Multichannel: customer service. How to improve it in your business
Over the last few decades, and as the media has been expanding and diversifying, we have gone from dealing with our customers face-to-face – who don’t remember those endless queues in almost any establishment – or, at best, by telephone, to serving them through multiple channels that didn’t even exist as long ago, such as email or social networks.
The fact that the client has many different means of contact with our business has, as almost everything in this life, advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it facilitates communication with the customer, with all that it entails in order to improve customer service and facilitate sales opportunities, but on the other hand it can require an extra effort to be able to properly attend to all those “open doors” in which the customer expects to be well attended.
What is multichannel customer service?
Multi-channel customer service is known as that offered through different communication channels, including the following:
- Presential: it is the most traditional user service. Be handsome and offer your best smile. It is now disappearing in many companies, especially those that operate mainly on-line, but it is still important for many others.
- Telephone: It is another classic that has been part of our lives for decades. Who hasn’t called a hotline? Today, and in spite of the new channels, it is still very popular because of its simplicity and speed, but it is also avoided or even “hidden” by many companies because of the effort involved in keeping it active.
- E-mail: of great importance in recent years, nowadays a large part of the user service is practiced through this channel. What company does not have a contact email address? For some businesses it has even become the only way for its users to communicate their requests.
- Contact form: derived from email -usually, its use generates an email, facilitates the sometimes heavy task of contacting a company.
- Forum: it is a very public way of customer service – queries can be viewed by any visitor -, which can serve to avoid repeated queries but also requires the effort of being attended to quickly and diligently. There are not so many companies that dare to offer this channel. Does yours?
- Social networks: one of the most fashionable channels. More powerful, but also even more demanding than customer service through forums. A good customer service in social networks can help you to make your excellence known, but it can also cause you problems when you do things wrong or don’t know how to manage certain situations, so be careful….
- Tutorials: whether in video or written form, they are increasingly used. If they are well prepared, they can spare you a great deal of time in consultations and convey an image of professionalism.
- Chats: these are an evolution of face-to-face or telephone customer service. Direct, fast, easy to use… they offer many advantages, especially to the user, but also a fundamental disadvantage: to keep them in operation it will be necessary to invest time and effort.
These are some of the most common ways a customer can contact a company today, but there are some more, such as apps or faq. The more your business offers, the more multichannel your customer service will be. Some companies even aspire to offer omnichannel customer service, which would mean offering all the existing channels of contact (this is something that many consider a “rare sight”).
How to offer a good attention to the multichannel customer?
As you can imagine, a good multichannel user service will require effort, dedication and professionalism. But, in addition to this, you will need to have the right tools to avoid going crazy and be able to organize all the incidents you receive through all those channels. Fortunately, you should know that there are technological tools that can help you in this task.
One of them is Integria IMS. Integria IMS is a help desk software that has -among other functionalities- an incident management system based on tickets that can help you centralize the customer service of your company and better manage it.
Imagine that you already have many open channels to serve your customers. Each of them is attended by one or more competent and professional people.
Imagine that, regardless of the channel through which the complaint, consultation, claim, etc. was communicated, your people could open a ticket in a system such as Integria IMS, which reflects each incident.
Imagine that the opening of this ticket could be communicated by a warning to the people in charge of resolving or managing the incident.
Imagine that in this ticket the different participants could reflect key aspects, such as when the incident was recorded, its current status, if it has already been resolved or how it was resolved. Or even attach photographs, or associate the incident with objects that form part of an inventory.
Even more so. Imagine that you could access the tickets with the incidents that have already been solved in the past to help you implement changes that allow you to improve the performance of your company or your customer service.
Integria IMS can help you do all this and more. In addition to its help desk system, Integria IMS has other functionalities such as an inventory, a project management system or a holiday manager.
Want to know everything that Integria IMS incident management system can offer you? You can do it right here: https://integriaims.com/en/product/help-desk-software/
Or better yet, ask us any questions you may have about Integria IMS. You can do this by using the contact form at the following address: https://integriaims.com/en/company/contact/
The Integria IMS team will be happy to assist you!