With email, SMS, live chat, voice becoming the key customer touchpoints, brands will have to share customer conversation across different departments, such as marketing, sales and customer service platforms to offer better customer experience. Simply being where customers are located does not matter, but knowing who they are and personalising the messaging along with where they are located makes a difference.
Considering customers as individuals, analysing their records, understand how they interact and knowing their interests and preferences is the key. They may be considered, the more traditional channels as compared to the messaging apps, but their potential is enormous when they are automated.
Let us look at how SMS, email contribute to a seamless omnichannel experience.
Omnichannel & SMS
As consumer preferences shift towards omnichannel engagement, enterprises must be able to hold conversations across the numerous channels, but SMS holds a special place. SMS is being viewed as an old school communication channel and people are surprised that it is still popularly in use. Almost 64% of the world’s population owns a phone but only 48% are connected to the internet. The real benefit of SMS is revealed when OTT messaging apps responds in times of no Internet. SMS can be effectively used as alternative mode of communication in an omnichannel for brands to communicate with their customers.
The true power of an SMS is displayed when it is automated and provides analytics to keep track of your campaign results with actionable insights into response and overall delivery. A real-time proactive SMS informing the customer about the delivery apart from an email and notification provides significantly more value. Moreover, a customer is more likely to respond to the SMS it can also enable a 2-way dialogue between the customer and brand.
Omnichannel & Email
Brands can automate their email campaign with highly personalised email content targeted to the relevant pre-identified customer segments using reports and dashboards which contains their historical behaviour, response pattern. This can be done using a variety of templates. Brands can orchestrate and pre-configure an email response which can be triggered by customer actions in real-time.
Omnichannel & Voice
Brands has started harnessing the power of enterprise voice products and solutions to create unique experiences for their customers by personalizing campaigns and enriching their journey with voice applications. These solutions are secure and reliable and has a diverse product line up, allowing enterprises to manage inbound & outbound calls with personalisation.
For instance, a credit card payment reminder or a loan payment reminder can be sent via Voice SMS, apart from email and notifications to create an impact. Moreover, a 2-way voice messaging can actually work as a call for action to pay the loan online and if there is any query, a call can be directed to a customer service agent who is knowledgeable about the personal history of transactions of that customer and is aware of the digital footprint, including search history.
Voice is yet another touchpoint ripe for customer engagement and can be a key differentiator for brands. It can be effectively used when coupled with Omnichannel in a campaign where customers prefers Voice as a channel of communications.
An integrated omnichannel solution helps to unify communications across multiple channels to give you brand an edge to reach customers as per their preferred choice of communication channel seamlessly.
The author is MD and Group CEO at Route Mobile. Views are personal.
