How CPaaS provides value at each stage of the customer journey
The CPaaS added value in the customer journey
A good CPaaS provider helps you create a combined campaign to drive awareness at a higher intensity. It also empowers you to schedule contextual marketing campaigns by linking your CRM data to your multichannel campaign to reach the right people at the right time. This makes the buying process much more convenient for your customers.
To truly understand the impact a multichannel customer experience can create, let’s dissect the stages of the digital customer journey.
Marketing teams
This is the stage of discovery, where brands need to focus on creating customer awareness and demand. Personalized nudges in this part of the digital journey are crucial, as 80% of customers are more likely to purchase from a brand that provides customized experiences.
This stage requires regular and impactful forms of multichannel communication, especially for retail and travel brands. With rich customer data, CPaaS allows you to choose the right set of channels to improve engagement rates, which usually make a combination of the following.
SMS — Studies show that approximately one-third of people who receive SMS messages respond to a call to action within the message, and nearly 50% of them will go on to make a purchase.
RCS — Rich Communication Service (RCS) delivers 20 times higher customer engagement than mobile banner ads, push notifications, and emails. This is because it helps customers seamlessly access multiple channels like voice, video, chatbot, etc., and can carry effective CTAs, making it one of the top channels to onboard new customers. Subway, the popular food chain, saw a 144% increase in offer redemption rate compared to SMS, and the channel has been widely used by other enterprise brands like Virgin Trains to get high conversions.
WhatsApp for Business — WhatsApp is quickly becoming the most popular channel in the mix, with 6.9% of customers being more inclined to buy from a brand if a WhatsApp option is available.
Push notifications on the website or app — Highly targeted and personalized push notifications have click-through rates as high as 30%, and currently, the banking, finance, and insurance industry (BFSI) has the highest number of customers who opt-in for push notifications.
Operations teams
When it comes to customer experience (CX), it is as important to ensure that your customers’ data and transactions are secure, as it is to keep them informed throughout their journey. CPaaS can help you achieve both objectives by providing the tools and APIs required to build and integrate communication features into the company’s applications, and automate communications. This in turn helps you build and manage communication workflows tailored to your customer’s journey.
CPaaS provides an array of channels, from push notifications and alerts to P2P SMS and video, to create meaningful interactions with customers. Remind them of important appointments, alert them when there is an update to their support case, or allow them to get in touch with you on their favourite channel… In short, if you add value and convenience, you improve CX whilst reducing the workload of internal teams.
CPaaS also enables security and authentication across geographies, with granular tracking and reporting to enrich the experience further.
SMS — SMS is a key channel for 2FA and OTPs. This is applicable to BFSI, retail, and travel transactions. By authenticating their transactions, your company can assure customers of security and flag any suspicious activity immediately.
Voice — Voice is a convenient channel to enable customer account confirmation and recovery, and passwordless authentication. It can supplement your SMS or WhatsApp authentication campaign or be used specifically for cases where transferring the call to customer support needs to be quick.
Customer service teams
Providing customer support is often misconstrued to be one of the final stages in the customer journey, but it should actually be the foundation for the journey. Good customer support can increase the probability of the customer associating with your company again or recommending it to other people. This is a stage that requires extensive personalization through channels like:
Voice — IVR remains one of the most cost-effective customer support solutions, but it has become synonymous with slow and ineffective customer service. CPaaS can change that perspective. It can help companies build and refine multi-level IVR flows, fix agent schedules, and record calls to analyze areas for improvement.
CPaaS also takes IVR to the next level — it brings in speech-to-text APIs that can help with sentiment analysis. This data can be used to intelligently route calls to the right people at the right time, enable multi-lingual support, and offer 24/ 7 self service features to customers as well.
Chatbot — Chatbots check all the boxes for customers and support agents. They provide instant responses, are easy to access, and have 24/ 7 availability.
Chatbots can handle entire conversations around 69% of the time, thereby reducing the workload of support agents. They also help customers transition to calls with agents easily without losing context. Chatbots can also collect customer feedback, making it the ideal channel for customer support.
WhatsApp - WhatsApp can be a simpler version of customer support and act as the perfect bridge to voice support. It can combine with chatbots as well. It makes conversations extremely convenient and can speed up customer service by 225%, making customer support its most popular use case.
Source: bloggingwizard
SMS - Similar to WhatsApp, SMS can help customers transition to other channels based on the urgency or severity of their requests. Combining SMS with other channels for support can significantly improve customer satisfaction, with 66% of them preferring SMS above other channels. SMS can also be used to collect quick feedback from customers about the quality of support.
Email — Though not as quick as other channels, email is commonly used for customer support. It allows conversations to flow asynchronously. A key advantage of email is that it allows for easy tracking and documentation of support interactions, so it is one of the most popular channel for handling confidential information, personal data, or sensitive conversations. Research shows that customers prefer email for non-urgent inquiries and have a higher satisfaction rate compared to voice support. Email support positively impacts retention. It can also be used as a supplementary channel to send customers the transcripts of their chat conversations post their voice call.
Lastly, it is important to remember that different industries have different needs – and this applies to both the enterprises, and their customers. CPaaS integrates with existing systems so that organizations can automatize communications using a combination of the channels above. There are software developers serving specific business verticals, which ensures its adoption is as valuable and seamless as possible. For instance:
Flipdish (for the travel and hospitality industry) is a booking and payment processing platform – by linking customer communications to the actions performed on Flipdish, companies in the industry can easily provide highly personalized experiences.
Sage integrates into the platform to optimize retail and e-commerce businesses’ operations (e.g. for accounting and business management, by managing the invoice process for final users, easily sending invoices, processing receipts etc.).
LeadSquared’s software helps healthcare organization deliver an exceptional patient experience, with a healthcare CRM, marketing automation, and a call center integration, so no communication is lost.