Digital channels: A performance lever for customer relations

Companies today face a major challenge: delivering a seamless, responsive, and effective experience while controlling costs and optimising resources. Faced with increasingly demanding consumers, integrating digital channels is no longer an option—it is a strategic necessity.

Why integrate digital channels?

Today, although 64.1% of inbound interactions are still called with a live agent, it’s not actually what customers would prefer. Only 36% want to call with their high complexity queries and even fewer, 24%, for high emotion ones (ContactBabel 2024). This presents an opportunity to:

✅ Offer a seamless omnichannel experience: Enable your customers to switch effortlessly from chat to social media, from email to voice, without interruption.

✅ Optimise operational costs: A chat or email is, on average, two to three times less expensive than a telephone call.

✅ Free up your teams for high-value interactions: Automation handles simple requests, allowing your agents to focus on more complex issues.

✅ Enhance customer insights: A unified platform centralises all interactions, enabling quicker responses and well-informed decision-making.

✅ Boost productivity: Leveraging AI and automation tools reduces processing time and increases team efficiency.

Understanding and anticipating customer expectations

Each customer has specific needs and selects a channel based on several factors:

Accessibility and autonomy: Outside of service hours, self-service solutions become essential. 

Urgency: A critical request will favour a real-time synchronous channel like live chat or telephone.

Age and digital habits: Younger generations prefer messaging, while others remain loyal to email or telephone.

Intent: A dissatisfied customer may turn to social media to express discontent.

Deploying a frictionless omnichannel strategy

The major challenge is ensuring a seamless transition between channels to avoid any customer frustration. With the right solution, a customer who starts a conversation via chatbot should be smoothly redirected to an agent without repetition or loss of information. Intelligent channel management not only enhances customer satisfaction but also optimises internal performance.

Levers for high-performing digital customer service

• A unified console: Centralise and streamline the management of interactions.

If you haven’t recently, it might be time to rethink your agent console.

• An enriched knowledge base: Provide precise and rapid responses.

• Intelligent routing: Direct each request to the most suitable agent or channel.

• An evolving approach: Gradually integrate new digital channels in line with customer needs.

Rallying your teams around a successful digital transformation

Effective digitalisation relies on collaboration among:

• The customer relations department, which defines the strategy.
• IT teams, who ensure technical integration.
• Chief Digital Officers (CDOs), who drive the transformation.

A shared vision and coherent implementation are key to the successful adoption of new channels.

Conclusion

AI-powered instant messaging, supported by tools like Odigo AI Orchestrator, has emerged as a key channel for delivering high-quality customer service. Offering an omnichannel solution and end-to-end request handling, it enables businesses to enhance both operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.