SMS, Email, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook — these are your customers’ new favorite haunts. And that’s where your business needs to create its digital customer journey.
Every online brand today follows this blueprint:
Create brand awareness using bulk SMS, email, WhatsApp messages, and paid ads on social media
Set up an app or website where the customer can complete the purchase
Provide channels like voice, email, or WhatsApp to enable returns and collect feedback
But the problem is, this journey is very disconnected and impersonal. For example, customers receive alerts for discounted flight tickets via email while receiving car rental promos via SMS at the same time, in the middle of a work day. This wastes time and effort for everyone involved.
And here’s the kicker: It’s not that customers don’t want updates and alerts from brands.
More than 40% of Europeans rely on and even prefer receiving SMS and push notifications, but less than 15% get anything relevant to act upon.
How can brands bridge this disparity? What happens when digital touch points are relevant and personalized?
1. They’re stuck with legacy systems:
Speed, customer data security, competitiveness, efficiency — that’s everything required for a good customer experience, and everything legacy systems can’t provide.
Legacy systems are outdated, expensive to maintain, and deliver poor results. Yet they’re quite hard to replace since business operations still rely on them. So as a make-shift solution, companies build on top of these outdated systems in an attempt to modernize their technology.
Often, it’s impossible to integrate modern software with these old systems. The more companies attempt to build on top of them, the more they have to lose when it comes crashing down.
2. Multiple cloud-based channels that don’t talk to each other
Companies invest in multichannel technology, which is a good thing. But if they are not connected and combined in the right way, it can affect your customer journey and become nightmare fuel.
Imagine having to introduce yourself every time you meet your neighbor. Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? Well, that’s pretty much how customer support works. A customer who asks for help through your chatbot gets redirected to a support ticket where they have to type out the issue again, then choose to call support where they need to explain everything from scratch.
What a great customer journey requires is a personalized, contextual digital journey across relevant channels, from start to finish.
But less effort for the customer does not mean more effort for the companies. Enabling a seamless digital journey is rather effortless, thanks to CPaaS—Communications Platform as a Service. It’s going to be a great asset for your business, so let’s get to know it.