Multichannel customer engagement has been talked about for years now. A quick Google search on the topic yields 275,000+ results. Search for Multichannel Customer Experience or Multichannel Customer Service and you get more than 50,000 results for each.
Why talk about it yet again then?
While not a new trend, seamless multichannel customer experience has continued to be an aspiration that organizations still struggle to achieve. Conceptually, it seems straightforward — consumers have shifted from telephone and email to a variety of channels such as WhatsApp, Messenger, Twitter, SMS, WeChat, text messaging, etc. for communicating with their friends and family, and increasingly they want to manage their relationships with brands and businesses over those same channels. In response, organizations have tried to provide alternatives such as mobile apps and built a presence on social channels such as Twitter and Facebook to engage with customers.
However, in most cases, these approaches haven’t led to the desired improvements in customer experience as validated in research by Dimension Data. As mentioned in their 2016 Global Contact Centre Benchmarking report, “The transition towards digital isn’t reaching its full potential. The gap between service delivery and customer expectations is widening.”
Read More Multichannel customer experience isn’t about saying “we’ll get back to you” on 10 new channels
