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With so many channels to choose from, where do I start? This simple question doesn’t always have a simple answer. There really is no definitive answer, but the one that is the best is “where your customers are likely to be most active.” Gone are the days of customer contact avoidance. Today, it’s all about customer satisfaction, which sometimes results in more contact.
Reactive channels are those you have less control over, they are public, and if you have a presence, customers can engage with you, but are you responding? These channels impact your Brand Image the most and often have a lot of “noise” to weed through, but they can also be a lower-cost channel and provide easy access to self-serve tools.
Proactive channels are private; these are channels you can control by visibility & throttling. You can choose to build or not, display or not, determine and control the % of visibility for these channels. These channels often serve your customer needs, and they can be a lower-cost alternative to expensive voice calls, especially for questions that require customers to share PII.
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Before you decide, you need to do your research and be prepared with your data to get the best answer for your business.
At a high level, you need to consider customer experience (entry points), channel mix (use cases), and resolution (self-serve or agent-assisted). Use website data, call data, demographics; there is probably a lot of information your company already gathers about your customer. Also, don’t forget to consider external research; there are plenty of experts out there that are already providing insights and recommendations:
Forrester - 62% of consumers will switch to a different brand or decide not to purchase from the brand after a bad customer experience.
Pew Research - 94% of the world owns a mobile phone, making sense to start there.
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When adding a new channel, consider:
Customer Experience
Company Goals
Also, consider the level of your Company maturity as it pertains to Customer Engagement. To find out more about defining your path, read this article about the Khoros Maturity Model.
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Review this checklist and Channel Guide by gathering the data you have and answering a few questions:
Channel Determination
Volume Determination
Company objectives
Workforce Management
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Once you get through this exercise, you will want to keep all data up to date, so you can analyze and optimize your customer and agent experience, and how that is impacting your company goals. This will allow you to continue to transform your digital presence.
Which leads to the question submitted “If I were to add one more channel in the next 6 months, which one should it be?” For the majority of businesses, I would say right now you should be focusing on Asynchronous Messaging. I may not have said that 6 months ago, but in today's world, it is a must!
There are several different ways to deploy this, ABC, GBM, Facebook, What's App etc. or if you want more control over data, your own Branded Messenger, and Khoros can help you with all of these.
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First off, let's start by saying, your "Artificial Intelligence" or Bot, is only as smart as the people who create it.
So when you make your first decision to use automation, step one for success is to map out your plan.
Now that you have all this awesome data you collected, and no matter the channel you have chosen you should definitely consider Automation!
Great AI can give your customer a great experience, while also freeing up your agents for the harder questions.
But how do you know where to start, and what are the benefits of automation? How would your business most benefit from automation with the least amount of effort? Those are the use cases that will give you the quickest ROI impacts. So consider these:
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Also, before you begin your Automation journey, I recommend reading this article, Building a smarter, more adaptable chatbot.
If you have questions, comments, suggestions PLEASE post them below!
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