The use of more than one channel or medium of communication to manage your customers is called multichannel customer support. It helps customers to coordinate via emails, calls, texts, social media, web pages, etc.
Most firms these days have a multichannel helpdesk to support their customers. It is a key strategy to use different platforms to connect and help customers with their queries. To know more pros & cons, keep reading further.
Pros:
In today’s day and age where the digital world has more channels than ever, you need to use those to your advantage. Multichannel customer support has its pros and cons. Read further to explore it.
1. Diversified Audience Reach:
Not everyone is found on LinkedIn or emails. Customers need to have options to interact with you. You should provide them with different options from Facebook to Instagram, emails to Twitter, and every other available platform for them to interact with you. This way you can meet your customers where they feel free and more approachable to you.
2. Strategize Marketing Campaigns:
Multichannel customer support is used for targeting messages to specific audiences. Expecting our customers to adapt to the channel your business uses or using the correct devices to contact you is simply unrealistic. Hence, you need to constantly update and upgrade with the market. You need to micro-campaign so that your customers find your business trustworthy and meaningful as well.
3. More Leads:
Multichannel customer support helps the business with more lead generation. It helps define the target audience and understand the potential leads. It is important to think of every micro detail. It includes their buying habits, the preferred channel of communication, interests, and characteristics. Next, you need to utilize the details which are right for the online marketing channels. It will help you attract new customers because this is a well-planned strategy. It helps you reach new customers on the right platforms, making your network larger and enhancing your business.
Cons:
There are many benefits to multichannel customer support, but it requires so much effort and analysis that it increases the budget for everything. Read further to know the details of these cons.
1. Adds to Marketing Cost:
Selling on multiple marketing channels will add to your costs. If you add the sales online, then you need to hire a staff to fill orders, buy software, process those orders, and enhance the online sales. Working with different people requires different advertising and promotional efforts. It depends on the partner’s understanding and also, on which platform you are gaining your maximum customers. Advertising on such platforms is costly, but in the end, it gains you a good ROI.
More products, in more places, require more supply. More supply means, more warehouses, staff, additional shipping costs, and much more. Everything involved in this chain requires money to function. Hence, your budget for advertising and marketing increases.
2. In-depth Customer Analysis:
In-depth analysis of your customers is both a boon and a curse. Boon because you can get micro insights into your customers’ interests. But curse because you need to record their activity and figure out the type of customer. What channel they are habitual to, you need to know their payment method and so many more insights that help you target your audience in a better way. This further helps with marketing strategy. But for storing and analyzing the details, you need software, and also their permission to share their details. You can only use those details if your customers allow you to use them.
3. Requires Advanced Analysis:
You need to track the progress on all the possible channels. Since multichannel customer support is on different platforms, you are required to analyze the complex, and unstructured data that is collected from all the different channels. It is difficult to succeed at different channels at the same time, but you can succeed if you have more advanced tools to analyze the data.
Conclusion
I hope you are more clear after reading this article about the different pros and cons of multichannel customer support. Regardless of what size your company is, it will always enhance your growth in the business, but you need to spend more money on software that can help you analyze the customers and plan your next strategic marketing move.
