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Customers crave the personal touch. FMCGs, more than other sectors, rely on individuals for goodwill, recommendations and repeat purchases in order to thrive even as they work to create brand images and interact. In this context social media can get you surprisingly more returns. The fly in the ointment is that you must use Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Pinterest and synchronize activities. This is where you will find it a challenge to keep track of activities on all channels. The simple way to manage them all is with the help of omnichannel contact center software.
Effortless single point control
The standard contact center software covers different points of communication such as email, fax, chat, voice, conferencing and text. However, omnichannel contact center software throws in social media integration into the mix. What you now have is unification of all social media channels as well as other forms of communication into one single dashboard. You can do lots more with less effort in a shorter time. Social media is important considering that when customers follow brands on social media 89% are more likely to buy, 85% will recommend you to their circles and 75% will increase spending. 50% of people derive information from social media.
You can create a compelling journey translating to more revenues when using diverse channels becomes easy. The single dashboard lets you keep track of activities across channels, respond, jump in and create a positive customer experience in different ways. Thereafter, communications can filter down to normal channels in the customer’s journey.
Vectors
Omnichannel contact center software is not just about unifying all channels. There are other vectors at work that you can leverage for a powerful impact.
Imagery and emotion: Instagram, for instance, uses powerful imagery linked with emotive responses and, in addition, a way to market your products.
Text, video, informative, participative: Facebook is a sort of portmanteau channel used by more mature people to share informative text, participate proactively, sound out people, voice thoughts, seek advice and so on. People could be objective and analytical as well as subjective.
Immediate interaction and sharing: WhatsApp is about here and now in interaction and sharing of interesting content. It is about disseminating or spreading information and getting things done.
Ripple the pond: Tweeting could be compared to throwing a stone in the pond to create ripples. The goal here is to broadcast information or thoughts and seek to engage others and seek responses. One example is to announce a discount offer or a product launch.
Tying all these together becomes easy when you have a single dashboard to oversee all channels. You can then create a grand strategy that works on all the above fronts using the different vectors.
The results are easily analyzed. You have inbuilt analytics, recording and tracking solution in the contact center software. It is relatively easy to extrapolate results of your different approaches on different channels and target customers in a far better way.
Quality matters more than quantity in your social media posts, tweets and interactions. The analytics part helps to keep refining strategies and delivering content that works for you and keeps customers happily engaged at different levels such as emotional, exploratory, and coldly judgmental or participative. You can target customers using these “mind” oriented approaches aligned with specific properties of each channel with ease through the contact center software with omnichannel feature.
You can cross-promote content and time your promotions for maximum engagement even as you keep tabs on results.
What the contact center software offers is more than haphazard seeding of social media channels. You can plan, implement and carry forward several threads simultaneously, each thread with a specific goal and all such threads ultimately coming together for your benefit and for your customer’s benefit. Omnichannel contact center solutions that incorporate AI will help you do this with much more ease since there is more automation, machine learning and facility to deploy conversational chatbots that will do the work of primary engagement before you step in.
Reinforce and drive social media campaigns
It is not an open end when you have social media integrated into contact center software. You can rely solely on social media to drive engagement. You can use the software’s other features to create primary touchpoints before you steer them into the social funnel. For instance, you could use the SMS/voice broadcast plus IVR feature to broadcast messages with a link to your social media pages. Once they respond you have a handle on their social connections. Conversely, once you have social media users in your CRM you could use the broadcast feature to send out personalized messages or to carry out surveys to know customer’s changing preferences. Send out emails and include Instagram connections in the email.
The normal way people view omnichannel contact center software is one that has social media on the periphery. However, given that many or majority of people prefer to interact on social media first, look at the contact center software from a different perspective for your FMCG business. It will make a difference.
