How Integrated Enterprise Communication Could Be Effectively Used To Improve Customer Experience In the case of digital-only interaction, access to lingual and paralingual parameters to gauge the reception of an engagement effort is unavailable

"The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place," said George Bernard Shaw.

Business communication has always been tricky. In the post-2020 landscape, where in-person interaction is out of the question, and the online space has become the go-to-medium for customers to safely interact with their favorite brands, it has become even trickier.

Why? Because in-person interaction allows the communicator to determine the effectiveness of their engagement strategy based on the customer's reaction and, in case it isn't working, to improve it accordingly. In the case of digital-only interaction, however, access to lingual and paralingual parameters to gauge the reception of an engagement effort is unavailable. As a result, businesses often struggle to drive effective customer engagement strategies.

There's a reason. Most businesses use the same engagement strategy to engage with their customers across a handful of digital channels. However, their target audiences exert their digital presence differently across different platforms; for instance, the kind of posts and content consumed on one social platform may be different from what they typically seek when visiting the other, while what prompts them to open emails might be different to what makes them respond to in-app notifications. A "one size fits all' approach no longer works.

To overcome this challenge, enterprises are revamping their business communication strategieswiththe principle of hyper personalization at its heart, and for good reason. A market report by Gartner revealed that personalized messaging can help organizations drive 16 per cent better commercial outcomes.

Depersonalized engagement efforts from brands on the other hand, can lead to customer discontent and it's easy to understand why. Aggravated by isolation and the overwhelming unease arising from the outbreak-led uncertainty, users today have zero tolerance for marketing campaigns that give the impression of only being interested in reducing them to statistics on a chart. Businesses, therefore, need to convey that they care about their customers and value them as human beings. And integrated, omnichannel engagement platforms offered by new-age enterprise communication solutions providers can help businesses achieve precisely this goal.

Improving customer experience through empathetic, connected, omnichannel engagement

The preliminary step in this direction is to recognize that no two customers are alike. Brands need to reconfigure the way they have previously driven their marketing efforts. To create deeper engagement with their customers, businesses must tap into the power of advanced omnichannel hubs available in the market today. Doing this can empower them to generate optimal results, with curated messages delivered at the right moments to the customer over the platform of their choice.

An omnichannel marketing automation hub allows brands to categorize their customer base into various segments based on unified, anonymized data such as demographics, location, behavioral patterns, etc. The insights generated after the analysis of these parameters can then be leveraged to target each segment with the relevant messaging to drive greater efficiency and maximize the conversion rate

The relevance of an engagement strategy is tied to the individual's needs and preferences, be it regarding the content of a campaign or the manner of its delivery. For instance, once an online retailer has created a persona bucket of customers with overlapping or intersecting buying behaviors, it can send each customer a curated list of products aligned with the purchase pattern of that segment. This will have twofold effects. A customer will get access to products that fall in line with their preferential context. And, as a result, the e-retailer can maximize the opportunity to drive upselling and cross-selling activities over its digital platform.

The data analytics of customers can also empower the online seller to connect with its customers through context-based, event-triggered messaging based on the analysis of spikes in their past buying behaviour during or around certain dates. These spikes may correspond to annual milestones, such as anniversaries, birthdays, etc. Using an analytics-driven approach, here, can help the e-retailer automatically curate and send relevant items as recommendations to the customer over the communication platform of their choice, be it on e-mails or chat apps. Such personalized and focused communication strategies can not only elevate the follow-through rate but also boost customer loyalty by making them feel seen and valued.

Brands can use tech-based tools to personalize and automate omnichannel communication across multiple channels ranging from chat apps and social media platforms to SMS, RCS, etc. Besides this, brands can use omnichannel engagement hubs to track the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns by analyzing the data collected in the process and using the insights to deploy enhanced campaigns while delivering better experiences in the future.

With the second wave of the viral outbreak raging across the country, the reprieve from lockdowns that people enjoyed in the interim has been curbed again. Consequently, the digital space has become, and will continue to be, the primary medium of interaction between brands and customers in the post-pandemic age. To stay ahead of the curve in the shifting tides of the viral outbreak, businesses need to adopt a more omnichannel-focused approach while personalizing the experience at each step of the communication flow. Discerning businesses which recognize the need for stepping up their engagement strategies will be better equipped to acquire new, happy customers while retaining old satisfied ones.