How Unified Chat Banishes Customer Frustration

Remember the supposed “good old days” when your customers dialed your toll-free number, explained their problem to someone on your help desk staff, and went away happy, or happy-ish?

The system wasn’t perfect. It also wasn’t the obstacle course it is now – for customers and businesses alike.

Your Frustrated Customer 

In the name of efficiency, and naturally only with the best of intentions, you’ve succeeded in turning customers’ remote interaction attempts into Odyssean quests of heroic proportions. 

Live chat platforms, SMS texting, social media, and mobile apps with integrated feedback features have sped up response times and automated answers to customers’ routine questions. But the reality is that in the digital era, the customer who’s looking to resolve a more complex issue – or two issues at once – is going to have a hard time of it. 

It’s no wonder 53% of customers abandon their online purchases. 

But what about your faithful customer who’s trying to resolve a support issue, and also has a question about a new product? They have no idea your help desk and your CRM don’t talk to each other. All they know is that their experience is anything but seamless, and absolutely frustrating. Forced to repeat account numbers and other information to multiple people or platforms, while being passed from pillar to post, is simply enraging.

For you, the increased churn that results from poor customer experience is just the tip of the iceberg. Because chat is just one element in a multi-layered ecosystem that requires you to handle different types of customer interactions with separate tools and strategies, you have a bunch of other problems too. 

A disjointed approach ends up creating a poor customer experience that degrades customer satisfaction and increases churn

Why It’s Time to Evolve to Unified Chat

For better or worse, today, real-time messaging and conversational tools such as live chat, SMS, chatbots, and social media are now the dominant channels for customer experience management. Alongside the risk of negative customer experiences, the following are some of the challenges arising from the fact that these channels are not integrated, and each requires a separately managed platform:

• Incomplete information: Without synergies between systems, the flow of data and customer feedback is impeded. This means leaders are unable to gain an accurate picture of the health of their business and make informed decisions around improvements in sales productivity and customer support.
• Difficulty scaling customer support, sales, and marketing functions: Configuring multiple platforms and tying their back-end systems together requires hefty integration and data aggregation efforts. These are costly and resource intensive. 
• Bloated costs, redundant services: Where sales and support teams both need to use the CRM’s chat option and the helpdesk’s chat option, the company must purchase not two, but four sets of digital engagement licenses. Then, since the platforms work in isolation, the company will also pay redundant chat deflection fees for every conversation not handled by a human.