All of us feel strongly about a brand that makes us feel unique and cared for. For example, you approach an online gift site and purchase a gift for someone, which gets sold out before you are able to place an order, and the customer service executive calls you and assures that he/she would arrange for your gift and assure it reaches in time, with the gift of your choice actually reaching in time, you receive a confirmation phone call as well as an email about it. How do you feel about the brand? How do you feel about the way they treated your situation? As a customer, this incident may make you a loyal patron of the brand. And this has a lot to with the ease of accessibility to the brand, the ease of shopping with them through various channels and your interaction with the brand. Developing a multi-channel engagement strategy, however, has baffled marketers. With fast changing technology and equally precarious consumer expectations, one is left wondering about how can one engage the customer effectively. To address some of these confusions Paul Writer in association with Zendesk and Knowlarity hosted a webinar called “How to Delight Your Customer With a Multi-Channel Engagement Strategy.”
Jessie Paul, Founder and CEO, Paul Writer started the webinar with these words, “We know what a good experience is when we get it.” Expanding on the topic Jessie pin-pointed the two key challenges to multi-channel marketing:
- Identifying the pain points for a customer during the interaction with the brand.
- Trying to create a seamless experience from the customer’s point of view instead of from the brand’s internal processes.
Jessie then invited KT Prasad, Country Head, Zendesk to talk about the role channels play in business and industry trends. KT elaborated his arguments with the example of a customer wishing to buy a shirt. He described the customer’s entire journey and interaction with the brand through various channels, pointing out where and what points could be pain points for the customer and how a bad experience could have harmed the brand.
KT stressed that in order to provide a seamless experience to a customer, the various customer touch point verticals must be integrated. He further added that integrating verticles for a seamless experience makes shopping convenient, helps in clarifying contexts and solves complexity. He further added that seamless customer experience reduced customer churn. KT further pointed out that customers today prefer to chat over talk and that they expect query resolution within 2 hours to 24 hours depending on the channel on which the query was raised. Most customers expect a brand to respond promptly to social media queries.
KT further cautioned the participants about how a bad customer experience can retract the brand and how it is important to effectively train customer service agents with enough knowledge to help resolve basic customer queries.
Gaurav Mehta, CMO, Girnar Soft took the discussion forward by sharing personal anecdotes and experiences of how executives have gone further than their job description and expectation to reduce the customer’s troubles. Gaurav argued that multi-channel engagement becomes easier if all verticals dealing with the customer are convinced that providing great customer experience is the way of doing business.
He further argued that great customer experience includes educating the customer to derive the most amount of value from your proposition.
Shantanu Mathur, Country Head Knowlarity focused on the role of voice. He pointed out that there is 82% voice penetration in India i.e. Indian Customers interact more on phone and that 48% customers prefer to talk to a person than respond to the voice mail.
He further talked about recorded conversation can be transcribed to understand the mood of the customer and how one doesn’t necessarily have to listen to the entire conversation but search through a list of indicative keywords to gauge the mood of the customer.
This webinar ended with a general agreement that engaging effectively with the customer on various channels is the need of the hour.
You can view the webinar here:
