How to Create Seamless Omnichannel Experiences With Chatbots

Any business needs to be available where its customers are. Unfortunately, most small to medium-sized companies don't have the manpower to promptly engage with them in many places at the same time. One of the best strategies to overcome this limitation is to use a single solution for common interactions that enables scalability across channels. This will save you the overhead involved in running separate applications for each channel or the headache of handling all of the communication by the business representatives. It's a simple, powerful, and effective way that's going to help you grow your business faster.

What's Omnichannel?

Many people are still not familiar with the term "omnichannel", although it has been around for quite some time. The Latin word "omni" means all, as well as universal, and the term "channel" is derived from the notion of communication. In other words, omnichannel implies interacting with your consumers in every way possible. This approach to communication puts the customer at the centre and focuses on removing the boundaries between channels and creating a unified, engaging, and useful experience.

Omnichannel vs. Multichannel

There's often some confusion between omnichannel and multichannel, and it's important to understand the difference. An omnichannel approach focuses on leveraging multiple channels to interact with clients. It puts the customer first, regardless of the channel they use. It's about having an integrated perspective of the client and using it to offer a consistent experience to them in all channels so that they can conduct business with you in whatever way suits them best at any given time.

Multichannel, on the other hand, is about using a mix of channels to reach the customer through different touchpoints. It is more about using multiple channels to make sure that people can find you on whichever channel they prefer, be it an establishment, website, call centre, or messaging application. This is not necessarily about providing a consistent experience across all channels but rather making sure that your business is covered by a range of channels so that the customer can find you wherever they are.

Why is Omnichannel Communication Important?

In the early days of the Internet, companies had just one portal: the website. If a customer needed to book an appointment, they called or maybe scheduled it through a web calendar. Now customers browse businesses from their mobile devices, receive reminders on their smart speakers, interact over messaging apps to contact professionals that can help them solve their problems, and leave reviews or address issues through social media.

Multiple touchpoints bring the customer experience to life. They are useful for both first-time visitors letting them know about your business and returning customers who have the opportunity to further engage with your company. This enables you to build long-term relationships, and supply your business with valuable data for future decision-making. Artificial intelligence ensures that data from these interactions never gets forgotten and keeps bringing benefits long after collection.

What's an Omnichannel Communication Strategy?

An omnichannel communication strategy is a strategic plan that includes roles, responsibilities, and schedules that enables you to start where you are, and systematically improve to gain a competitive advantage and future-proof your business. It implies an integration between creation, promotion, distribution, and communication channels to let your customers interact with your business however and whenever they want.

How to Create an Omnichannel Communication Strategy?

Although creating an omnichannel communication strategy might sound like a daunting task, it might be simpler than you think and it's definitely worth the effort since the demand for omnichannel conversation will only increase in the future. A good strategy should give you answers to the following questions:

1. Who is your customer?
2. How does your customer journey look like?
3. How to positively influence customers' actions at every step of the journey?
4. Where do these interactions take place?
5. How to manage knowledge as a shareable business asset?
6. How to connect with relevant visitors in real-time?
7. How to measure the results and continuously improve?

It's good to start creating an omnichannel communication strategy by gaining an understanding of who your customers are, what they're trying to achieve, and why. It will help you to set a strong foundation for customer-centric messaging that will improve your marketing, sales, and customer service efforts.

Customer Profile

A customer profile helps to gain a better understanding of the person behind the purchase. It's a set of characteristics that describes consumers in a structured and detailed way and breaks them down into their jobs, pains, and gains to help you stay focused on the individuals you're selling to. Not all jobs, pains, and gains are equal, and some are more important than others, so it's vital to sort them in order of importance.

Customer Journey

Your company has to engage a wide range of people, from first-time visitors to brand advocates, and everyone in between. To get a better understanding of the various needs and how they evolve, it's essential to start with the understanding of the customer journey and its stages to identify the areas where your customer expectations meet your business goals. In its simplest form customer journey consists of three stages:

Sales Funnel

A sales funnel is a road map that connects customer tasks, pains, and gains at every step of the journey with business objectives by delivering personalised value propositions. It's a process that aims to progress the interaction with your customer from the first time encounter to actions after a purchase. Three major areas should be considered when creating a successful omnichannel sales funnel:

Omnichannel Touchpoints

Identifying the right channels through which customers engage with your business in certain scenarios is key to distributing the right information at the right time. You should think about the context in which your audience will access the information. Careful consideration of how, where, and when they'll consume the content is just as important as the messaging itself.

Your omnichannel strategy should take into account not only the initial set of channels but also the future ones. It's crucial to understand how each channel contributes to the overall plan and how they complement one another. An excellent communication strategy should not only free you from the constraint of any single channel but also enable seamless expansion to new ones in the future.

Channels you decide to use initially should be reevaluated periodically to ensure their effectiveness in achieving certain business objectives. Adopting an omnichannel strategy can come from many directions, but usually, it's best to start from the basic channels first. The following list suggests the best order in which to integrate them into your messaging plan:

Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is a process of improving communication between people by managing knowledge as a shareable business asset and exposing it to customers who seek that information at the right time, for the right reason, over the right channel and modality in a systematic way.

Customers have questions at every step of the journey, and you have the answers, but your consumers want better methods of interaction that enable them access to the information they need even outside your business hours. A knowledge base chatbot can respond to natural language questions using text or voice with quick, relevant, and useful responses.

It's vital to simplify the processes necessary to maintain common enquiries on every channel to improve not only the customer experience but also employee productivity and overall job satisfaction. It's important to identify people who will take responsibility and manage the customer-facing knowledge in your business. This means establishing roles, responsibilities, guidelines, and schedules.

Omnichannel Conversations

Your content is now a conversation, and your need to take all of the steps to improve the quality of communication your business has with prospects and customers. The process of listening to incoming messages in real-time can be extremely overwhelming, and you can easily spend an entire day responding, but there might be little benefit from doing so.

Omnichannel Chatbot

Chatbots are the latest trend in the omnichannel space. An intelligent chatbot can operate on any channel required by a business because AI provides cross-platform capabilities. It can help you engage in a subset of conversations in situations where you can bring value both to your customer and your business and automate everything else.

An omnichannel chatbot can be your digital assistant, helping your customers with common enquires, without engaging a human representative enabling you to save time and money. These AI-powered bots can communicate with customers through both voice and chat using natural language, to answer questions and provide information about products or services.

Real-time messaging

Chatbots are a powerful tool that improves communication with clients. They, however, aren't as clever as real human beings. As a result, when the need arises, a chatbot must be able to seamlessly transfer a conversation to a live chat agent and ensure that all of the information collected throughout the conversation is passed on as well so that the customer doesn't have to repeat themselves.

It's best to minimise the number of tools agents must know and screens they have to interact with and provide a single interface that enables interaction with customers over voice and text channels. The conversation routing mechanism should also be unified to handle both forms of interaction. Integrating chatbots with live chat can improve customer experience and staff productivity.

Continuous Improvement

Your measurement activities should be focused on answering fundamental questions such as "what's working?" "what isn't?" and "what should I do to make it work next time?" This implies that you'll need a method for measuring and reporting the results of your operations in a way that is simple to comprehend and provides useful insights.

Expecting groundbreaking results overnight will, unfortunately, lead to disappointment. While there are some low-hanging fruits you will need to start using conversation metrics to roll up your sleeves and get ready to go through the process, again and again, to accumulate improvements over time. You should also clearly establish what's going to be measured, and be able to conclude your customer needs and continuously improve.

Conclusion

It’s no secret that omnichannel is changing the way consumers interact with businesses. Customers are now more likely to use several different devices and forms of interaction during the day. To help them fulfill their needs quickly and efficiently your business needs to not only be there for them but also keep track of their interactions across devices to be able to deliver useful and relevant responses.

By 2020 it’s estimated that 80% of all transactions will involve at least two sales channels, whether your consumer needs help to choose the right service or product, or has an after-sales query. Your business needs to create an omnichannel strategy to improve the digital conversations you have with your prospects and customers across various channels.

Having a good omnichannel communication strategy results in multiple ways for customers to interact with your business - whether it be through a website, social media, or different communication channels like messaging apps or virtual assistants. Providing a great experience across all these channels ensures people have many options when looking into buying from you.