5 Features to Consider When Choosing an Omnichannel Messaging Platform for E-commerce

How to choose the best communication platform for online trade.

An omnichannel messaging platform is a tool that helps businesses or entrepreneurs deliver seamless, continuing conversations across all messengers and social media: offering a multichannel approach to sales, marketing, and support.

E-commerce is a highly competitive business niche wherein customers are already spoiled with so many options. If you are aiming to win accounts and customers while retaining the same, be sure to take an omnichannel strategy and the right platform seriously.

A solid omnichannel messaging platform can transform your online business into a more cost-efficient venture by establishing customer-based communications with the target market via a variety of channels and providing clients with a consistent, seamless experience.

A messaging platform suitable for e-commerce should set out to improve the customer experience of any internet company, equipping both sales and customer support teams with tools to build interactive messaging experiences to employ modern social media and go beyond old-fashioned email and pricey SMS.

When choosing a solution to communicate with their shoppers on a consistent, seamless basis, e-commerce businesses should consider the following features:

1. A list of communication channels and corresponding features

You should always prioritize your user experience. Nowadays, online shoppers like to select from a range of channels to engage with a brand. When communicating with e-commerce companies, specifically, customers use chatbots and social media apps such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. You’ll also want to zero in on channels your audience spends the most time on, shortlisting messaging platforms that empower you to reach your customers wherever they are—while ensuring you can add or remove channels as your audience needs grow and evolve.

2. Important customer data for your web store

An award-winning e-commerce company must be everywhere its customers are. This requires an online store to pinpoint a messaging platform that creates a single, unified customer profile complete with conversation history and context that moves from channel to channel—allowing customers to seamlessly switch between channels without resubmitting their mailing address or ticket number on multiple occasions as they’re bounced from specialist to specialist. Thus, seek out an end-to-end messaging platform that provides the best of both platform and CRM functions. Moreover, your team should enjoy the ability not only to share but to distribute dialogues with buyers, assign tasks, set reminders, and leverage the power of automation such as auto-replies and templates—fostering faster, smoother workflows.

3. Your sales and support team experience

Before purchasing a platform, check to ensure your team can effectively use said tool to manage conversations. Look for a friendly user interface to process inquiries, generate sales, and solve customer issues in the form of dialogues. Your users should onboard a new communication solution to effectively leverage it in only a few days, meaning that an easy-to-use omnichannel messaging platform with an intuitive interface should top your list. As an e-commerce business manager, you should try the solution first before seeking feedback from your front-end specialists.

4. Integration of an omnichannel messaging platform into your existing business infrastructure

Any website must combine additional channels into its primary shopping environment. Hence, the best messaging platform is configurable to support any workflow, powerful enough to handle the most complex business needs, and flexible enough to scale at any pace. You must integrate the functionality of business messengers and social media within your current CRM or business application, and an omnichannel messaging platform must provide you with open API or pre-built integrations for this very purpose.

5. Competent and comprehensive support

Customer support is important not only for your online customers but for any teams in contact with those buyers as well. Hence, your e-commerce messaging platform is like the oil that keeps your car running smoothly; as soon as something goes wrong with your communications, the entire process can grind to a screeching halt. Competent technical support provided by an omnichannel platform must be accounted for as well. Top-notch CPaaS empowers your business by offering beneficial assistance and guidance in fulfilling sales, marketing, and support goals.

An omnichannel platform with these features can truly empower your online business to offer the smart, consistent omnichannel messaging experience your customers demand.

Boost sales and loyalty with Umnico

In addition to the aforementioned features, you should always check if the omnichannel messaging platform of your choice can support you in fulfilling your online shop's primary objectives: such as selling more inventory and retaining buyers.

Umnico helps to engage customers at multiple levels via one interface, using a broad combination of popular social media and instant messengers.

As a CPaaS that boasts customer relationship management functionality, Umnico ensures everyone across your business gains access to information on channels where clients reach out, along with other data needed to create a consistent, personalized experience.

Umnico offers a free functionality essential for small business matters, it also has a free trial period and complementary onboarding services, with the ability to test all communication platform features with no limits during the trial.

Recently, Umnico has also introduced communication automation functionality, based on GPT-4 chatbots. Having such a capability in your hands, you can easily raise the performance of your customer relations and decrease the workload of your help desk. Chatbots will allow you to fully automate the process of answering frequent customer questions and processing typical requests.

This omnichannel messaging solution offers several reliable integrations within the most popular CRM systems, along with a single API that supports over 25 messengers and social media channels—so you can successfully accomplish your communication goals.

Finally, as Umnico prioritizes the business success of its clients, it provides every e-commerce company with world-class technical support and guidance from a team of experts to ensure every subscriber fully maximizes platform capabilities.

Whether you’re just getting started with messaging or looking to scale your business, Umnico can help you in minimizing the risk of losing buyers while boosting store conversion rates and revenue.

See for yourself: try Umnico—an omnichannel messaging platform that drives sales and loyalty.

To sum up, it’s important to make the right choices when selecting a CPaaS and omnichannel messaging platform, as the right tool can immensely boost your performance while the wrong option can lead to adverse ramifications. There are a variety of such platforms on the market—each one boasting a unique set of features—meaning that as an e-commerce professional, you must review all communication capabilities, data management functions, and the overall onboarding experience before selecting a product. Your online store environment compatibilities and efficient levels of support should also influence your decision.

A communication platform such as Umnico may provide you with the important features required for e-commerce omnichannel sales and customer support. Sign up for a free trial to see omnichannel messaging benefits in action while enjoying complimentary guidance from the Umnico staff.

The content has been updated on December 1, 2023