you won’t have insights into the underlying challenges of it: how they’ve been dedicating resources and energy, or how their organization has evolved to their current setup. Let your own goals and resources direct you to a starting point and build from there.
Using the Right Data
In order to gain actionable insights from data, you’ll need to collect metrics that speak to your customers’ habits, expectations and needs.
When asking your customers what they need, the trick is to avoid being invasive but still gather honest inputs. Customer service surveys immediately after brand interactions have a high response rate, but proactive outreach to your customer base (perhaps immediately after a purchase) will help you learn their customer service expectations before ever needing help.
If you prefer not to solicit feedback directly, analyzing the time customers spend on your website is another way to gain insight into their behavior and possible pain points. Additionally, because data collection, monitoring and analysis can be time-consuming, utilizing third-party services like Desk.com are a good option for gathering information if resources to gather, monitor and analyze incoming data are limited.
With this info in hand, you’ll be more informed about your customer needs and which channels are most useful to them (as well as your prospective customers, who are equally as important).
An Integration for Every Situation
An omnichannel setup is difficult to navigate (at best) if your tools don’t communicate intuitively with one another. With the right tools, there are integrations for almost every aspect of your omnichannel setup, and these services can provide even more insights that show how your strategy is functioning.
At Aircall, our retail customers can use the Shopify integration to instantly access customer details at the onset of every phone interaction. This productivity-focused integration saves customer support workers up to two minutes per call. Streamlining your chosen communication channels through integrations lets your agents focus on delighting customers with a quicker, more personal support experience.
Start Building Your Strategy — Today.
Now more than ever, companies need to improve their communication strategies to meet customer expectations — expectations that have likely changed substantially in the last year as online shopping has increased. The companies that survive the economic downturn caused by COVID-19 will be the ones that connect, understand and communicate with their customers effectively and with empathy. An omnichannel strategy is the best way to improve the customer experience across the board.
But remember, building an omnichannel strategy is an iterative and continuous process. In order to best serve your customers and your business, you should constantly be looking for ways to improve operations. Replace outdated solutions, listen to customer feedback and train both your team and customers to be at ease using your communication channels to have the most productive interactions possible.
Note that taking an omnichannel approach doesn’t mean the same service representative is an expert in every channel, as each requires different interpersonal and technical skills. For this reason, as retailers continue to navigate the “New Normal,” we’ll likely see companies begin specializing their teams. However, they’ll need to strike a balance between specialization and siloing; all team members should be carefully trained in the channels that provide a deeper customer service experience, such as the phone.
Furthermore, companies with successful omnichannel strategies will connect the dots between every channel, identifying tools that haven’t seamlessly talked to each other in the past (i.e. making sure information instantly flows from chat to a phone call so all relevant information lives at the operator’s fingertips).
Retailers that take these extra steps for customer success now are going to be the most successful when it comes time to fully welcome customers back into stores — the place where the customer most directly connects with a brand. Building and maintaining these online relationships now will leave a lasting positive impression on the customer, and therefore business viability, long after we say goodbye to 2020.
Olivier Pailhes, CEO and Co-founder of Aircall, began his career at The Boston Consulting Group and ArcelorMittal. While working in large enterprises, he saw the opportunity to improve the way businesses connect with customers on the phone. That led him to jump into the startup world to create Aircall. Pailhes holds an MBA from HEC School of Management in Paris.
