Chapter 2

Consistently reach users on their preferred channels

The most valuable business real estate is on a customer’s phone. It’s where users are, where they do business, where they communicate with their family, and where they connect with the world. It is also where brands have the biggest potential to build trust. 

As referenced above, humanity, transparency, capability and reliability are the four components needed for trust. Brands that build omnichannel communication strategies grounded with these principles will successfully win new customers and retain existing customers.

Let’s address how to effectively embed these in various channels: Voice, SMS, Email, and Video. 

How to get customer trust through an omnichannel.

Show how you care with voice calls

A customer messaging with her favorite online business.

Even as the world becomes more and more digital, voice calls remain the number one customer service communication channel. According to the Deloitte Digital: Close the Trust Gap Report, 67% of consumers rank “issues resolved quickly” as the most important factor in making it easy to do business with a brand. 

 Voice calls offer the immediacy users want from companies when facing urgent issues. Additionally, it is an incredibly personal channel where brands can show empathy, efficiency, and competence to their customers.

But voice calls are also a landmine for phony, fraudulent activity. To protect your brand and instill confidence that customers are actually speaking to your company, there are a few steps brands can take:

  1. Register for SHAKEN/STIR

  2. Add CNAM to your phone numbers

  3. Register phone numbers with FreeCallerRegistry.com

In addition, it’s critical that your provider can provide excellent connectivity, with access to global carriers, indefinite scaling, and private connections to the cloud. To customize the customer experience, it’s important to adopt a solution that allows for a wide array of features that customers will appreciate.

A customer’s data.

Demonstrate your brand’s intent with SMS

Illustration of communication between a support agent and two users through WhatsApp, SMS and Messenger.

For businesses to stay competitive and improve user engagement, adding a messaging channel is essential to their communication strategy. Studies show that it is a high engagement channel, with a 98% open rate and a 45% response rate. Plus, 90% of users will read their messages within three minutes of delivery, making it the perfect medium for asking users to take immediate action.

Messaging not only provides a human touchpoint but also establishes transparency in how brands handle user data. By following best practices, companies exhibit both customer consent and compliance with regulations. 

But with SMS, it is also crucial companies ensure messages actually make it to their customers. This is where deliverability becomes a pivotal part of SMS strategy. Deliverability is the percentage of messages that reach the intended recipient and in SMS, it is critical for customer engagement. 

There are several factors that impact deliverability, including: 

  1. Filtering

  2. Respect for the customer’s preferences

  3. Carrier’s acceptable use policies

  4. Compliance with regulations

  5. Selecting a high quality provider

Carriers monitor SMS engagement and performance and will filter out messages for a number of reasons. If enough users are opting out of messages, marking them as spam, not reading and immediately deleting, or if error rates are high, carriers will filter messages or worse, they will shut down your phone number.

Pamphlet image showing how to increase deliverability by using different business numbers and channels to connect with your customers.

Panera Bread extends contactless services with SMS messaging

  • SMS enabled at 2,000+ locations to enhance customer engagement

  • 49% of sales through digital channels (Q1 2022)

“Implementing Twilio was an easy lift from our perspective. We were able to realize our vision for improved customer experience very quickly"

Raj Anbalagan
SVP OF Digital Technology and innovation, Panera

In response to the pandemic, Panera Bread was able to roll out curbside pickup across the country in only two weeks, giving guests a safer option through its mobile app when they needed it most. Geofencing is a location-based service that triggers an action when a device enters a virtual geographic boundary. It is deployed across all locations, so the cafe is notified when guests arrive for curbside pickup, and the associate brings their order to them. Cafe associates can focus more on their guests, both in store and curbside, because of the simplified process.

 However, only a smaller percentage of guests had the mobile app installed with permissions enabled to allow geofencing to function. Panera Bread wanted to expand this great frictionless experience to as many of their customers as possible. They also wanted to move beyond one-way push notifications to two-way communication between guests and cafe team members to eliminate any barriers in exceeding guest expectations. 

The need to improve the customer experience with direct communications prompted Panera Bread to look to SMS as a seamless, consistent channel of communication across website and mobile app orders. Twilio’s Programmable Messaging was cross-functionally vetted by the technology, business, and digital experience groups, who agreed to adopt it quickly.

Build trusted relationships with email

Like with SMS, major components of trust can be delivered through a brand’s email strategy.  Email can communicate a brand’s transparency much like SMS, but it can also deliver capability and reliability (which signal brand competence.) 

Also, when it comes to ROI, email has a proven return on investment of $36 for every dollar spent making it a cost-effective channel where brands can build user retention and loyalty.

To foster trust through email, first verify that users are receiving your messages. After all, if users aren’t–brands are not achieving their goals. And if users are marking email as spam, this points to larger issues in the overall strategy.

How to build trusted relationships with email.

Key areas for successful email deliverability

  • Keep in compliance - CAN-SPAM requires that emails include a way for users to unsubscribe from messages. Remember, a few unsubscribes are better than users marking emails as spam. Or worse, violating CAN-SPAM, which has serious monetary penalties. Besides CAN-SPAM, other regulations like GDPR have stipulations around using and storing personal data. GDPR applies to any brand that collects, stores, or uses data of EU residents. Read more about GDPR requirements for email here.
  • Maintain your email reputation - Volume of email, email content, and the frequency of send all affect your email reputation. Implement DMARC, which helps protect brands by preventing unauthenticated parties from sending emails from their domain.
  • Target and personalize your emails - Brands deliver better and more relevant content when they consider the recipient uniquely. Ask consumers their email preferences, what they’d like to receive, how often they’d like to receive messages, and other preferences that help ensure your delivering value. Just like in SMS, differentiating sender addresses is a best practice, so transactional emails come from a different email address than marketing emails.
  • Implement BIMI - BIMI is an email standard that can help your brand stand out from the crowd(ed inbox). It ienables the use of brand-controlled logos within supporting email clients. BIMI leverages the work an organization has put into deploying DMARC protection by bringing brand logos into the customer’s inbox.

Build a human connection with video

Brands adopt video as an emerging channel to create frictionless and optimized customer engagements. Video solidifies human connections with customers. Consumers want to feel authentically connected (even in our digital world) and video is one of the best ways to achieve that. 

Afterall, video is incredibly personal – establishing a real, face-to-face connection with a human that represents your company. This is an optimal channel for relationship-building and creating extended, immersive brand experiences, which can grow customer loyalty.  

That is why video quality is so important when building a virtual experience. And for brands that want to personalize the user experience, Twilio Video adds a layer of immersive customization that sets them apart from the competition.

A user’s data.

Indeed Makes Interviewing a Breeze with Twilio Video

During the pandemic, Indeed found that it needed to modernize its digital channels with flexible features, browser optimized video conferencing, and something that was easy to use. 

Twilio’s APIs gave Indeed’s developers the freedom to customize every aspect of their solution to include recruiting-specific functions and visualizations. Indeed’s platform makes creative use of Twilio’s Conversations, Messaging, Voice and Video APIs - for a better candidate experience.

When candidates enter the interview, they are placed in a virtual lobby and queueing system that allows the interviewer to see who’s present. If the candidate has to wait, they can request the system to text them once the interviewer is ready. And if the internet connection is shaky, the candidate can use the click-to-call function as an alternative channel.

Indeed’s use of an omnichannel strategy clearly outlines how their platform optimizes both the interviewer and candidate experiences. It’s thoughtful uses of digital channels like this that drive customer loyalty and trust.

Consider these best practices for a video strategy

  • Build embedded, branded video experiences

  • Leverage reporting like Video Insights to understand and optimize video performance

    Explore video insights

  • Activate noise cancellation to isolate background noise in real time

    Learn about noise cancellation

  • Implement virtual backgrounds to provide a cohesive (and fun) video experience

Table of contents