Customer satisfaction is the ultimate driving force behind business success. This satisfaction stems from total control over purchasing power. Customers should be able to buy products and services on their terms, whenever they want, and via a method that suits them.
Omnichannel – a seamless customer engagement platform offers this opportunity to the customer irrespective of where they are shopping online from- a desktop, a mobile device, or a brick and mortar store.
An omnichannel engagement platform lets companies stay connected with their clients via a company website, social media accounts, email, phone, text messaging, and chatbots or live chat. It ensures a consistent customer experience across all these channels and touchpoints.
Apart from being an effective customer engagement tool, it can be used for intelligent marketing and sales, breaking the barriers between a business and its customers across many fronts.
Thanks to its omnichannel strategy, US retailer Target enjoyed its best-ever quarter in Q2 2020, with a sales increase of 24.3% and digital sales soaring 195%. The strategy has also fared well for customer retention and higher purchase rates.
What is an omnichannel experience?
Omnichannel engagement platforms leverage a multi-channel sales approach to deliver a seamless customer experience. It accounts for all devices and platforms that a customer can use to interact with the company, creating an equally efficient and positive experience across all these channels. It has become common for people to switch across devices and platforms with technological advancement.
As per Google research, 98% of Americans switch between devices on the same day.
Organizations can use this trend to their advantage by adopting an omnichannel approach in their marketing, sales, and service strategies, allowing greater reach and likeability among customers. For example, instead of just offering customer support on their desktop sites, organizations can leverage Facebook messenger, live chat, email, and phone to reach out to their customers.
Benefits of omnichannel customer engagement platform
In this day and age, customer experience has moved beyond the customer service department and shifted to efficient tracking, managing, and using of customer journeys.
1. Serve your customers where they are
Convenience is what customers constantly seek, and delivering them options to avail products and services in a manner that suits them can be a big positive for customer service and business growth. For example, customers may prefer to do a simple task like paying monthly bills via their mobile phones, over a PoS, or through desktop apps. Offering them a seamless choice and the same ease of experience can be pivotal in improving customer loyalty and conversion rates.
2. Gather actionable insights
Making informed decisions is about understanding the importance of customer insights and data in a business. A unified omnichannel customer engagement platform makes it easier to assemble data in one dashboard and work with it. It can be instrumental for organizations in painting proactive strategies for business growth.
3. Real-time engagement
Omnichannel platforms allow real-time customer engagement via chats and videos or screen sharing and co-browsing. Customers can feel actively involved with your products and services by offering real-time solutions. With visual engagement tools like video calling and composing, queries can be resolved faster without overburdening the agent.
4. Improved customer service
With new and innovative solutions flooding the market, focusing on customer needs means gathering customer data and feedback and using these for insightful actions. An omnichannel platform can be used to align all company processes, strategies, and technology to fulfill customer expectations. It can help identify a range of customer behavior and respond to them accordingly. Further, maintaining a brand presence across all possible channels boosts credibility and customer connection.
Embracing an omnichannel approach is a must for brands to create customer satisfaction, generate more conversions and enhance their revenues. As the strategy becomes widely accepted, businesses must embrace it to stay ahead of the competition.
Top 5 Omnichannel Engagement Platforms
If you wish to deliver efficient customer engagement across many communication channels, deploying an omnichannel engagement strategy is the best way to go about it. Here we have listed the top five omnichannel engagement platforms for your Business.
NovelVox – CX Infinity
CX Infinity by NovelVox is an effective communication tool that takes agent productivity to a new level. It can help establish highly satisfactory engagement sessions with customers on their preferred mode of communication.
CX Infinity enables agents to respond to customers appropriately and maximize lead conversion opportunities with context-driven conversations. By offering customers support from the first interaction throughout their journey on their preferred communication channel, CX Infinity enhances customer loyalty and retention.
Feature of CX Infinity
- Maximize customer engagement with a single workspace
It brings the customer’s favorite channels to the agent’s fingertips-from text to email, phone, chat, social, etc. It can handle all customer interactions across channels with equal ease; it resolves customer requests from a single window.
- Empowers to capture and convert leads efficiently
By seizing every opportunity to make every interaction personalized, CXInfinity leads to 30% more lead generation. Enabling agents to engage with customers based on their behavior and interaction history, agents can engage with customers proactively via live chat.
- Forge a longstanding relationship with customers
89% of the customers are retained by brands having omnichannel solid experience. CXInfinity captures a conversation on any channel, and agents can continue the conversation on any other channel. Conversations can be captured on a unified workspace enabling agents to respond seamlessly to messages, emails, and calls. By staying within reach- agents can keep conversations flowing wherever customers are.
- Keeps customers delighted
Simplified customer follow-up with proactive tools can keep customers engaged even when conversations do not happen in real-time. Automated responses with intelligent bots can guide customers to consult the knowledge base or schedule an appointment.
- Cuts down the sales cycle
By connecting faster across channels, sharing product collaterals during the conversation, switching to video mode at any time, or walking through step by step over co-browse, CXInfinity simplifies the sales process. With this proactive platform, agents can act faster to close deals.
Freshdesk
It is a helpdesk software platform that’s ideal for use in the customer service strategy. It offers options for practically every communication channel, ranging from email, live chat, social media, and phone calls. Workflows can be automated easily, enabling easy customer self-service management and review reports to see your strategy’s biggest strengths and weaknesses.
Features of Freshdesk
- Instant help across all the channels
Customers can help themselves on the channel of their choice from anywhere, anytime.
- Omni Route handles agent assignment
Phone calls, texts, chat messages and tickets are allotted to the right agent in the team
- Dashboard for a holistic view of support performance
A unified omni channel dashboard offers a bird’s eye view of a team’s performance across channels.
- Bots and AI for delighting customers
AI understands the customer’s intent, and bots can deliver precise answers to questions.
- Accelerate your team’s efficiency
Saves agent’s time by reducing repetitive tasks. Consolidated reporting and streamlined management improves agent efficiency.
Zendesk
It enables communication across several channels and a built-in ticketing system that ensures no customer goes unheard. It’s also designed to be easy to integrate and use within a team, so the customer service reps and marketers should have no trouble learning how to use it.
Features of Zendesk
- Provides personalization
Agents can understand customers’ needs better with the predictive analytics feature. This can empower them to raise customer satisfaction rates to new levels and can help turn a negative customer experience around.
- Empowers customers to help themselves
Automatically suggest relevant articles to customers while they wait for an agent. Answer Bot, by Zendesk AI, handles those often-asked, easy questions, freeing agent time to focus on problems that require a human touch.
- Smart routing
Flexible IVRs and group routing allow customers to request a callback or text message instead of waiting on hold.
- Helps in managing a unified view of the customer
A unified view of all channels enables agents to handle customer queries quickly and efficiently.
- Engage with customers in real time
Real time engagement with customers via chats or video, and even through screen sharing and co-browsing.
LiveChat
It offers robust functionality, giving agents the chance to reach out to customers through many channels. Designed to be faster than conventional communication channels, it also has built-in analytics tools to help you understand your performance.
Feature of LiveChat
- Open chat protocol
A simple and powerful protocol to manage it all. All messages, rich content, files, and more are embedded in a single platform.
- Native support within all LiveChat applications
All integrated channels are natively supported in LiveChat web, mobile, and desktop apps. Just by integrating it once, it can be accessed from anywhere.
- One common interface for all channels
Omnichannel APIs lets you integrate any channel directly into LiveChat. A standard protocol handles all communications.
- Messaging mode
Handles both real-time and async communication with just one protocol by switching to messaging mode.
- Reporting APIs
Enables agents to build data-driven dashboards and advanced reporting tools.
Bold360
It is a customer engagement software built for live chat and AI-based communications. It can help you integrate all your customer-focused communication channels in one place and solve the customer experience problems holding your organization back.
Features of Bold360
- Streamlines customer service
Reduces cost with AI and human support. Brings down complexities in contacting support teams
- Increase customer conversion
Removes barriers to conversion in real-time by helping website buyers choose products
- Empower agents
Arms your support teams with knowledge and information they can trust.
- Improve customer experience
Deliver better results across every customer engagement platform
- Modernize employee support
Automated internal support can cut the time wasted in searching for internal systems or submitting tickets.
The omnichannel engagement platforms we have listed here are the best in the market. Ultimately, the best way to choose an omnichannel platform is to understand the needs and preferences of both your clients and prospects. Omnichannel presence undoubtedly provides a better user experience just by using all essential contact points and channels. The good thing about the strategy is that your business can engage in trial and error without significant consequences.
Add a channel to assess improvement in engagement rates. Drop and choose another one till you find the platform perfect for you. If you are looking for an all-inclusive omnichannel platform for real-time customer engagement, then NovelVox is the best option for you. It enables you to put all customers’ favorite channels – phone and chat, to email, text and social at your fingertips. You can also manage all conversations and resolve customer requests in a single window instantly.
Interesting Related Article: “How to Properly Use Engagement Marketing to Acquire More Customers“