These days, social media and instant messengers are some of the most popular channels to connect with friends and colleagues at work. They are also widely used by brands to establish two-way communication with clients for both marketing and support purposes. Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other platforms provide an extensive set of tools for chatting and file sharing that open possibility for more personalized interactions.
Despite all the benefits messengers and social media can add to customer communication, a business inevitably faces a problem when trying to manage all of these channels, especially during a phase of rapid growth and scaling. Customer support agents can miss an incoming message on one of the channels, or a sales rep might need to ask a customer numerous questions that their colleague has asked already but in a different messenger.
All-in-one messenger platforms that integrate with messengers and social media, moreover, merging customer correspondence into a single stream within one interface can effectively streamline omnichannel messaging and take customer communication to a whole new level. In this post, we’ll review the advantages of employing such an all-in-one messenger for business in detail.
Benefits of omnichannel messaging for business
- Short response time. The key issue a business faces when it decides to extend the number of communication channels is how difficult it is to maintain conversation across all of them in the best possible manner. Eventually, some inquiries receive generic or late answers, and some get entirely missed in times of high volume of incoming messages. None of this works towards establishing better customer-brand relations. An all-in-one messenger platform allows employees to receive and send messages to customers in all connected channels through a single easy-to-use interface. And this means no more missed tickets or late replies.
- Personalized marketing. Researchers show that the open rate of emails tends to be about 10 times lower than that of instant messages. Sending a personalized offer via WhatsApp, for example, while calling a customer by their name, has much more chances to convert into a purchase than another one promotional email sent in bulk. Here, all-in-one messenger helps marketers to launch such campaigns in multiple channels quickly, without the need to go through a tedious process of switching interfaces and client bases for different messengers and social media.
- Convenient for customers. While providing the ability to communicate in real-time, messengers do not require clients to devote their full attention to a conversation, as is the case with a phone call to customer support, for example. A person can write to a brand representative, receive an answer in minutes and continue the conversation at their own pace, replying when they want to. Such convenience significantly and positively impacts customer satisfaction rate, and all-in-one messenger helps to leverage the benefits of messenger and social media in the best possible manner.
- Automation. All-in-one messenger platforms come with extensive tools for automating routine communication tasks, which helps to interact with clients more effectively. For example, template messages can be used to answer frequently asked questions, while auto-replies help customers feel that their inquiries are taken care of even when there are no available operators at the moment. Also, all-in-one messenger platforms can quickly route inquiries to relevant employees according to a request or client type. All of this allows agents to worry less about the routine side of their job and focus on solving complex requests from clients in a creative and quick fashion.
- Extensive analytics. The majority of all-in-one messengers have built-in instruments that allow analyzing customer requests and the work of employees on all channels and provide a unified set of data on them all. This is extremely useful for establishing the most common issues customers run into, their preferences and demographics, as well as the performance of sales and support agents: number of chats, average response time, conversion rate, and so on. Needless to say that comprehensive and accurate data is a key ingredient of success for any business.
Summing things up
As you see, there are numerous ways in which all-in-one messengers solutions help brands to establish omnichannel communication with customers, reply in a timely manner, automate routine interactions and learn more about who their clients are to achieve a more personalized approach. If you’re looking for an omnichannel messaging platform at an affordable price, consider trying Umnico which easily integrates with all major social media and messengers. It also has iOS and Android mobile apps for connecting with customers on the go. A free trial available to all new customers allows assessing the platform’s capabilities without any financial commitment.