The race of digital communication tools continues, and the speed is increasing. While business owners compete for customer loyalty and customer service worries about the clash of dozens of tools they need to use daily, a fundamentally new approach in customer reach is entering the arena of digital communication trends.

Customer communication channels constantly evolve. The new ones--like visual search and voice technology--arise while the importance of the existing channels is changing dramatically. These innovations lead to drastic changes in digital communication strategies for sales and marketing teams of both large enterprises and SMEs. This article will help you figure out what's essential about the newest customer communication channels and how to use them in a way that gets you ahead of the competition.

The Where, What, and Why of Customer Communication Channels in 2021

Digital communication channels are all about the convenience for the target audience, their preferences, and readiness to interact with brands using this or that specific tool.

For example, predicting the popularity and success of chatbots is not a guess but an analysis of most users' behavior and the customer demand for instant availability. The reason is: customers expect you to be always online, and they prefer live chat to phone calls or emails in the initial stage. Responsiveness has become an even more critical trump card in the game as there appear more and more ways to achieve it.

Learn more about how Interactive Offline Communications Engage Customers.

Well, responsiveness and live chatting are about communication speed and making customer communication available round the clock. Other innovations like self-service or trigger-based communications are also gaining momentum as the technology provides more and more different opportunities to perform them.

As customer success defines businesses' competitiveness, the industry of customer success tools will thrive. Combined with analytics, communication, customer service, payments, and related platforms, the number of tools required by a new business to enter the market will keep growing. But the good news is, any company investing in customer reach, customer communications, and customer relationships will confidently expand its customer network.

6 Innovative Ways to Reach Your Customers in 2021

#1: Powering Chatbots by AI. Reducing the time employees spend answering frequently asked questions can save millions of dollars and ensure an increased conversion rate.

#2: Virtual assistants and SMS reminders. It is one of the most effective ways to engage patients in the healthcare industry and keep them informed about regular checkups. Other service-based industries are also quick in adopting this method to generate recurring sales.

#3: Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. As L'oreal proved, an interactive fitting is one of the best shopping stimulants.

#4: Direct mail marketing also offers promising innovations like trigger-based printing and shipping flow automation or address verification tools to eliminate wrong shipments.

#5: Gamification: the experience of Semrush shows that helping the customers stay up to date with the products is highly beneficial.

‍#6: Voice technologyand voice-activated technology are cutting-edge communication channels, and their increasing popularity among consumers is a signal for businesses.

Technology for Innovative Omnichannel Strategies

Omnichannel marketing keeps its immense popularity among marketers as its goal is to create a seamless and continuous consumer experience. For efficient performance, all the marketing instruments must be connected and synchronized. The channels themselves change and evolve, but the main factors of the successful omnichannel digital communication strategy remain:

• Convenience is a central requirement for a satisfying customer experience,
• Consistency: no matter how many people, processes, and tools are involved in creating an omnichannel environment, all of them are parts of the same system,
• Relevance: the interactions should be localized and personalized enough to build strong relationships,
• Usefulness for a customer: for higher ROI and increased customer loyalty,
• Agility ensures timely adoption of additional tools for analytics, performance, or other needs as they arise. Flexibility is always the biggest challenge as marketers constantly adapt the system to customer behavior or market changes.  
  

Connected tools and well-thought customer communications drive value in customer reach campaigns and impact the conversion rate.

How Amazon Prime Enhanced Their Omnichannel Strategy with Voice Technology

With its mission to be "Earth's most customer-centric company," Amazon made its omnichannel strategies an excellent example of consistency in customer communications.

Their two fundamental principles of success are focus on customer experience and integrating marketing channels into the backend to satisfy customers' needs in whichever channel they want.

So, when voice technology and voice-activated technology entered the customer communications market, Amazon presented the smart speakers with personal assistant technology and integrated the voice channel into reaching the customers. After the failed attempt with the Fire Phone, this innovation was risky, but it met the highest expectations.

The Amazon Echo speaker line led to Alexa, another voice technology, continuing the efforts to grow the newly established customer communications channel.

Alexa's capabilities impacted Amazon's strategy in two ways:

1. Letting manufacturers use Alexa's capabilities for their hardware,
2. Investing in other form factors.
   

Once people choose Alexa, they become more likely to buy more and more connected devices for their smart home ecosystem. This provides a logical chain of multiple repeat sales. Thus, more than 73% of customers return, creating a geometric progression of the customer network.

What’s in the Future for Customer Communications?

As the future of customer communications is multi-channel, implementing efficient digital communication strategies and integrating innovative customer communication tools is a must.

But the more innovative customer communication channels you need to incorporate in your omnichannel system, the more carefully you should choose the tools. Fast, simple, and seamless integration with your internal systems and your CRM is a must, along with data encryption for security and compliance.

Wondering about other essential features for a high-quality customer reach enablement platform? Contact us for a demo.