SkyCreek’s guide to making your multichannel communications solution count.

Multichannel communications is more than just engaging with your customers on multiple platforms. It’s an efficient tool for deploying information to customers, but it’s also a crucial component in the overall customer journey. When you take a holistic approach to multichannel communications, customers enjoy an effortless experience from their first engagement through the entire service lifecycle.

The world of telecommunications, healthcare, finance, and utilities dictates regular communications and updates. Whether it’s scheduling appointments, automating service updates, or deploying time-sensitive information, these high-churn, high-competition industries rely on effective, widespread communications to retain customers and deliver exceptional customer experiences. The right multichannel communications platform will help your organization increase revenues, reduce costs, and boost competitiveness by improving brand loyalty. To measure the efficacy of your multichannel communications strategy, make sure your solution delivers on these four fronts:

1) Flexibility
Which message? Which channel? What time? Customers expect organizations to meet them where they are, but it’s not enough to solely follow their contact preferences. Being able to transfer conversations seamlessly from one method to another provides continuity of services that greatly contributes to customer satisfaction.

According to one McKinsey and Company case study of a media company, most customers don’t much care about singular touchpoint events. They care about the cumulative experience across multiple touchpoints and multiple channels, over time.

Flexibility doesn’t just apply to the customers’ choices and preferences, but your agents’ capabilities too. The right multichannel communications platform provides the visibility to help customer care representatives view the customer’s touchpoints in the context of the overall journey.

2) Seamless Experience

Before email, social media, and chatbots became methods to engage customers, the customer journey was linear. But the journey branches in all directions now, sometimes hopping around each tier before finally exiting the funnel.

Whether a customer is speaking with a call center agent or texting a technician, they expect the same level of service across all channels. Consistency across the customer experience, especially in a non-linear journey, emphasizes company listening, a key component to fostering brand loyalty.

Take, for example, the story of SkyCreek customer Charter Communications. Looking to centralize customer touchpoints across all channels and operational segments, Charter Communications partnered with SkyCreek to integrate its billing, customer relationship management, preference management and workforce management systems through eContact. By centralizing content creation, brand management, and visibility across multiple customer journeys, SkyCreek helped Charter Communications ensure that all customers are being provided with consistent, clear, and customized communications. This partnership translated to a reduction in inbound call volume via providing an excellent service experience at scale over multiple journeys.

3) Customer Journey Optimization

When interactions are streamlined with a multichannel communications solution, customers are much more likely to engage with agile, on-demand communications where responses can be received in real-time. Your multichannel platform should allow for automatic and manual deployments to embrace operational change without excessive strain on internal resources that can prevent quick delivery.

Continue to hone the customer journey by taking your multichannel data and personalizing their experiences. Multichannel communications provide customer journey optimization through automated experiences, troubleshooting clarity, feedback gathering, and more.

4) Adaptability

Data received from your multichannel communications tool will inform the changes you need to make to provide an effortless experience. Bringing back the McKinsey and Company case study, the media company found that at each customer touchpoint, “the interaction had at least a 90% chance of going well. But average customer satisfaction fell almost 40% over the course of the entire journey.”

The touchpoints weren’t broken—the onboarding process was. With insights like these, organizations can adapt processes, systems, and interactions. For telecommunications, healthcare, finance, and utilities companies, consistent changes are the norm and you need a multichannel communications solution to facilitate that change.

Implementing Your Solution

Forming a cohesive strategy across all channels can be challenging. The right platform is intuitive and makes it easy for organizations to glean actionable data from customer communications and make both sweeping and minute changes to the process.

Make sure your platform can cater to your teams’ unique needs, too. In order for multichannel communications to be effective, your teams must be empowered to share insights and implement the plan cohesively.

If you already have a multichannel communications provider, assess them using these four pillars to ensure you’re getting maximum benefits. If you’re just starting to adopt a multichannel communications strategy, schedule a free demo with SkyCreek to see how eContact can give you ultimate control over customer communications throughout the service lifecycle.