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Key Takeaways:
- It allows companies to increase their profits.
- Companies with extremely strong omnichannel customer service see a 9.5% year-over-year increase in annual revenue, compared to 3.4% for weak omnichannel companies. Similarly, strong omnichannel companies see a 7.5% year-over-year decrease in cost per contact, compared to a 0.2% year-over-year decrease for weak companies. (Aberdeen Group)
- Omnichannel customer service helps companies to increase their profits by:
- Increasing brand loyalty through improved customer experience.
- Reducing labour costs.
- Reducing cot through higher productive efficiency.
- Achieving personalisation by leveraging data.
- Constant improvement through feedback collection.
The Obvious Reason: Money
For any profit-maximising company, ensuring consistent growth in profits is vital for the sustainability of the business. Statistics show that omnichannel customer service (CS) – which is customer service across multiple platforms integrated into a single system – puts a company in a position to consistently earn more profit in the long run.
Aberdeen Group found that companies with extremely strong omnichannel customer engagement see a 9.5% year-over-year increase in annual revenue and 7.5% year-over-year decrease in cost per contact. On the flip side, companies with weak omnichannel customer engagement only saw a 3.4% year-over-year increase in annual revenue and a 0.2% decrease in cost per contact.
This then begs the question: How does having a strong omnichannel CS system bring in more cash?
1. Improved Customer Experience (CX), Leading to Increased Brand Loyalty
Brand loyalty is an effective lock-in strategy for companies to maintain its consumer base, thus increasing revenue. Brand loyalty helps to “secure” customers as it increases the switching costs – both the implicit and explicit costs of consuming a substitutable good or service in place of the incumbent company’s good or service – for customers. Big brands such as Microsoft and Apple have been extremely successful in building brand loyalty in their consumers and they do this by ensuring their customers have a great experience with the company, their products and services at any point.
This is because omnichannel CS gives customers convenience and consistency.
Convenience. Omnichannel CS brings convenience to customers as they can seek assistance from the platform of their choice from wherever they are whenever they want.
Consistency. Since the various platforms are integrated into a single system, the quality of service and assistance rendered to the customer will be similar. This boosts the customers’ confidence in the company as they can take heart in the fact that they will be getting the help they need regardless of platform.
2. Reduced Labour Costs
There are two parts of the profit equation: revenue and cost. Besides increasing revenue because of the reason mentioned above, omnichannel customer service also reduces costs.
Imagine you own an airport with multiple terminals. Each terminal will need sufficient concierges to assist the multitude of travellers that are in your airport. With each concierge comes the need for customer service ambassadors to run these concierge services. In this day and age of rising labour costs, that would be pretty expensive for you wouldn’t it?
With omnichannel CS, you are able to centralise your manpower to serve the entire customer base. Since a single system is being used, all CS requests can be routed to that very system, allowing a smaller pool of customer service ambassadors to handle them collectively. In fact, this is exactly what Voncierge did for Changi Airport Group – check it out here.
By reducing the amount of manpower required, a company with strong omnichannel CS is able to make significant cost savings.
3. Higher Productive Efficiency
Besides needing lesser customer service ambassadors, implementing omnichannel CS will improve the productivity and efficiency of the company’s customer service ambassadors. Having a centralised view of all requests, the team of customer service ambassadors can divide and conquer, thus resolving issues more swiftly.
In the event where one does not know how to render appropriate assistance, the request can be instantly routed to someone else who is better equipped to provide help. This allows the company’s CS to become and well-oiled machine, as time spent on each request is reduced.
Since customer service ambassadors are more productive, this allows the company to reduce cost and thus, increase their profit.
4. Personalised Goods and Services through Data
Omnichannel CS gives the company many touchpoints with customers which allows the company to gather different types of data. Having all these data in a single system allows the company to effectively assess customer behaviour, as well as their tastes and preferences. This allows the company to better curate their goods, services and CS such that it caters to their customers’ needs.
Accenture found that 91% of consumers say they are more likely to shop with brands that provide offers and recommendations that are relevant to them, demonstrating that personalisation plays a vital role in contemporary CS and revenue generation.
5. Feedback Collection
As famous Canadian, Robin Sharma, said “Small daily improvements over time lead to stunning results.”
Unlike traditional CS, omnichannel CS is a system that makes it easy to constantly improve. As with data, feedback can be collected across multiple platforms, allowing the company to analyse and assess the weaknesses of their CS. This allows them to constantly enact changes to enhance the quality of their CS and to ensure consistency across platforms.
This also gives customers an avenue to voice their concerns and opinions, allowing them to feel that they are heard and have the autonomy to improve their own experience.
Conclusion
In conclusion, today’s society and customer sentiments necessitate that current traditional CS systems shift to a modality that is more omnichannel. Recent studies and statistics have all underscored this paradigm shift and many companies have started investing heavily in digitalising their CS while also incorporating new platforms for customers to contact them. Hence, an increasing number of companies are cognisant of the fact that omnichannel CS is a key factor in placing a business at a competitive advantage.
If you are a business owner and have yet to start incorporating omnichannel CS into your business, it is not too late to start now. Anyways, you are already on a website that provides a premier omnichannel CS SaaS that can enhance your business now. So, what are you waiting for?
