What’s the next phase for customer communications? You can already chat back and forth with customers through social channels, text messages, emails, and phone calls. All the right touchpoints are there, but they’re not necessarily as well connected as they could be.
For instance, can you start a conversation on the phone and pick up where you left off in an email?
In a recent post for Twilio Hub, expert Paul Greenberg introduces what is perhaps an even bigger snag in the current communications ecosystem. The author of best-selling book CRM at the Speed of Light: Social CRM Strategies, Tools, and Techniques for Engaging Your Customers says there’s still too much emphasis on the precise channel you use to communicate with customers.
While we’ve taken the first step of embracing omnichannel customer communications by putting the structure and strategies in place to engage with people everywhere they want. However, it turns out there’s more work to be done.
As long as we’re still operating in a world that’s defined by channels, the customer experience will be fragmented.
Imagine that a support team only has the ability to respond to a customer’s text message via standard SMS message. What happens to people who exclusively communicate via WhatsApp?
To communicate with the support team, they would need to change their usual behavior to accommodate the company’s preferred communications channel. That’s inconvenient.
It’s the opposite of how it should be, according to Greenberg. Instead, he sees a very different future in which channels become less important.
In his vision, businesses will focus on providing customers a seamless experience that prioritizes convenience and builds trust. The channels we use now, like WhatsApp, iMessage, Skype, Gmail, Slack, will all fade into the background. What your customers see during an interaction is the content—the channels become invisible.
What makes his vision even more compelling? He says this future of unified communications is not that far off. It’s a near-term possibility if we continue to see the development of robust infrastructure that can underlay the channels we use to support a seamless experience.
Curious to learn more about how Greenberg’s sees a future of channel-less customer communications taking shape? Check out his article on The Hub for the full story.
For more ideas to improve your omnichannel marketing, here are a few additional resources that can help: