Too much channel, not enough omni: How Khoros creates seamless experiences for customers and teams

The customer engagement nightmare

Picture this all-too-common story: you work in customer engagement — maybe the contact center, social media team, marketing department, or even the C-suite. Your company is slashing budgets in response to a volatile economy. Customers have flooded your queue with incoming direct messages on social media, Google’s Business Messages, Apple Business Chat, SMS, web chat, and a dozen more channels that you can’t even remember. The number of ways in which you’re expected to interact with customers is simply overwhelming.

Amid all these channels, teams struggle to stay afloat. Even if they can answer every inquiry in a timely manner, the experience for customers varies widely from channel to channel. The only constant about your customer experience is the lack of quality control.

The cost of inefficient customer engagement

Managing all that traffic can be expensive and time-consuming. Take voice, for example. Businesses spend $1.3 trillion annually on voice calls alone. It is the most expensive channel, but it’s also the most popular. But many businesses still apply “old school” band-aids to a very modern problem by assigning different teams to take care of different channels: one to man the phones, another for social media, a third for email, and so on. When teams focus exclusively on one channel, they create blindspots and miss important context for the customer’s journey. Customers have to repeat themselves over and over, starting from the beginning every time they inquire on a new channel or with a different team.

This inefficiency doesn’t just rob your customers of a good experience, it robs time from your teams, and it quite literally robs your bottom line. Brands with these disjointed structures can’t holistically serve their customers because valuable customer interaction data becomes trapped amongst the web of teams, systems, and processes. And brands that don’t track their customer’s digital journey will never truly know their customers — and, as a result, cannot effectively market, sell, and serve digitally.

The downstream effects of this inefficiency go beyond just the channels you manage. Negative reviews and comments pile up that could threaten your brand and cause churn. Without the right platform, brands miss the conversations that are happening out of view.

The consequence is in the numbers: 73% of brands expect the number of inbound channels to increase in the next one to two years and 77% of these same respondents report struggling to create a cohesive customer journey across their existing channels. Similarly, 65% of customers said they have switched to a different brand because of a poor experience — this means that if your competitor’s experience is better, you could lose over half your customer base to them.

Although the customer engagement struggle is real, it’s not all doom and gloom. Just as people will stop buying from brands that provide a bad customer experience, 86% of consumers say they will pay more for a better experience. Customer experience (CX) is a key differentiator — perhaps the most important one — for every brand. So, even though bad CX is a major drag on your bottom line, good CX, in contrast, will put you ahead of your competition.

The best news of all? Providing a good CX isn’t as hard as you might think.

Let’s start by saying that collecting channels — that is, adding new ways for your customers to get in touch with you — isn’t a bad thing per se. In fact, you should be collecting channels, because the more options someone has for contacting you, the easier their experience will be. The problems we talked about above start to occur when you only collect channels without integrating them into a broader CX strategy.

The solution to this problem is an omnichannel customer engagement platform like Khoros.

Our unique Platform gives your brand a leg up on the competition in three main ways:

Approachable AI and automation

Unlike many other automation frameworks, ours is user-friendly and requires little or no coding ability to set up and start using. With advanced chatbots, agent assist, automated prioritization, modernized workflows, and much more, you can give your agents the experience they need to be effective in their work. And best of all, your customers will appreciate the consistency and ease of the experience.

Learn more about our AI and automation capabilities.

Actionable insights and analytics

“This call will be monitored for quality assurance.”

“This conversation will be recorded to better serve you in the future.”

This — the timeless CX anthem. But what does quality assurance mean to your company? Are you actually assuring quality? The Khoros Platform offers the best customer experience analytics solution on the market. It takes all your unstructured data from every customer interaction and analyzes it in real-time, picking up on trends and issues that might have taken you years to notice (if you ever did). With these insights, you can make changes to your CX that improve everyday interactions and keep customers happy.

Learn more about Khoros CX Insights.

Omnichannel engagement — the right way

We saved the best for last. No longer does “omnichannel” simply mean collecting endless channels in your contact center and marketing organization. Now, it means building a seamless, modern experience that both agents and customers can use to save time and money. Our platform is the only one that allows your teams to engage customers on every channel, including voice, without ever having to leave the screen. It’s everything you need, organized beautifully, all in the same place. 

Learn more about our omnichannel platform.

Curious about the power of our platform to drive better business outcomes? Let’s look at how three brands have made enormous progress with Khoros this year.

Thousands of enterprise brands use Khoros to power their customer interactions on every channel — including voice. Here are a few examples of how the Khoros Platform has helped brands save money and improve experiences.

AGL: $1 million ROI

The Australian Gas Light Company (AGL), one of Australia’s leading integrated energy companies, wanted to support a digital customer experience across every channel, including their own brand community. They use the full Khoros Platform to plan content on social media, respond to customer concerns, and deflect volume from their contact center. The results are amazing; AGL responds to 72% of inquiries within an hour and has a calculated ROI of over $1 million in just one year of partnership with Khoros.

Read ALG’s full story here.

Flexera: $1.3 million saved

Flexera, a company that specializes in IT, partnered with Khoros to build a community where their customers can go to find answers to their questions, instead of calling the contact center. By using their community to deflect inquiry volume away from agents, they have saved over $1.3 million in the last year alone.

Read Flexera’s full story here.

Viessmann: 78% organic growth

Viessmann, a global, family-run business, is one of the world’s top suppliers of climatization, industrial, and refrigeration systems. They use the Khoros Platform in their online community, contact center, and marketing organizations. With the advantage of Khoros, those organizations can communicate more effectively — both with one another and with their customers. Even more importantly, Khoros has helped them to grow organic visits to their community by 78%, schedule 70% of marketing content in advance, and improve average TAR by 31%.

Read Viessmann’s full story here.

Swisscom: 68% increase in agent efficiency

Swisscom, Switzerland’s leading telecommunications company, uses the Khoros Platform to develop their social media and customer care strategies. They deflect calls using Google’s Business Messages, create new marketing campaigns and opportunities on TikTok, and integrate other channels to create a more cohesive, seamless experience — all through Khoros. And with a 68% increase in agent efficiency, a 480% increase in positive sentiments, and a 57% increase in responses, they couldn’t be more pleased with the results.

Read Swisscom’s full story here.

Want to see results like AGL, Flexera, Viessmann, Swisscom, and so many others? Check out the Khoros Platform to see how it works, or request a demo to get started today.