Creating an omnichannel customer journey on a global scale can be challenging. Not only do you have to worry about a wide array of country-specific taxation and regulations, but customer expectations can vary greatly from country to country.

If a Japanese customer is dissatisfied with their phone support experience, they can and will request in-person support to visit their office—and usually the request is satisfied. Just imagine the increase to your support budgets if this was expected in North America!

Since this support tactic isn’t financially feasible for most of the world, many companies seek innovative technology to streamline their support operations and increase efficiency, especially in the B2B (business-to-business) world.

Here are a few ways one of these technologies, customer support software, is leveraged by businesses around the world to have a positive impact on the omnichannel customer journey.

Utilize an omnichannel ticketing solution. This is arguably the best way to use customer support software not only to save money but also increase customer satisfaction. Through an omnichannel ticketing solution, it’s easy to reduce information redundancy and requests. For example, if a customer initiates a live chat but has to end the dialogue abruptly before their issue is resolved, the chat conversation can be converted to a ticket and an agent can follow up via email once they have the correct response to their issue. Likewise if they call the support line later, all the information from previous chat and email conversations are available in one central system.

Unite global support staff to improve operations. Especially for global teams, collaboration can be tough sometimes. With different time zones there are often small windows of time each day to communicate important customer details between agents. This is where collaborative customer support software can really help. Not only can you leave private actions on tickets that are only seen by agents, but you can communicate in other ways internally. One of my favorite examples is if a company supports customers in both Australia and New Zealand. They can create a customer alert on a profile stating which country that specific customer prefers their support agent to be from. This personalization ensures a more positive support experience during the customer journey.

Create integrations to work together across areas. Just because one technology solution works well in one country doesn’t mean it will be a good fit somewhere else. In fact, if you look at some of the leading software companies around the world their geographic dominance can vary significantly by region. With this said, it’s important to choose support software that integrates well with other software to educate employees at a global scale and throughout key departments. Sales should be able to see what support is doing so they aren’t pushing new products onto customers that are unhappy and can focus promotional efforts on satisfied customers.

Build an online customer support presence. This is a solution where some B2B companies really lag behind their B2C counterparts. Through the right customer support software solution, companies are able to create a global online customer support hub that allows their customers to track their tickets, look up information to solve their own problems, and much more. In certain parts of the world some customers actually prefer to find their own solution to their problems on their own time so it’s important to give customers that option. We are seeing lots of companies launch a customer support hub or consolidate their online support solutions into one place for the very first time. It really is a strong value add to the support aspect of the customer journey.

There are several ways that customer support software positively impacts the customer journey. In an omnichannel world, it’s important to have a conversation that can bridge communication channels through both software and integrations because it makes an organization smarter about their operation and their customers. This knowledge will not only enable companies to provide better support today but it also will assist in creating a blueprint for streamlining the customer journey in the future.

Robert C. Johnson is the co-founder and CEO of TeamSupport.com, a cloud-based, B2B software application built to help customer-facing support teams serve clients better through stronger collaboration, superior teamwork, and faster issue resolution.