How To Choose The Right Channels For Customer Experience Success

Leverage omni channel communications for email, SMS, push, and chat

Hubspot declared 2107 the year of Customer Experience (CX), and with good reason, customers who have great experiences with you, keep being customers. The problem is we all talk a good game about focusing on the customer, but sometimes we all fall short. Sometimes we miss the boat even on the simplest thing — which communications channels to use.

Good news, there’s a way to integrate multiple communications channels into your CX program without breaking a sweat: Omnichannel communications.

Why CX is important to business

From Hubspot:

According to Gartner data, 42% of CEOs say that better CX was “the key change that has driven more wins.” Furthermore, for 80% of B2B customers, CX is the biggest influencer in the decision to work with a certain vendor*. And, Walker insights indicate that by 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiators.

TL;DR: Good CX is good business.

Great. “How do I get there?”, you wonder. Hubspot has some online retail examples that should inspire you, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.

First let’s look at best practices from Hubspot.

5 CX best practices to get you started on the right path

Hubspot’s takeaways are applicable for any business; don’t stop reading if you think “I don’t sell things online”. If your company has a website, you’re selling online. Don’t equate selling with online shopping carts and checkouts. Selling includes inbound marketing, online marketing, and getting potential customers to respond to a call to action.

Hubspot’s CX takeaways lay the foundation for any CX program:

• Emphasize the Story. Tell your story so people can relate to you.
• Enable Exploration. Let people “stumble” on new things. Help them find something awesome.
• Showcase the Product (and Earn Press). Product needs to be front and center.
• Remembering to A/B Test. Exhaustively test. And then test more.
• Learn From the Competition. Someone might be doing it better or worse.

Yes, but then what?

And this is where Hubspot falls short. Once you have these five essential CX tips down pat there is still something missing — communication channels.

Ouch.

Optimized website flows. Content that tells how you craft your product. Stalking the competition for what’s working and what’s not. All great. And these will improve CX. Just one thing.

How are you engaging your customers? How are you communicating with them?

Oh right.

No matter how awesome your customer experience program is, customers will want to communicate with you. No getting around that. Which channel to choose? Email, SMS, chat, push messages? All of them are great! Which one is best for me?

All of them.

Omnichannel communications build omnichannel CX

This is the power of omni channel communications suites. You don’t pick which channel to use, your customers pick. You offer updates via email, chat, SMS, and push and let customers choose which channels are right for them.

For you, all the messages, campaign data, and customer insights are pulled into a single view so you have a complete picture of your customers. For customers, they get messages how and when they want them. Win-win.

When you make a change to the checkout flow you can see if there is a spike in support requests, because the support queue can come through your omni portal. You can track which reminders work best for webinars or downloads. Is SMS the best way to confirm new users? You can learn which customers prefer push, email, or SMS and send those customers messages that click with them.

Omnichannel closes the CX loop

Hubspot’s recommendations are great. Implement their points on CX and you’re going to be on a great path to success. But, don’t forget to have great customer experiences, customers have to be able to communicate with you. You need to have singular messaging experience for you and them.

Omni channel communications solutions close the CX loop with communications that treat customers to the same experience online, offline, and every time they engage with you.

Originally published at www.infobip.com.