Customer Care in an Omnichannel World

Written in collaboration with Gorgias

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Email Support Isn’t Enough

Every company sets up a help desk email account to receive and respond to inquiries from customers. For the most part, email is an effective way to handle routine customer care issues, which is why 60% of inquiries come in through that channel.

But without omnichannel support, the other 40% inquiries have little choice but to call your customer care center. When customer care reps are bogged down answering questions about your shipping and returns policy, they have less time to focus on providing personalized assistance to those who need it.

Why Email Won’t Cut it For Some Inquiries

Why don’t all customers rely on email for customer care? There are three reasons that give shoppers pause. The first is urgency. Sometimes people need immediate assistance, like when they need to redirect a package or change an order before it’s shipped. If customers are unable to get live help in times of urgency, they may not ever return.
Another reason is generational preference. Baby Boomers and Gen X are avid email users, but those under 30 aren’t particularly email oriented.  Many of these younger shoppers prefer iMessage, Zoom and even Google Docs over email. Some pundits speculate that Gen Z “might finally kill email.” It’s worth taking the time and effort to cater to younger generations, as they’re the ones who are opening their wallets more frequently and driving the economic recovery.

Finally, while channel distinctions are important to brands and marketers, they’re absolutely irrelevant to consumers. In other words, to the consumer, it’s all one activity: requesting help from a brand, and it shouldn’t matter how that’s done.  

According to a survey of 1,025 adults by Rightpoint, 94% of consumers say customer care channels should be interchangeable.  If a prospective customer asks about product specifications on your Instagram post, your brand needs to answer in that same channel. Ditto for customers who request a refund or replace product via SMS.  

Omnichannel Support is Essential to Exceptional Experiences

Every brand strives to deliver exceptional experiences to its customers and for good reason: research byPwC found that for 65% of shoppers, a great experience is more influential than advertising when it comes to making purchase decisions.

Omnichannel customer care plays a vital role in creating exceptional customer experiences, but it must be done correctly. Specifically, customers expect brands to recognize them in every channel, and to pick up a conversation thread where it left off, regardless of the channel. If a customer initiates a conversation as a DM on Twitter, she expects to be able to continue the conversation via live chat on a site or via SMS. If your brand can’t deliver on that functionality, you may be at a competitive disadvantage. According to a Salesforce survey of 15,600 consumers, 74% say they already engage in omnichannel conversations with brands.

It’s not enough to simply allow consumers to contact a brand via phone, email, SMS, and social media. Brands must be able to link those conversations to the same customer, and in some cases, to the same helpdesk ticket. Failure to do so sends a message to the consumer that the brand doesn’t value the time she took to explain an issue, and forces her to start from the beginning. It can also lead to multiple sales reps tackling the same issue with the same customer, unaware that they are duplicating work.

How Many Channels is “Omnichannel”?

True omnichannel customer service accommodates the modern consumer’s communications preferences.  

Omnichannel support is broader than phone and email, it includes Facebook, Instagram and Twitter comments and direct messages, live chat on your site, and even SMS messages. In the years ahead more channels will likely be added (Domino’s allows people to contact the company and request help via it’s Slack channel).

Naturally, omnichannel customer care introduces complexity into customer care workflows. As mentioned above, a customer can begin a conversation on Instagram and continue it via live chat on your website the following day. Keeping track of these interactions can be a challenge. Without a tool to centralize and track omnichannel incoming messages, customer care team members must manually check multiple sources on a continuous basis -- a time consuming process. Worse, multiple customer care reps may end up responding to the same customer with the same answer (and keep other customers waiting in the meantime).

To eliminate redundant work and deliver an optimum customer experience, you need a tool that merges all interactions into a single platform, so that if a customer reaches out via live chat and social media, your customer care team can see it’s the same customer, merge the tickets into one, and respond in the appropriate channel.  

Three Tips for Getting Omnichannel Customer Care Right

Here are three tips for delivering the kind of omnichannel customer care experience that will impress your customers and make them loyal to your brand.

Tip #1: Centralize All Incoming Messages

Find a tool that can centralize all of your incoming messages, regardless of channel, into a single repository and associate it to a unique customer record. Such a tool will spare your team the burden of signing into multiple channels and systems to check for customer communications, and ensure that no messages fall through the cracks. Some tools will even route incoming messages to the appropriate expert or team member based on their content or sentiment.

Tip #2: Maintain One Thread per Conversation

Associate all components of an inquiry to a single thread for easy reference. For instance, if a customer sends a Twitter DM to say his product arrived damaged, and later emails a photo of the damaged product, those two correspondences should be assigned to the same ticket number, so that the customer care rep gets the full picture. Assigning multiple messages to the same ticket number also ensures that only one team member is assigned to help that customer.

Tip #3: Display all Customer Information Close to the Conversation

Drive efficiency by presenting all information about an order or incidence close to the conversation, so that customer care reps won’t need to switch between multiple tabs to respond to inquiries.  As in the example above, the Twitter DM reporting a damaged product and the email with the photo, should both be presented with the appropriate order number and product, so that the customer care rep can resolve the issue quickly and efficiently.

Get the Right Tool

If your brand still relies solely on email to support your customers, consider updating your tech stack. With more tickets coming from different channels, adopting a customer support tool like Gorgias can be a game-changer for your business. Gorgias centralizes all incoming messages into a single platform, and offers smart automations to drive efficiency, lessen the workload for team members, and answer customer questions faster.

Gorgias fully integrates with most ecommerce platforms, and has seamless integrations with over 30 popular apps and platforms, so it’s  likely you can be up and running in no time at all.

What’s more, Gorgias' robust reporting capabilities allow you to track service response times, and set metrics to measure performance. You can also draw important insights -- questions asked most frequently, favored channels, etc. --  to help you optimize your customer experience on a continuous basis.

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If you’re curious about how you can better manage all of your customer communication, you can get TWO MONTHS FREE for being a Stairway to CEO listener! Simply go to gorgias.com and mention the Stairway to CEO podcast.
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Written in collaboration with Gorgias, a leading helpdesk for Shopify, Magento and BigCommerce merchants where retailers can manage all of their customer communication and tickets in one platform (including email, social media, SMS, live chat, phone) It’s powered with machine learning to automate up to 25% of commonly asked questions, and seamlessly integrates into your existing tech stack to deliver better customer support.