Omnichannel Customer Care: Concepts, Benefits, and Solutions

Vũ Khôi

Author at Wotech Electronics Blog

As technology keeps advancing, reaching and caring for customers has become more difficult. The reason is that customers are now present across many different channels — Facebook, websites, email, and more. If a business lacks an effective omnichannel customer care solution, the damage extends beyond brand image to revenue, profits, operational processes, and much more.

So what is omnichannel customer care? What are its benefits, and why should you use omnichannel customer care software?

What Is Omnichannel Customer Care?

Omnichannel customer care is the activity a business carries out to satisfy customers' needs and wants, delivering a consistent experience across different channels. This helps retain potential customers and persuade them to increase revenue.

>>> Read more: 6 Effective Customer Retention Strategies for Businesses

Today, thanks to technological development, customers reach businesses through many different channels, creating multiple types of touch points and better customer care. There are two main types of touch points: offline and online.

• Offline touch points: Touch points where the person delivering customer care interacts with customers face to face. Examples: serving customers directly at the counter, attending to them at events, and so on.

• Online touch points: Touch points where the business cares for customers indirectly through online channels such as Zalo, Facebook, email, messaging, and more.

What Are the Benefits of Omnichannel Customer Care?

Higher Customer Satisfaction

When a business cares for its customers thoughtfully, they feel satisfied with your service. Among thousands of companies offering identical products and services, if your customer service outshines your competitors', customers will certainly choose you. Buyers become more impressed with and loyal to you, building a lasting relationship with the business and becoming regular customers.

A Deeper Understanding of Customers

While caring for customers, the company interacts with them more often and gathers more information about potential buyers. This provides enough data to build accurate customer personas, analyze buying behavior, segment audiences, and launch suitable marketing campaigns.

>>> Read more: Listening to Customers: 10 Reasons and Effective Listening Skills

Stronger Brand Identity

Customer service can help a business improve its brand image in the public eye. Customers even become more forgiving if your company makes a mistake. According to a Salesforce report, 78% of customers will forgive a company's mistake if it provides excellent service. Meanwhile, nearly 90% of customers say they trust a company whose service is rated "very good." As a result, the business gains more loyal customers and a stronger image in the community.

Attracting More Customers

When you provide good customer service, buyers are satisfied and recommend the business to others. 94% of customers will recommend your company's products if they rate your customer care highly. Moreover, if the business is well reviewed on review sites or by past customers, new buyers will trust and choose your products and services. According to Zendesk, 90% of customers are influenced by positive reviews of businesses. The company becomes more reputable, and as a result, more customers choose you.

A Stronger Competitive Edge Over Rivals

In addition, customer service becomes a competitive advantage over rival businesses. The products and services may be similar, but if you care for customers better, you gain the upper hand — customers trust and choose you more often. This drives up sales and revenue. According to research by Bain & Company, businesses can grow revenue 4%–8% above their market when they deliver a great customer experience.

Increased Revenue

Good customer service helps a business convert leads into final customers, thereby boosting sales. According to Glance, 78% of customers say they have abandoned a purchase or stopped buying because of a poor customer experience. So if the business cares for customers better, they will feel more confident and comfortable continuing their buying journey. They may even come back to buy again and become regulars.

How to Deliver Omnichannel Customer Care Effectively?

Unify Your Sales Channels

With so many different channels, controlling customer care activities becomes difficult. The business may miss customer requests, leaving them dissatisfied and ready to rate you 1★ — and they won't buy from you again. That's why the business needs to unify its channels. Customer service staff can respond right from a single screen without wasting time switching between different channels.

Analyze Customer Personas

Analyzing customer personas gives the business a complete view of buyers so it can draw up suitable plans. Typically, because there are many channels, the business collects information from customers across those sales channels, then segments it and rolls out activities depending on each customer group.

Survey Customer Satisfaction

Regularly surveying customer satisfaction helps the business identify "gaps" in its customer care operations so it can respond quickly. These survey results should be collected into a single system, categorized by channel, by the team resolving the issue, and by the matter itself.

Automation

When a business has many customers across different channels, activities like sending birthday cards, messages, and emails take a lot of time — and information can slip through the cracks. The business also carries out activities like assigning tasks, evaluating, and filtering leads. Automating customer care activities is therefore essential. Execution time shrinks, while the risks caused by errors and missed information are reduced.

SimERP — Unified Omnichannel Customer Care Software

To deliver omnichannel customer care effectively, businesses should use omnichannel customer care software that suits them. Look for highly adaptable software that integrates many different features, brings all customer information into one system, handles customer care activities quickly, and syncs data with other features such as shipping, inventory management, and sales. SimERP can fully support you in doing this by helping you build, execute, and manage an omnichannel customer care strategy in 4 steps:

Customer Analysis

Once you have customer information, the business can manage it by creating a customer storage board in SimERP's CRM feature. Details such as name, address, company, phone number, email, and Zalo are all stored. The board displays the history of exchanges between the customer and the business: number of meetings, revenue, quantity of goods delivered, receivables, and more. This gives you an accurate picture of the customer persona, characteristics, and buying habits, so you can devise suitable, tailored care plans.

Track the Customer's Buying Journey with CRM

In SimERP's CRM module, the business can observe each stage of the customer's buying journey — from first contact to order completion and post-purchase care. Users can adjust and manage information related to complaints, requests, and additional notes in each customer's card. This lets the business keep close tabs on every customer, minimizing missed information or slow resolution of customer issues.

Build and Manage the Customer Care Process

With the Projects module, the business can create its own customer care workflow and manage care stages based on the company's current operational process. For example, users can create stages such as New, Received, In Progress, and Resolved, or rename the stages as they see fit.

Within each customer card, the business can create various note keywords related to the issue the customer encountered, such as: late shipping, faulty goods, and so on. Each card has its own distinct color indicating the type of customer issue. This makes it easy for operating teams to distinguish, recognize, and resolve problems quickly.

Create and Send Emails

With the Email Marketing feature, users can build customer care email templates — such as cards, gifts, or discount codes. This is a great way for the business to serve customers better and build close relationships with them after the sale. You can also build email templates to survey buyers about product and service quality.

Recipient rates are clearly displayed right on each email plan. Users can even filter the number of people who opened the email, clicked the link, replied, or whose emails bounced. The business can then evaluate the quality of each marketing plan and adjust it to suit its customers.

Today, SimERP offers a free 30-day SimCRM trial. Sign up now to experience the software's features!

Closing thoughts

Building, executing, and managing omnichannel customer care has never been easy for many businesses — especially when the company must manage a large customer base across many different channels. Managers therefore need to choose an omnichannel order management software that suits and optimizes their business. We hope this article has given you useful information and helped you find the best customer care approach for your company.

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