Professional Diploma in Omnichannel Sales&Service Management

Hello everyone and welcome to the online-course created for any current or potential corporate managers from junior to executive level, that will make you stand out from the others.

this course might become your first step to acquire skill set, knowledges and maybe even a whole new profession, that is appearing right now. Learning it today, gives you advantages tomorrow!

I’m talking about digital transformation. In terms of customer communications in basically any meduim or big enterprises. And for small businesses, the most succesfull ones, they are already doing it in a modern way from the first day.

this transformation - it is a moving away from old way of communications, like phone calls, email, or even fax - to new way - whatsapp, facebook messenger, instagram direct messages, telegram - any messaging apps that people are using in their everyday life. And now they are starting to usу it to talk to businesses. To chat with an online store, with a bank, medical clinic - with any organization out there.

And here lies the opportunity!

All of these companies need employees or contractors who understand how to make this shift, this transition. New channels on the one hand bring a lot of new possibilities, such as chatbots and artificial intelligence, and on the other hand, require a rebuilding of current business workflows.

For example agent’s KPI in a contact centre based on whatsapp, is very different from a voice-based CC. And somebody need to know how to deal with it.

But the contact center is not the only place where apps like whatsapp are taking over. It affects pretty much every customer related departpent: sales, marketing and loyalty, support, customer experience, automation and online services.

So, Whether you plan to tie your career or business entirely to this feild, this knowledge will help you achieve your professional goals in a variety of ways. Because communication - is the essential part of business.

I started this journey seven years ago, when it was hardly even existed. Since then, I have worked with some of the world's biggest clients, such as Societe Generale, British american tobacco and others. Now I’m a founder of a startup called brandy.im.

I invite you to my course where you will learn the basics about communications of the future. Welcome!

Welcome to our first video.

Before we start I want to give a quick intro of myself and also let’s take a look on the course plan.

So without further ado, here is what we will discuss

The course consists of 2 parts:

In a first one, everything down lesson 4, we are talking about the key benefits for business in general.

And then learning the basics of chatbots and AI.

The second part is becoming more specific.

We will see how exactly it implies to different departments. Discuss business application of particular messaging channels.

And with all of that we are getting ready to meet the main framework –

of ideal customer journey in modern channels. Which will be useful tool to any of your further projects.

And briefly about me.

You can call me Slava. For a last 7 years I’ve been running chat platform startup. For these years we made a lot of stuff, worked with some worldwide clients.

We have become official provider of apple messages for business. Not sure if this is my most significant achievement, but personally, the most pleasant one. A chance to work directly with apple team is really cool

and I have been honoured to become one of the business experts at the Retail banking school, where we are right now.

Feel free to connect or ask me anything on linkedin.

And, let’s jump in!

On our 1st lesson I want to talk about the main question?

Is it even important?

Basically we need to understand

– will it benefit us,

how much effort should we take,

will it make any difference after all?

I would say that the main reason, why it is a big thing,

is the transformation happening right now: a gloabal trend of switching from voice to text-based conversations

I have the statistics with the amount of users for the top platforms like whatsapp or telegram, with enormous 2 billion users.

But actually, you don’t even need this slide because we all use it everyday.

We chat with our friends, colleagues all the time. I even message something to my wife chilling next room. So why can’t I chat with the bank, or with delivery service, or any other business?

Such imbalance simply can not hold forever. And it doesn’t

We’ve seen an explosive growth in text conversions in companies who started using it

One of our client, a big online store, has this huge rise of whataspp conversations taking over the incoming phone calls in a last about 3 years. From 5 to 50 percents of all inbound customer’s requests.

Sure, it vary from country to country, industry to industry, but the trend is undeniable

Because people just love it. It’s comfortable.

Remember a last time you were waiting on the line, or repeat yourself few times to another agent. It’s just annoying, we all know how it feels.

Texting is free of these problems: you can see the whole message at once, no need to listen it for a minute. Your question can be simple forwarded to the right agent, who will be able to work on that immediately, not asking you once again.

For some people it’s just less stressful to send a message than to call. For example, they might be tired of sticky sales people pushing too much.

You can chat when it’s easy you. Start chat in the morning and continue few hours later, let say in the coffeeshop

And not to say that we can send images, links, videos - just imaging how does it level up the whole customer experience?

OK - it’s good for the customers. But what about business? Does it need it?

Depending on task, we can talk about different benefits. But most common are

first – The Customer satisfation rate - in text channels in general it goes up. Reasons we just discussed

the second - automation rate. With help of a conversational AI it is possible to automate up to 70% of all inquires. Maybe even higher. Without dropping CSAT which is highly important.

And of course - new business opportunities. Payments, advertising, promotions - messaging apps constantly develop new features for business.

So how will I answer this question?

Yes.

But only if done right. And here is the tricky part. As great as text-based user experience can be, it can also be completely awful. Why?

Because while for your customer it’s just a simple chat, for you as a business it is a real challenge. You need to respond with the right person, the right department, the right chatbot, etc etc.

If departments don’t work in a smooth workflow, it might become a nightmare. Imagine marketer who wants to send a new promotion, while customer has an open support ticket with urgent crucial incident in progress.

So I hope this online course will be a good start on mastering this new world of digital communications and happier customers

Introduction to the world of chatbots

Text conversations, despite being pretty similar to regular voice dialogs, have one huge new thing. It’s obviously chatbots. Yes, you can say that there are plenty of voice robots and ivr nowadays. but chatbots are much more than that

when we are talking of chatbots, most people think about AI. Some super complex algorithm, talking like humans, knowing everything.. or nothing. But actually chatbots started a bit before that. To understand them we need to take a step back. To see where and how chatbots operates.

now on the slide you can see some screenshots from whatsapp. look closely and you’ll see, that it’s not regular conversation. You see buttons, menus, in another words - usual mobile app interface.

All the modern massaging apps, like whatsapp, telegram, facebook or instagram - all of them support some kind of buttons or other interface components, which allow user to easily navigate through the bot. Because it’s way more comfortable to just tap a button, than to type every command

We even came up with a new name for this type of chatbots - a chat application, chat-apps. Mobile applications you need to install on your phone. And chat-apps are already there, you just need to send a message.

They can be used for tons of tasks. Any type of online service, promotions, geo services, payments etc etc. And only above that, you can add AI if you need that kind of automation. But many chatbots successfully works without it.

So here are 4 types of chatbots, that we want to specify

the basic one - chatapp

second - chat-center management bots

integrational bots

and finally artificial intelligence bots

Chatapps we’ve already discussed (but we will dive deeper in the second part of the course)

lets go to Chat-center management bots

This type of bots are neccessary for a good customer experience with company’s contact center. Why?

Imagine you send a message to an online store, asking something about their product. You send it and nothing happens for a munite, two, five. And you just don’t know will they answer you and when. And you just go to another website. If simple chatbot will answer you immidiately, saying that company is working, everything is ok, live agent is about to finish his last conversations and will get back to you in 10 min max, you most likely will wait for it, knowing that’s all ok.

And there are dozens situations, where the simplest bots will improve experience a lot!

For a business there are also good applications, for example NPS surveys - bot that will ask you to give a feedback, rate an experience. Or chatbots, that just monitors how fast live agents reply, or do they use correct words and so on.

We will get back to this topic in more details in the second part of the course also.

Ok, next is the “integrational bots”

It may sound a bit compex, but we don’t need to get in technical staff here. It’s just important to undertsand, that really useful chatbots usually don’t work isolated. They need to exchange the data with other company’s systems. Keep that in mind when designing your chatbots scenarious

Quick example: e-commerce store chatbot. Client asks for his order status. Chatbot must me capable to send a request to e-commerce platform and recieive an answer.

And last but not least: AI bots.

But this topic deserve it’s own lesson!

Lets move to it!

On our third lesson we will talk about AI chatbots, that doesn’t make clients angry.

Hardly anyone likes to chat with a virtual assistant nowadays. The reason why is on this picture. AI bots usually stupid. Why, because they try to pretend to be human. But the current level of technology is not there yet.

And companies will not stop to make this bots, because they are just to profitable. So lets make world a bit better place and find out what to do with it.

So, to create bots, that doesn’t annoy your clients, we need to clearly understand what they can and cannot do.

Ok, commercially available AI technologies are capable to

Recognise the clients intent. What does it mean. It can compare user’s message to one of the topic, that was previously uploaded to this AI. So we need to write down the most common topics, and for every topic, we need to add at least few examples, how users can ask for it. After that AI magic will do the rest.

second - it can extract some parameters from user’s massage. To use it in a following chatbot or chatapp process

and yes, it can learn. but not by itself. Somebody need to show the AI, where it was wrong or right.

Ok, what they can’t do

Create their own answers. Yes, there are some cutting edge technologies like GPT-3, but it’s really far from simple commercial application for regular businesses.

Next - the most dissapointing - they cant support a conversation. They can answer to some of your questions, but if you ask a follow-up question, it will not relate it to a previous one by itself. It’s possible, but only with manual adjustment by the people who developed it.

And that takes us to the last one point - they cannot teach by themselfes. However we have some hacks, but in general they are not capable to do that.

Our approach follows this rule: the AI identifies the topic and launches the chat app.

user doesn’t need to continue the dialogue with words, which might be misunderstood. user can simply tap a button and solve their problem.

If the AI finds multiple topics with a >90% recognition rate, it will offer all the scenarios it finds and the client can select the appropriate one with the tap of a button.

Lets talk about how can modern business use the messaging apps

First, let's look at the main ways in which companies are currently communicating

It’s phone comunications, emails (not only for conversations, but also for subscriptions. or transaction messages)

website and mobile apps - it’s also quite interactive channels nowadays. The days when a website was nothing more than a business card a gone long ago

and advertising. Right now it’s mostly a oneway communication channels, but messaging apps can change it too

And you can see, that this tools or methods used by many departments:

sales, marketing, customer experience, automation and online service developers. Lets dive into it

1st one - customer support. usually everything starts from here.

Ok, things seems to be easy, when you are running small local business, you have one whatsapp number in your office and users text you occasionally. But what to do, if you have thousands of messages everyday

For that purpose there are solutions like my startup. It’s a multi-channel chat platform, that combines different channels and dialogs from it, and route it to any number of support agents, sales people or anybody in company.

it has a lot of tools for live agents, for supervisors, it should have some chat-center management bots, I mentioned them on lesson two.

I have a good example of a least obvious case for these bots. Nobody is thinking of that, when starting chat-centers. When your agent have finished a conversation with a client, he need to mark it as a finished one. The logic here, is when the client will have a new question, let say after few weeks, they will send as a new message. When that happens, the dialogs routing logic of a chat platform, should find a free live agent to answer.

But, what if agent marked a conversation as finished, and after 2 minutes client just send - thanks and good by message. If we follows the logic, this new message will be Interpreted by the platform as a new conversation. Platfrom will find a new free live agents, who will receive this “thank you, by’ message. Obvuiosly it’s not how it should work. So we came up with the “pre-closed” chatbot logic. When agent marks the dialog as finished, it pre-closing bot activates. It waits for a let say one hour. ANd if it’s nothing there, the bot mark a dialog as a completly finished. But if user send a new message, bot calls for the agent who already worked with this user.

Next. Sales.

All of that can be done not only in customer support, but also in sales department. Sales people can get the same chat workplace and sell right within a conversation. What can help them to do it,

As you can see on the slide, there are some product catalogs, fancy product cards, prices.

(next slide) Here we can see a paymentы

and here are the company descriptions

All of these features are already available on most apps like whatsapp. And basically turning it into a fully loaded e-commerce solution. Actually we have a clients, who even have not got a website anymore, and just use instagram and whatsapp for their online sales.

All of that together leads to a full scale e-commerce assistant. With huge automation potential. From our experience AI by it’s own can automate about 20 percents, and if we add chatapps - there are even more automation. Together up to 70 percents

Ok, next big field of actions - is marketing, adverstising, customer relationship and loyalty management

Lets start with ads. There are many ways to promote your company with messaging apps:

Consider target ads in social networks

or native ads in a popular accounts and channels. For example there are channels in telegram with millions subscribers, and you can buy a promotional post there.

How does it look like. I have a good example - on the screen you can see an instagram stories with call to action - send me “yes” and recieve a coupon code. This type of ads have a great conversion rates.

Or a bit more old fashioned - adds in a facebook that can lead you to starting a conversation in the messenger. You don’t leave the social network. so this platform like this types of ads a lot.

when user start conversation, promo bot can navigate them through the funnel. It will ask questions, sent some atractive images and can even close the deal. Or connect saleperson to chat for a help

Next. Customer engagement

If you are a consumer brand, let say some beauty products, you also can take advantage of messaging apps. By building relationship with your customers directly.

You need just to offer them to have a chat with you. One of the easiest way - place a QR cod on you product package or insert a flyer, that leads your customer to a conversation with a bot.

It’s a great way to introduce your other products, or just to motivate to buy it one more time. You can offer some promo code or any other special offering.

The similar approach can be used for any retailers. You can place a QR code near the checkout point so your customers would be able to quicky sing in in your loaylty program.

It’s working quite good, because it’s convinient and fast. No need to download an app, or to have another plastic card.

And if your are a consumer brand, but you produce some complex products. Electronics, electric bikes, tools, home applience - anything, where your customer could have some question on how to setup things, or how to fix any promblems, chatbots also can help there

simple put all of your guides, step by step manuals, and other usefull informations to a chatbot, and your customers will have 24 7 personall assistant.

So, as you can see, there are a lot of ways how messaging apps can enchance different workflows. Now let’s move to a lesson about particular messaging apps

Ok, welcome to the most boring part of our course. We need to cover popular messaging apps, discuss its pros and cons, and major aspects of them.

Lets start with whatsapp - most popular one, at least right now.

If you want to use it in business, you have to options - they called whatsapp business application, and whatsapp business api

application made for small businesses. its free. and it means exaclty what it is - an mobile app. So you still have most of the whatsapp features, mentioned before. But you an reply to your customers just from one phone or from one web interface. So it works only for a small companies

but even more important, you can’t initiate conversation with user. and you can’t connect it to your other systmems, for example to CRM or to e-commerce platform.

For that purpose whatsapp wants you to use their Business API. API precisly means the posibility to connect it to other systems automaticly

But this is a paid channel with quite complex pricing models.

they define two types of conversations - initiated by user, and by business. Then all the messages, sent and recieved within a 24 hours alloceted to this session, and whatsapp charge you for the nubmer of sessions. Price depends on region, and type of conversation

Business initated conversation is actually a key feature, because it allows business easily engage customers. So they ready to pay for that.

You can’t send anything you want though. Every message you want to sent to initaite conversataion, must follows the specific and preaproved template by whatsapp. It’s an automatical moderation, so the whole process is not that complicated eventually.

And the last thing to consider - you can’t get business account from whatsapp directly. You need to get it from an official provider. Whatsapp has a lot of them. Problem here is that every provider has it’s own pricing, which is added to the whatsapp pricing. And it can be a real nightmare to compare the final pricing between these providers.

The next one is facebook messenger

This channel is mostly free. So it’s good to have it.

Hovewer there are some limitations. First one - you can not initaite conversation if user havn’t sent you a message first. There are some exceptions with facebook ads, but in general you cant initate it

Second - there is a time window, during which you must to answer. After it closed, you cannot write anymore

the rules depends in the specific type of messages. You need to mark them at the bot setting up process. Types are on the slide

And Instagram direct. Recently they merged it with facebook messegner platform, so rigth now they are basically the same channels.

But I strongly believe that instagram direct is going to be much more popular than facebook messenger, because of instagram features. Like starting conversation from stories. And overall instagram is highly commercially used by a lot of businesses.

So keep an eye on this channel! Despite that it have been with as for a long time, it’s only been a year, as it became possible to connect it to a chat platform and business systems. So we exepcet a huge rise of this channel in comming years!

And we moving on to telegram, viber, and other apps

Telegram

this one is by any means the most technically advanced app. So for a really complex chatbots - it’s a definitely a way to go.

audience is not that big right now, but it’s growing, and there are regions where telegram is extremely popular.

in terms of ads rigth now the most popular way is a native promotional posts on popular telegram channels. But messenger also working on their own ads platform

Major cons here - is total restriction on business initiated conversations.

But just look where it is now in terms of chatbots. Super facny beatuful chatbots opportunites for just infinite applications

Viber

Also a channel with some regional peaks - in some countries it’s very popular. so check your geo before starting.

this guys have strong business focus. a lot of oportunities from ads to ecommerce.

channel is mostly free, but they will charge outgoing messages or something else. Actually I put as a cons their pretty unstable pricing - back in a days it was changing to often.

But overall - the channel gives a lot of oportunities.

Apple messages for business

As I meantioned in the intro, my company is the official provider of this channel which i’m super proud of. it is a relatively new channel, but it is not yet very well known.

Key thing here - you can have a branded business account in a messages app, which is available by default on every apple device. And there are 1.8 billion active apple devices right now.

It really stands-out from other messaging apps, becouse it’s part of an ios, of operating system. So it’s deeply integrated with all of apple’s features. Apple pay, maps, AR. And the interface of this channel follows all the apples guidlines. SO it looks really good.

The channel is free by apple. But every provider might have some extra prices. Consider that too.

For the cons - i’d say that the only one - is that it might take some time and efforts to set channel up. Can take up to a month easily. But we or any other provider would love to help with that.

really great channel

And wechat. Actually I have nothing to tell about it, because for my career we have almost no experince with it. But it is the app, where it all statred. If wasn’t the telegram who invented chatbots. In china they use wechat in enormouse ammount of ways in everyday life. And other western messaging apps was inspired by them in some way.

So if you are going to dive deep in this conversatinal topic, you definitely shoul keep an eye on wechat to.

may just one technical thing that I will point out - wechat have 2 different entities - for china and for the rest of the world. and you need to develop separete bots, separate accounts for them. And to register a mainland chinise business account, you need to have physical address there

Live chat - the most used text channel by businesses right now. And for a good reason - it’s super convinient to have a chat directly on the website. And moreover - everything we were talking about before also applies to livechat.

chatbots, AI, everything. Except one. You can not build up and grow a client base here. Thats the only thing where livechat really loses to messaging apps

But we have solution even to that. Livechat could be a great entrypoint for your messaging channels

SImple offer to a user to jump in whatsapp, viber, telegram or any other app, and they might easily agree to do that.

Quick example. Client asks some question about the product, you answer in a live chat, but in the end you, or a chatbot, offer to click on a link and start conversation in a preferable messenger, to start the conversation, and maybe you can even offer some discount coupon for this transition.

With this approach you can without no extra costs convert you web visitors to actual client base, who are in direct contact with you brand.

Lets take a look on some examples of cool live chat, that my company have made

Here is the British american tobacco website. We made this chatbot, where user can pick a prodcut, find where to buy one or talk to a support agent

It is a big sport-goods retailer. Here user can purchase a gift card, sign up to loyalty program, manage the order and also have a support from an agent

And societe generale - we participate in the mortgage preaproval chatbot in the live chat widget

User could use it to fullfil the big survey form. There was cooll results - first tests have shown that it’s 50% higher conversion rate compare to regular web form on the website.

I guess it’s related to the fact that conversation in the chat is more close to real conversation, and that’s why more comfortable, that a routing fulfulling a huge form.

One cool feature that live chat has - an active invitations to the conversation. But you need to use it wisely. What do I mean. Look at the slide. What’s wrong here?

In general, all is fine. it will work for some users. But if we make one step forward to user’s head, we will see that they already know that you are there ready to talk. And they will start a chat anyway if they initially was going to. And will not, if they wasn’t

But, if a chatbot will offer to start a chat, offering some infromation or asking something specific, users will goes for that, because there is something new, and there is no obligation, and you are not bothering and live agents.

Combine it with a transition to messaging apps mechanics - and you get even more results in tems of client base growth.

see you on a next lesson

Congratulations! You make your way through to the end of the course.

Our last topic will summarise everything we’ve learnt. And wrap it up in a single framework, that you can use to design any business communications in modern channels across your customer’s journey

Lets start with the easy example and then move to the framework

Meet James!

He is your potential customer, and he’s looking for a coffee machine

He is on your website and livechat proactivly invite him to a conversation.

James see that it’s offering dicsount coupon and also have some info about types of coffee makers, so he jumps in

after a quick conversation with the bot, he is offered to save the dialog and move to messaging apps.

there he have some assist from a sales person, and they close the deal. James is paying by the link sent within a chat.

Next day order have been shipped, and special chatbot notifies James in that same conversation.

Few days later another bot asks for a feedback. And James happily provide it, because he had an awesome experience

After a month, company’s marketer decided to expand client base and create a campaigne called “invite a friend”. He is sending a message to all customers, saying that if they will simple forward this message to a friend, who might be interested in coffee, they both will receive a present.

All of those different activities performed by different people from company side, but for James it’s just a smooth seamless chat with a brand, that works perfectly and match all his needs.

that how it should be done.

Now take a look on this diagram

You can see a separate stages of communication process. From the first start of a dialog, to the repeated sales at the end.

Try this on your particular business. select the most suitable scenarious for every stage from what we have learned. And you will get a good plan for a digital transormation in your company!

I hope this course was useful for you!

We are going to create more detailed courses for specific topics. Also we can provide an offline trainings about digital channels designed specially for your company. And of course I’m inviting you to try our chat platrom called brandy. It capable to do many of things from this course.

Feel free to connect with me on linkedin

or Ask me any question

check out brandy. im - it’s website of our product.

And thank you once again for being with me on this course!