While we advocate for business to provide multiple customer communication channels, we have put together the different types of communication channels.

• Live Chat

You can integrate a live chat application on your website through which visitors can connect with your customer service agents and get answers to questions and queries immediately. Live chat has proved to be a preferred channel of secure unified communication because customers can engage with the company in real-time, and it is a better substitute for phone calls and waiting in line for a customer agent to be free. Customer service agents can even attend to multiple customers at a time.

• Ticketing

The ticketing platform is one that the customer submits their requests or complaints through an online form or their email address, and your customer support agents receive these complaints and respond later. Every request submitted is handled as a ticket for ease of tracking. Tickets create a trail for different support agents to process customers’ requests as the history of messages from a user is recorded. See here for companies that make use of the ticketing system of customer communication.

• Knowledge base

As your company gains more customers, you should start collecting data and knowledge on your customers to identify their common problems and the solutions to these problems. Over time, a lot of knowledge would have been gathered, and you can put these out for users to access whenever they want. Knowledge bases already have the complaint and the solutions; therefore, users do not need to escalate to the customer service department because they can find their solution by themselves. FAQ sections on companies’ websites are compiled using knowledge bases.

• Social Media

I don’t think it comes as any surprise that social media is on this list. Social Media has become a major customer engagement tool, and young customers seem to use it effectively. It is usually one of the fastest ways to get in contact with a customer and is becoming more and more common.