As the purchasing habits of potential customers continue to evolve and the level of choice available to them expands every day, the need for strong brand reputation has never been more important for modern businesses.
In a study by PowerReviews, a whopping 97% of consumers revealed that they consult product reviews before making a purchase, with 87% of them actively looking for negative reviews to inform their decision.
With more and more shoppers basing their decisions on reviews and online ratings, the power of customer opinions is a crucial factor in determining how successful your business can be in attracting more customers.
Not only does your business’ reputation among customers affect the awareness and trust of your brand, it can also have a huge impact on achieving your business KPIs; including sales and customer retention targets.
With this in mind, we are evaluating some of the key ways that omnichannel communication can help you to satisfy more customers, improve their overall impressions of your brand and influence them to review your business more positively.
No longer a nuisance to customers
By engaging customers through omnichannel software, your business can offer a variety of communication channels, ensuring high availability and convenience for your customers.
When firms use omnichannel platforms such as ConnexAI, they can also log and save a record of these preferences, as well as the desired times that customers are open to this communication.
By utilising and adhering to these preferences in customer engagement processes, your business can ensure that customers are happy to communicate with you, while remaining GDPR compliant and creating a smooth customer experience.
Offering a variety of communications streams with an omnichannel platform will not only boost your success rate, but also strengthen your reputation within your industry for unparalleled service by securely anticipating your customers needs.
Faster response times and providing better experience
With the power of communicating directly with businesses now in the hands of everyday customers, many of them will expect swift responses when communicating with customer service teams.
Businesses are now receiving complaints, requests or enquiries around the clock across a multitude of communication platforms, with most customers seeing their enquiries as a one of urgency.
When using ConnexAI omnichannel communication software, our clients can consolidate inbound communication from customers into one system, allowing them to prioritise each request accordingly and assign the correct agents to handle them swiftly.
By handling customer queries more efficiently, with clear points of escalation, agents are able to efficiently engage with more customers and provide an overall better standard of service.
This not only helps to boost the overall brand reputation, but also enables them to reach their sales or call targets and satisfy their team managers in the process.
Knowing your audience through your data
By using omnichannel reporting and analytics, your business can identify trends about your audience to strengthen your outbound strategy based on the inbound trends.
For example, if your omnichannel reports show that the 16-28 age demographic prefer to contact you business through live chat between 1pm and 3pm, your business can utilise these insights to plan a more targeted and effective outbound communication for this demographic.
By taking the next step to utilise live chat as an outbound sales tool based on previous success, your business could cleverly target key warm leads and will likely experience more success by reaching out to the right customers, with the right message, on the right platform.
Resolving issues faster through social media
In the modern business landscape, many customers will forgo calling helplines or navigating websites, and instead jump straight to social media to directly communicate with businesses.
This new wave of public customer interactions is a crucial one for businesses to get right, as not only are they communicating with customers who directly engage with them on social media but also the existing and potential customers who see these interactions.
By utilising omnichannel communication, businesses can streamline their customer response processes into one platform and cut down on time consuming tab-hopping between social platforms, CRMs and dialler systems. This will allow customer service agents to solve customer enquiries faster, provide a more satisfying service and free up time for them to handle even more support requests.
Extended reach through social media
Social media enquiries bring a new challenge to businesses looking to protect their reputation but also an opportunity to strengthen their brand, as the more they satisfy customers publicly on social media, the more likely they are to be seen in a positive light.
Public social media engagements can also provide an added benefit for localised issues or popular enquiries.
When many customers share the same complaint or enquiry as those being dealt with on a business’ social media page, they will be able to see engagements surrounding that issue on this page and potentially find the answers they are searching for without having to initiate contact themselves – allowing them to save time and achieve a satisfying conclusion more quickly.
Adhering to GDPR measures
Following the introduction of GDPR measures in 2018, customers expect their details and data to be handled securely and feel that all decisions relating to this data should be theirs to make.
With omnichannel communication, customers are more empowered and can more easily remain in control of their data. With multiple communication platforms at their disposal, they are able to submit data requests, and opt-in or out of communication on specified platforms.
Businesses can seize the opportunity to satisfy their customers through omnichannel, and boost brand reputation, by ensuring GDPR compliance is maintained across all platforms, and allowing customers to submit and handle GDPR requests securely through each of them.
By allowing these engagements to happen through all platforms, businesses are able to provide a greater sense of control to customers and leave them feeling satisfied with the service they receive from their brand.
To learn more about the positive effects that omnichannel can have on your business, stay tuned for part two in this blog series. Or if you would rather witness the benefits yourself, simply get in touch with our sales team to book a free demo or claim your free trial of the ConnexAI omnichannel engagement system.
