SkyCreek’s Guide to Making Your Multichannel Customer Communication Solution Count
Multichannel communication is more than just engaging with your customers on multiple platforms. It plays a key role in customer communication management by offering an efficient way to streamline workflows on the operational side, and provide improved customer experience as well. Multichannel communications are holistic, giving customers a smooth journey from their first interaction through their entire service lifespan.
It is particularly important in sectors like finance, telecom, utility, and healthcare communication where the clarity and timeliness of communication greatly influence customer satisfaction. Whether it’s scheduling appointments, automating service updates, or deploying time-sensitive information, these high-churn, high-competition industries rely on effective, widespread communications to retain customers and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
The right multichannel communications platform will help your organization increase revenues, reduce costs, and boost competitiveness by improving brand loyalty and operations.
To measure the efficacy of your multichannel communications strategy, make sure your solution delivers on these four fronts:
1) Flexibility
Which message? Which channel? What time? Customers expect organizations to meet them where they are, but it’s not enough to solely follow their contact preferences. Being able to transfer conversations seamlessly from one method to another provides continuity of services that greatly contributes to customer satisfaction.
According to one case study (by McKinsey & Company), most customers don’t care much about singular touchpoint events. They care about the cumulative experience across multiple touchpoints and multiple channels, over time.
Flexibility doesn’t just apply to the customers’ choices and preferences, but to your agents’ capabilities too. The right multichannel communications platform provides the visibility to help customer care representatives view the customer’s touchpoints in the context of the overall journey.
2) Seamless Experience
Before email, social media, and chatbots became methods to engage with customers, the customer journey was linear. But it branches in all directions now, sometimes having people jump between communication channels before they complete their journey.
Whether a customer is speaking with a call center agent or texting a technician, they expect the same level of service across all channels. Consistency across the customer experience, especially in a non-linear journey, emphasizes company listening, a key component to fostering brand loyalty.
Take, for example, the story of SkyCreek customer Charter Communications. Looking to centralize customer touchpoints across all channels and operational segments, Charter Communications partnered with SkyCreek to integrate its billing, customer relationship management, preference management and workforce management systems through SkyCreek’s ECP solution. By centralizing content creation, brand management, and visibility across multiple customer journeys, SkyCreek helped Charter Communications ensure that all customers are being provided with consistent, clear, and customized communications. This partnership brought a reduction in inbound call volume by providing an excellent service experience at scale over multiple customer journeys.
3) Customer Journey Optimization
When interactions are streamlined with a multichannel communications solution, customers are much more likely to engage with agile, on-demand communication where responses can be received in real-time. Your multichannel platform should allow both automatic and manual setups to handle operational changes without putting too much pressure on the team which affects quick delivery.
Continue to hone the customer journey by taking your multichannel data and personalizing their experiences. Multichannel communications provide customer journey optimization through automated experiences, troubleshooting clarity, feedback gathering, and more.
By aligning customer communication strategies with emerging consumer trends, businesses can significantly enhance the effectiveness of their customer journey optimization, catering to the evolving preferences of their audience.
4) Adaptability
The data received from your multichannel communications tool will inform the changes you need to make to provide an effortless customer experience. Bringing back the case study by McKinsey & Company, the media company found that at each customer touchpoint, “the interaction had at least a 90% chance of going well. But average customer satisfaction fell almost 40% over the course of the entire journey.”
The touchpoints weren’t broken—the onboarding process was. With insights like these, organizations can adapt processes, systems, and interactions. For telecommunications, healthcare, finance, and utilities companies, consistent changes are the norm and you need a multichannel communications solution to facilitate that change.
Implementing your Solution
Forming a cohesive strategy across all channels can be challenging. A cohesive multichannel communications platform integrates these channels, streamlining customer communication management for smoother operations.
Additionally, it simplifies the process for organizations to collect actionable data from customer interactions, enabling them to make necessary adjustments to their processes.
Ensure your platform meets the specific needs of your teams. For such communications to work well, your teams should be able to exchange insights and work together smoothly to implement the plan.
If you already have a multichannel communications provider, assess them using these four pillars to ensure you’re getting maximum benefits. If you’re just starting to adopt a multichannel communications strategy, schedule a free demo with SkyCreek to see how our Enterprise Communication Platform can give you ultimate control over customer communications throughout the service lifecycle.
