Why should enterprises build connected experiences across customers’ preferred channels?

The growing integration of digital technology in our day-to-day lives has transformed the face of B2C communication over the past few years. The channels of communication continue to grow diverse, and successful businesses building toward long-term growth have readily adopted them into their consumer outreach and engagement strategies. In the wake of the ongoing pandemic, businesses need to re-evolve by stepping up their game.

Lost in translation: COVID-19’s impact on B2C communications

Steve Jobs once said: ‘You cannot understand what is happening today without understanding what came before.’ It holds doubly true for rapidly changing customer experiences, especially during this pandemic.

Traditionally, enterprises addressed customer queries primarily via in-person visits. Telephonic calls and postal exchanges were some of the other popular mediums. Email stepped into the mix with the advent of the internet, followed by social media, messaging apps, and website/app chatbots.

Each user typically had a preferred medium of outreach, and each medium was governed by a distinct set of netiquettes.

Today, however customers are at a liberty to switch between devices and formats. In the absence of a cohesive ‘connected’ strategy, businesses can struggle with this change in consumer behaviour. More importantly, they might not be prepared, whether in terms of talent or infrastructure, to deal with this shift.

As a result, their end-user engagement strategy runs the risk of losing the personalisation and context built over multiple interactions, across different channels. Customer experience suffers in such a scenario, leading to lower satisfaction – and inevitably, loss of business.

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Towards connected experiences

Cloud-based B2C communication platforms are helping brands overcome this challenge with cutting-edge, tech-driven solutions.

Seated atop the various nodes of information flow, these platforms help brands initiate meaningful conversations with their target audiences, through the channel and language they prefer. They can also help brands drive omnichannel experiences that operate at the intersection of the physical and digital worlds.

During the pandemic, for instance, many on-demand service brands registered an increase in orders. To deal with the soaring quantum of demand, leading players in this domain turned to a new omnichannel strategy by appending voice-based communication solution to their existing SMS channel. Doing so, they were not only able to provide reliable service and always-on customer support to their customers but also drive employee productivity, delivery rates, and even a reduction in costs.

A truly connected world

Past research also shows that these are not singular success stories limited to certain platforms. By using connected communication strategies, brands have been able to increase customer loyalty by around 66% and brand interactions by 44%, while driving better classification of customer profiles, market data, and in-depth region and channel-specific insights.

All of this creates a virtuous cycle. More engagement results in better data, even as the data translates to deeper insights.

Armed with these insights, brands can make more accurate decisions to communicate with their target audiences, which in turn provides more high-quality data. Doing so, helps them to create superior moments and drive personalised engagement through one-on-one interactions – at scale.

To recapitulate, at a time when we are spending more time engaging with our digital devices, the significance of connected experiences has only grown. Against this backdrop, B2C communication platforms are simplifying the enterprise migration to such processes. The idea is not to translate a square message that it may pass through a triangular channel.

It is to personalise each instance of communication to maximise engagement and drive conversions. In doing so, enterprises can seamlessly manage the brand experience across an array of channels – creating new growth avenues for business while ensuring a higher-than-average rate of customer satisfaction and eventually, retention.