What’s the next phase for customer communications? You can already chat back and forth with customers through social channels, text messages, emails, and phone calls. All the right touchpoints are there, but they're not necessarily as well connected as they could be.
For instance, can you start a conversation on the phone and pick up where you left off in an email?
While we’ve taken the first step of embracing omnichannel customer communications by putting the structure and strategies in place to engage with people everywhere they want. However, it turns out there’s more work to be done.
As long as we’re still operating in a world that’s defined by channels, the customer experience will be fragmented.
Imagine that a support team only has the ability to respond to a customer’s text message via standard SMS message. What happens to people who exclusively communicate via WhatsApp?
To communicate with the support team, they would need to change their usual behavior to accommodate the company’s preferred communications channel. That’s inconvenient.
It’s the opposite of how it should be, according to Greenberg. Instead, he sees a very different future in which channels become less important.
In his vision, businesses will focus on providing customers a seamless experience that prioritizes convenience and builds trust. The channels we use now, like WhatsApp, iMessage, Skype, Gmail, Slack, will all fade into the background. What your customers see during an interaction is the content—the channels become invisible.
What makes his vision even more compelling? He says this future of unified communications is not that far off. It’s a near-term possibility if we continue to see the development of robust infrastructure that can underlay the channels we use to support a seamless experience.
