What is omnichannel customer service?

The advent of new customer acquisition channels like social media, website, conversational AI (chatbots), and others has led to a variety of choices on how consumers and customers choose to interact with businesses. While this has created new opportunities for businesses to build relations with a customer, with more choice comes more challenges.

Omnichannel customer service aims to set up individual customer touchpoints across a variety of channels that converge seamlessly. This allows the customers to continue their journey with the brand independent of the access channel.

What are the challenges in omnichannel customer service?

Fragmented interactions: An unorganized omnichannel customer engagement system can result in disjoined interactions that could lead a customer away.
Repeating information: When a customer moves from one platform to another, having to enter the same information again could result in frustration.
Lack of personalization: When data is gathered from multiple channels, it can be challenging to integrate it and provide a personalized experience to a customer.

How to achieve excellent omnichannel customer service?

1. Better customer insights

A unified system, omnichannel engagement helps merge customer data from different platforms. All that data can be organized into a dashboard to gain deep customer insights.
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2. Improved shopping experience

A good understanding of how a company’s multiple touchpoints are working for the customers helps in enhancing the overall shopping experience for them.
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3. Real-time customer engagement

An omnichannel presence enables real-time interactions with customers using chat or video. This allows for a more personal and hands-on interaction.
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4. Customer convenience

Every customer has a preferred way of interacting with a company. Having multiple available touch points enables an organization to contact the customer without causing him any inconvenience.