As evidenced by the rise in rich communication suites and unified communication solutions, we all use multiple channels these days. If you’re only checking your email or only communicating with customers by phone, you business is obviously in trouble.
Using multiple channels is a way of life now. We may not be on every single chat service and social network, but we must multiple channels to stay connected. This is the case for individuals, and also for brands.
How these multiple channels are used can vary, however, and it makes a big difference. A collection of disjointed communication channels presents a markedly inferior experience for customers and colleagues than an omnichannel approach.
“Omnichannel is the favorite buzzword in the digital world of late, but not everyone has fully grasped the difference between adopting a successful omnichannel approach, and merely featuring on multiple channels,” noted Mike Saunders in a recent article for Bizcommunity.com. “There's a huge difference, which lies in the strategy and way of thinking more than in the physical adoption.”
Instead of just working on multiple channels, an omnichannel approach makes sure that the customer experience on every one of those channels is aligned with each other. At the same time each channel is still optimized for its specific touch point.
The omnichannel approach to the multiplicity of communication options helps remove the disjointed, siloed brand experience that can frustrate consumers and drop efficiency for customer service agents.
It also better positions firms to allow customers to reach out in any way that is most appropriate, something consumers now expect. If they are being corralled toward a particular communications path, they are not being served properly.
This is where technologies such as rich communications suite (RCS) come into play. RCS helps bring together multichannel communications into a single, omnichannel that is tightly integrated and enables brands to pull together chat, phone and text as if they were a single unified channel.
Basically, RCS is the technology that helps make omnichannel communications possible, bringing together what otherwise would be multiple channels and serving them up in a way that they seamlessly can blend together into a single channel that nonetheless is pervasive and doesn’t sacrifice the functionality of each individual channel.
Every brand is now multichannel. But only those firms that understand the direction of things have realized that having several channels is not enough if they are disjointed.
Edited by Alisen Downey