In today's world, customers expect seamless experiences when interacting with businesses, regardless of the channel they use to communicate. This is where omnichannel support comes in. By offering omnichannel customer support, businesses can meet customer expectations and improve customer satisfaction. In this article, we'll explore its benefits and the reasons why you should use respond.io as an omnichannel support platform.

Intro to Omnichannel Customer Support

Traditional support teams often focus primarily on a single channel like phone, email or website chat support. However, this can be limiting for larger companies with many customers and agents to manage. A multichannel approach expands the reach of customer support.

What is Multichannel Support?

Multichannel support enables customers to contact a business through multiple channels such as email, phone, website chat or any instant messaging channel like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger.

One of the main problems with using multichannel support is the potential for inconsistent information. Since each channel may have a separate team or process, customers may receive different answers or solutions from different representatives or channels. This is frustrating and confusing, leading to lower satisfaction and loyalty.

Another issue with multichannel support is slow response times. If different channels or teams are not coordinated, it may take longer to resolve cases. Slow response times can lead to frustration and dissatisfaction, and may even result in lost business.

Multichannel support lacks personalized attention. If customer data is not shared across channels, it may be more difficult to provide a personalized experience and anticipate customer needs. This often pushes agents to go for a one-size-fits-all approach.

Agents who provide multichannel support don’t have easy access to the customer’s background. Therefore, it’s likely that they will miss the inquiry’s context, and will probably have to repeat the same questions every single time.

Companies looking for a better alternative to this imperfect support system should instead adopt an omnichannel support approach.

What is Omnichannel Support?

Omnichannel support is a customer-centric strategy that involves providing customer support across many different channels and touchpoints seamlessly.

Omnichannel support is fully integrated, as it enables customers to interact with a business through multiple channels while maintaining a consistent and personalized experience.

In an omnichannel approach, customer interaction across all channels is recorded and tracked. This means that each customer's history and preferences can be used to inform future interactions. Next, we will discuss the benefits of omnichannel support.

Omnichannel Support Benefits

Omnichannel support can help businesses provide a more efficient, effective, and personalized support experience. Let’s dive deeper into everything this support approach has to offer.

• Consistent customer experience: This leads to higher satisfaction, as customers feel recognized and valued across all channels, regardless of which channel they used to contact the business.
• Faster issue resolution: by having a complete view of the customer's history and preferences, representatives can anticipate needs and provide relevant solutions more quickly no matter which channel the customer reaches out on.
• Improved customer insights: by tracking customer interactions across channels, businesses can identify patterns and trends to inform decision-making.
• Greater efficiency: omnichannel support helps businesses optimize resources and processes, as customer interactions are tracked and managed through a centralized system. This can lead to cost savings and improved productivity.

Overall, while multichannel support provides customers with multiple ways to contact a business, omnichannel support offers a seamless, experience that can lead to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.

By leveraging customer data across channels, businesses can provide faster issue resolution and gain valuable insights to inform decision-making and improve the overall customer experience. But don’t take our word for it. Let’s see a real-life example.

How Kleta Achieved 100% Growth with Efficient Omnichannel Support

Kleta, a bicycle subscription service in Spain, achieved efficient and effective omnichannel support by using the respond.io platform.

Respond.io helped Kleta centralize its four support channels on one platform, automate everyday processes such as chat routing, agent assignment and support escalation and integrating messaging channels with a customer database.

With the right mix of automation and human support, Kleta resolved most issues within 48 hours and received consistently high ratings in customer satisfaction surveys. As a result, Kleta doubled its subscribers in two months and aims to triple them within a year.

Just like Kleta, any medium to large-size business can use respond.io for omnichannel support. In the next section, we will explore some of the respond.io features to keep in mind.

Revolutionize Your Omnichannel Customer Support with respond.io Solutions

Respond.io is an ideal platform for omnichannel customer support because it offers a range of features that make it easy to manage customer inquiries from multiple channels in one place.

Use an Omnichannel Inbox

Respond.io's omnichannel inbox is a powerful tool that centralizes all customer communication channels, such as email, WhatsApp and Instagram in a single platform, eliminating the need to switch between different channels.

Businesses can even connect custom channels and integrate their existing CRMs with respond.io. This allows them to exchange information between any messaging channels and their CRMs or custom channels, as well as update customer data in their CRM and on respond.io simultaneously.

In addition, they can create support tickets while chatting with customers without leaving the respond.io platform. It’s easy to record any event on both platforms, creating a consistent customer story.

Contact duplication is sometimes unavoidable and poses a threat to consistent customer stories. This is how you can fix it with respond.io.

Recognize Returning Contacts on Any Channel

Respond.io's Contact Merge feature is a useful tool for omnichannel support that allows support agents to consolidate customer information across multiple channels into a single unified profile.

For example, if a customer contacts a company via email and then later via WhatsApp, you’ll be informed that these two separate interactions are from the same customer and have the option to consolidate the customer's information into a single profile.

This helps support agents provide more personalized and efficient customer service because they have a complete view of the customer's interactions and history with the company.

It also ensures that the customer does not have to repeat information or context when they contact the company through different channels. Next, you should probably set up a respond.io omnichannel chat widget as part of your omnichannel support strategy.

Set Up an Omnichannel Chat Widget

An omnichannel chat widget allows website visitors to communicate with businesses via a range of messaging channels, keeping the conversation history in one place.

In addition to that, it helps businesses to generate more website leads, build positive relationships with customers, and provide them with a consistent customer experience across every touchpoint.

Respond.io’s omnichannel chat widget supports plenty of popular support messaging channels such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook Messenger. Other emerging channels like Google Business Messages are also supported.

This omnichannel widget is customizable, meaning that it can be designed to match a business's branding and style. This helps create a consistent user experience for customers and promotes brand recognition.

Automate Support Processes

Messaging app users, like those on Telegram or Viber, expect fast responses from businesses. Respond.io helps manage expectations by sending automated welcome and away messages.

To provide quality support, agents need context. Pre-chat surveys can collect information and help customers communicate clearly. Respond.io enables 24/7 omnichannel support with advanced automation, including routing to the right team based on business hours, shifts, languages, and departments.

CSAT surveys are critical in measuring customer support success. Respond.io's Workflows enable businesses to create and send CSAT surveys automatically or manually with the Shortcut button and save data to Google Sheets, a CRM or data warehouse.

Monitor Agent Performance and Analytics

Respond.io provides businesses with Reports and Analytics to monitor agent workload and productivity, track conversation progress and resolution time. The supervisor dashboard enables managers to identify unresolved conversations and monitor agents in real time.

This allows managers to evaluate their teams' effectiveness, pinpoint areas for improvement, and work towards enhancing their performance. To wrap it up, let’s summarize the main points on omnichannel support that we have discussed.

Omnichannel Support: Is it for You?

While multichannel support provides customers with multiple ways to contact a business, it may result in inconsistent information, slow response times, and lack of personalization.

In contrast, omnichannel support helps businesses provide a more efficient, effective, and personalized support experience, which ultimately leads to greater customer loyalty and retention.

Omnichannel support may not always be required for micro and small businesses. However, larger companies looking to scale their support, or companies that juggle multiple accounts or messaging channels should embrace this approach.

Respond.io is an ideal platform for omnichannel customer support, as it offers a range of features that make it easy to manage customer inquiries from multiple channels in one place.

By leveraging the right mix of automation and human support, businesses can achieve efficient and effective customer support, as demonstrated by Kleta, one of respond.io’s clients.

To get off on the right foot with omnichannel support, sign up for a respond.io account today.

Further Reading

If you’ve found this article interesting, here are some additional readings you may like:

• WhatsApp Customer Service Platform: How to Use WhatsApp for Support
• WeChat Customer Service: A WeChat Support Guide
• Viber Support: Using Viber As a Customer Support Channel