How To Get The Most Flexible Customer Experience From The Messaging Channel
The proliferation of mobile devices and messaging applications has forever shifted the mindset for consumers when interacting with businesses. The complete reliance on voice has greatly decreased. As SMS became more widely used, consumers began to move away from talking in favor of sending messages to each other. This trend continues to expand from person-to-person to person-to-business communications.
The industry is still evolving today, with additional channels, such as MMS, RCS, social media, live online chat, and even video chat for consumers. Keeping up with these trends can be challenging, if not impossible for a business.
The Challenges of Flexible Customer Experience
Customer engagement solutions need to be as flexible as the business owner and still meet the customer’s preferred method of communication. A previous blog post noted that customers now expect additional channels beyond traditional voice. Setting up a webpage, obtaining a text enabled phone number, and starting a social media presence may be very easy, but managing them is very challenging.
This can be especially complicated if the messaging is more visual or needs to convey a lot of information concisely. The adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” comes to mind. Imagine a customer has received a self-install ring doorbell and is confused by the instructions for installation. A novice trying to describe the situation by voice or even text would be a recipe for a dissatisfied customer experience. Or picture a field service technician who needs to send an image of what they are looking at when requesting additional help from the support center expert.
Even if a business can solve the challenge of managing these channels, there is an additional obstacle to overcome – how to connect them. Regardless of channel, from the customer’s perspective, they are interacting with a single business. Customers expect personalized service interactions; they expect the business to know them and their interaction history.[i] However, since the channels operate independently, the service representative typically does not have a complete view of the customer journey.
How an Omni Channel Contact Center Can Solve These Problems
An omnichannel solution, enabled with advanced business messaging capabilities consolidates all communications to a single, unified client. This functionality simplifies the management of multiple channels. A customer can send an image of their existing doorbell wiring using MMS instead of describing it. The field technician could provide their GPS location via RCS upon arrival at the job site, upload images or video to the support center expert, or even close out the work order by choosing from a carousel list of templates. With an omnichannel contact center, a customer service representative can handle all these interactions in a consolidated location. This is important because it can provide context in the form of historical conversations or orders, regardless of the channel used each time (SMS, RCS, Apple Business Chat, voice call, email, etc.), permitting proactive response and most likely first call resolution.
The result is a very flexible customer engagement and an increase in agent efficiency which reduces time and cost.
If call abandonment rates and first call resolution metrics are suffering, this could be a sign that additional advanced messaging channels may be needed.
Learn more about how to connect and grow business communications channels at https://www.mavenir.com/.
[i] Microsoft State of Customer Service 2019
