Omnichannel Customer Experience as a Competitive Advantage

⏱ Reading Time: 8 minutes

Customer expectations have never been higher. We are living in an omni-channeled, constantly-connected and instantly-gratified world. Providing a seamless omnichannel experience for your customers, in which a conversation can hop from social media to webchat to the phone without causing confusion or hassle, is essential in today’s customer experience economy.

 🚀 Read: Omnichannel Guide for Digitally Advanced Brands 🚀

Organizations which conducted that approach have a bigger chance for success because they are creating a close relationship with their customers. Improvement of customer satisfaction also creates loyalty.

What Is Customer Experience and How Important It Is for Your Business?

Customer experience has fast become a top priority for businesses and 2021 is no different. In fact, it seems that companies are focusing on positive customer experience more than ever before and this trend will continue. Why? Econsultancy conducted their survey for Digital Marketing Trends, they asked companies to state the single most exciting opportunity for 2021. Can you guesss – customer experience came in first, as shown in the picture below.

Picture 1. Customer experience as business opportunity

Also, a Walker study found that by the year 2021, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.

So, what exactly customer experience is and why is it so important?

The best way to define customer experience is as the impression you leave with your customer, resulting in how they think of your brand, across every stage of the customer journey. Multiple touchpoints factor their behaviors and build memories and feelings to drive their loyalty. The two primary touchpoints that create the customer experience are people and product.

The Temkin Group found that companies that earn $1 billion annually can expect to earn, on average, an additional $700 million within 3 years of investing in customer experience.

For SaaS companies in particular, they can expect to increase revenue by $1 billion.

Investing in customer experience initiatives has the potential to double your revenue within 36 months.

It doesn’t matter what kind of business you’re in – improving the experience for your customers is the key to increasing retention, satisfaction and revenue.

Related: Customer Experience Optimization in 5 Easy Steps

Customer Experience in the Omnichannel World

Today’s customers have access to a wider range of technologies than previous generations, with many customer segments having either grown up with or heavily influenced by technology. Changing lifestyles mean that today’s customers want to undertake the buying process at a time and place that suits their own needs, using the technology that they have in their hand or in front of them.

Customers don’t think in terms of communications channels. They simply want an answer to their question or a solution to their issue.

A constant change in consumer behavior drives the transformation of retail. A new form of retail, where all the channels of the company are seamlessly integrated has emerged. This is referred to as omnichannel retail. In omnichannel retail, the aim is to make the customer experience as seamless as possible where customer can choose to use any of the available channels during any phase of their buying process depending on their needs.

A great omnichannel experience is backed by a well-thought-out omnichannel strategy that reduces pain points and removes inconsistencies in customer journeys. Your customers need to be able to connect with your brand via all of your communications channels and have the ability to pick up where they left off on one channel and continue the conversation or buying process on another.

Related: Omnichannel Strategy; What, Why and How [Guide]

Picture 2. Omnichannel customer journey

Providing unified commerce means that regardless of the journey the customer has taken, or what touchpoints they’ve made to make a purchase, their customer experience should remain the same: frictionless.

5 Key Elements to a Winning Omnichannel Customer Experience

1. Consistency

Consistency is vital when building a true omnichannel business, but it is also indispensable to create experiences based on a unified brand presence that consumers can trust. This element refers to your omnichannel strategy and the expectations of your users regarding getting the full experience when they interact with a company. An expectation of consistency is about building and focusing on end-to-end processes, policies, guidelines, and re-structuring all teams to be able to collaborate together to provide a consistent experience from sales towards support and IT.

2. Availability

This is about choosing options, offering more possibilities and different forms of experience. In addition, it gives users the ability to communicate with a particular company based on their personal habits.

3. Convenience

Today’s consumers are time-strapped where they try to do more with less time. In order to save their time, lower their effort to buy from you and make life easier for your customers. The key is to make your product or brand the easiest within your industry to find and use. Start by doing a thorough assessment of any and all barriers that could prevent your customers from finding out about your products or services and therefore from actually buying them. Be extremely honest in compiling your list of possible barriers, and for each potential obstacle, try to find a true, actionable solution for it. improving convenience will result in customers coming back for more.

4. Relevance

Customers are more connected and empowered than ever before. Brands have to meet their expectations to remain relevant to them. The new consumer expects interactions to be real-time with real human beings, highly personalized, and tailored to buying preferences, who can help them in making their buying decisions according to their behaviors.

5. Seamlessness

Possibility where customers can pause the activity and be able to continue it later from a different touchpoint.

Powerful customer experiences are not just about maintaining consistency, relevance, and convenience at any cost. It is about creating equally seamless customer dialogue across every stage of the customer journey, from pre-purchase research to post-sales touches.

How we Use Omnichannel Customer Experience at Paldesk

If you need powerful Live Chat and Help Desk tool, Paldesk is a great opportunity for your business. This software helps you improve customer service through all channels of communication in the most effective way. Channels that are included are Web chat, Mobile Applications (SDK), WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, Viber, Email, Drupal, and Slack. Access to inquiries from all of those channels is in one appropriate dashboard.  

Software features

• Predefined Answers. Saved responses on FAQs make answering questions faster.
• Set Automated Responses. Determining an automated message for incoming customer inquiry.
• Smart Chat Routing. Direct chats to the corresponding agent.
• Manual Chat Transfer. Switching chats between agents insensibly.
• OmniChannel User Identification. Paldesk certainly recognizes and registers visitors on your web. You can connect other channels or social profiles they arrive to develop unified customer evidence.
• Customizable Chat Widget Design. Chose optimum installation and color.
• Compatibility. It ’s adaptable with Firefox, Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Safari.

To prevent juggling multiple accounts, open browser windows and logins it’s important to engage and reply to your clients. Through the live chat button, you can simply initiate a chat with them. It opens a chat box and immediately sends a message to agents location.

Paldesk provides customers better service together with faster problem solving and selling more products. This tool can help businesses with diversified chat operators in different crews or divisions. Also, it’s excellent for startups and entrepreneurs for handling their beginnings with a live chat channel.

Picture 3. Paldesk as a powerful omnichannel solution

Account & pricing

To apply all of those features to your business, first of all, you need to create Paldesk account on their website. Before starting to use the full version you can try out Paldesk – Live Chat & Helpdesk software 14-days for free without credit card required on start. For more information about pricing, you can check out it on pricing page.

Key benefits for customers using Paldesk Live Chat

• Immediate Access to Help. Customer support is available immediately and it’s real-time communication so it helps to improve customer experience and resolution time.
• Personalized Experience. Paldesk allows users to create experience according to their affinities.
• Easy to Find & Use. Live Chat is based on a friendly interface so customers are disposed to find the solution and besides that to ask additional questions.
• Convenient. Visitors don’t like to lose their priceless time spending it on waiting for responses from agents, because it makes them nervous. Live Chat gives them a possibility to start up chat session when they want or pick to be contacted by agents in selected time.
• Customizable. Paldesk Live Chat allows you install live chat widget in just a few clicks. It gives visitors the opportunity to personalize it according to their needs.

Testimonial

This is customers experience with Paldesk.

„Switching to Paldesk has helped us manage hundreds of customer messages we get daily. We’re now responding much faster to email and Facebook messages from one central point. The team consistently updates the product with great new features each month. Paldesk is a really powerful helpdesk software from a company that cares.“  — Tugomil, CTO, Supersport

Conclusion

Nowadays, that business has grown enormously, we can realize how organizations want to cut down the costs everywhere it’s possible, keeping up with customer expectations and satisfaction.

OmniChannel makes it possible. It enables clients to contact HelpDesk through the channel which they rather prefer regardless of the type queries they have because all channels are connected together so agents can react very quick and effective.

When clients experience this kind of service, that adapts to their preferences and habits, it automatically increases their satisfaction and creates loyalty to service. Therefore such service requires analysis of data, their storage and its usage in the given moment. Storing data helps to create personalized content, implement knowledge of problems and predict future customer needs.

All organizations which are oriented on customers and have constant touch with them should consider the introduction of OmniChannel Customer Experience concept into their management. Tools like Paldesk are greatly facilitating their implementation in a system of companies. It helps that service can continuously progress. Hence organizations which apply it are in a better position than the competition.