Customers today are a lot more demanding than they were just 5 years ago. Back then, people were satisfied with social media interactions for customer service, or receiving emails for promotions and offers. However, digital transformation has made customer engagement expectations far greater in 2022.
Now, customers expect interaction across a variety of channels, including phone, email, social media, SMS and WhatsApp, and a great experience with all.
Meeting customer expectations: How to optimise customer experience
Digital is a crucial factor in winning the “war for customer engagement”.
What are the customer expectations now?
– Expect personalisation.
– Expect companies to be able to forecast what they want before they ask for it.
– Expect to choose the time and channel that they engage with a company.
– Expect a consistent experience, no matter what channel they engage with.
This means it is critical for companies to have a single view of a customer rather than having their interactions fragmented across different channels. Communication channels need to be united in order to build a single view of the customer’s journey. This helps with forecasting the customer’s requirements, and enabling the business to understand their customers better, in order to deliver a customised and tailored experience.
There’s a lot of noise out there for customers and it’s easy for them to forget about you or be swayed by another brand. Providing a tailored experience that engages customers via the channels they use the most will help them cut through that noise.
- Multi-channel experience
Customers want a seamless multi-channel experience. They expect real-time conversations that are not tied to a single channel. Cloud communication platform that connects various channels to interact with customers via your CRM can help with this. This can then build a profile of the customer in the one place, every time a customer interacts with a business.
- Personalisation
Having a digital solution that unites the digital customer experience in one place means the customer can receive a consistent interaction every time they engage with a brand. At the minimum, customers want a company to recognise their name, their purchase history and recommend products based on their past purchases.
- Automation
It can be challenging for businesses to always be “on”. If a customer requests information, it’s important that a business gets back to them,. However, a lot of this can be managed automatically. Even automating simple tasks like follow-up emails can help reduce the time that customer service agents spend on simple workflows.
Internal roadblocks to customer engagement
- Lacking a shift in mind-set
Some businesses haven’t quite adopted a digital transformation mindset. Whilst Covid-19 has spurred some into action, some businesses are still too scared to act and are waiting to see how things go. The truth is that time is running out and they need to act now in order to survive: if they don’t, they risk being left behind.
- A lack of strategy
A lot of businesses don’t know where to start when it comes to selecting the right digital tools for customer service. There’s a variety of solutions out there and they lack the understanding of what tools will yield the best results. Finding a solution that is able to do more than just one thing is the right approach here.
How Soprano can help
Soprano offers tools that enable effective digital transformations for customer engagement strategies and workflows. We offer:
- An omnichannel hub: Businesses can engage with their customers using a variety of channels including SMS, email, voice, RCS and WhatsApp.
- Interactive messages: Soprano Connect can send and receive messages from customers to facilitate a two-way dialogue.
- Branded templates: Soprano allows businesses to use branded templates for interactive campaigns.
- Monitoring and reporting: Businesses can monitor, analyse and report on customer interactions that are happening in real-time. For effective customer engagement in 2020, unification of communications is essential for businesses: Soprano’s communication platform makes it all possible. Head to our website to find out more.