10 Things To Remember While Creating An Omnichannel CX Strategy

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Consumerism has evolved to that level where providing a long lasting customer experience is the secret to success. Your business interacts with the customers on various levels through different channels like social media platforms, websites, google discover, etc. This enables you to increase your target audience reach and the revenue opportunities. 

Hence, you need to ensure your customers experience warmly and welcomingly with your business. For this you need an omnichannel experience, which simply helps you integrate different channels seamlessly and deliver a unified customer experience. Your goal here is to deliver the shoppers a consistent and smooth experience at every stage of their journey, regardless of which channel they are interacting with with your business.

But the real struggle for retailers and ecommerce players is building an effective omnichannel strategy. Typically, the customer needs vary between online and in-person shopping channels, and to ensure a sensible cohesion between the two can be a challenge.

Fortunately, with this article your dilemma will be resolved forever and you can easily strategize your omnichannel customer experience with a clear brand vision.

1. Know Your Target Customers

Communicating with your target customers is very important for a successful business strategy. You’re missing out on huge opportunities if you are not able to interact with your customers when they are interested or in need of help. 

For this, you need to list down the interaction channels where your target customers are most active. Then you need to familiarize yourself with those selected channels – whether it be social media, emails, live chat on youtube streaming, or anything similar. You should ask yourself –

  • How are the customers communicating on a channel?
  • How can you use this information to enhance your outreach to feel more native?
  • What are the customers’ quirky needs and how can you fit in those with a solution?

Reaching your customers is very essential for developing proper communication channels. You should have a handle on your customer’s preferred channels with consistent, reliable and engaging content to interact with them.

2. Ensure Convenience In Customer Service Model

With increasing digital ease to discover and search the information and solutions on their own, customers demand of service convenience grows immensely. If you want to remain in your customers’ good books, you need to have a seamless start-to-finish digital support for your customers.  

If your customers have a question on the weekend, do they have to wait for Monday to get your response? Or, do you have 24/7 live chat support to meet their weekend needs?

Moreover, you need to have a polished, and up-to-date knowledge base on your website to address your customer needs without them reaching out to your team.

3. Deliver Consistent Quality Experience

These days customers look for those brands which provide consistent quality experience. This practice builds trust within the customers and helps you build a loyal customer base for your brand. This is possible when you show consistency in your policies, processes, and actions from every channel that your customer touches. 

You should monitor and track if all of your policies, and actions with the customers are updated, reasonable, and carried out consistently across all the channels. You should avoid situations where customers face friction with return and exchange processes, which may reduce the reorder rate of your business. To craft these experiences, you should look into a team with proven track record in delivering digital experiences for enterprises.

4. Improvise Services Based On Customer Feedback

You should never hesitate or ignore perfecting the backend of your customer experience as it’s necessary to remember that they actually bought a product or service from your business and it is expected to experience quality customer service. 

You should strategize channels for collecting customer feedback and be proactive in addressing those issues and pain points. There are various methods through which you can achieve this – google forms, surveys, one-on-one customer calls, emails, etc. Once you solve the root of the customer issues, they will remember this and would stick to your brand for future purchases.

5. Design In-Person And Digital Personalization 

You are also aware of the fact that your business is not the only one in the market and it is now the consumers who choose the service and not the other way round. 

Therefore, to get an advantage over your competitors you need to prepare smart CX strategies and personalization is the most interactive one. A luxury brand, Nordstorm offers their customers the option to do curbside shopping or in-store pickup. Also, it notifies its customers via SMS, whatsapp, emails or app notifications when their order will be ready and available for pickup.

Such kind of customer experience is the new trend of Omnichannel CX strategy and it benefits the businesses in a full-proof manner. 

6. Implement Timely Training Of Team 

You should not forget your employees after hiring them. There should be regular training of your employees with proper assessments to keep them updated with the customer service experience strategies. 

For digital experience it isn’t needed, but what about in-store service? Therefore, you should have routine team training exercises and with-customer monitoring systems to assess and improve the customer service delivery and enhance your employees skills. 

7. Automate Experience With AI

You don’t want a robot to interact with your customers. It will be not only costly but many customers won’t even like it. But with the growing business and customer base, it would be more difficult to apply the same personalized service which was for a handful of customers. 

That’s where AI and automation comes into play. Once you know how to indulge AI tools with your business services, it will not only create an incredible and unique customer experience but also enhance your customer service standards.

Like you should definitely introduce chatbots on your website to address customer inquiries even when your customer service agents are away. Even if chatbots guide the customers to knowledge base on your website, it is still better than piling up customer grievances. 

8. Involve In Social Listening

There is no better way to understand your customer needs than from their own social media.

Social listening is the monitoring of your brand’s social media presence for direct mentions of your business. You must use this to understand your competitor’s performance, your customers’ engagement with your brand and others, and hear your customers’ issues.

There are various social media channels like twitter, instagram, linkedin, where different types of customers interact with your business solutions with their views and problems. You should be attentive enough to discover those and it would help you achieve your targets. 

9. Emphasize On Ease Of Use And Simplicity

Your website should be easy to navigate, interact and exit for your customers. It would be a disaster if you just leave your website without checking errors and issues. 

Therefore, you should focus on these strategies to make your website easy and simple to interact with.

  • Mobile-friendly interface
  • Minimalistic UI/UX design approach
  • Minimum pop-ups and interruptions
  • Error free payment gateways
  • Updated “Contact Us” information
  • Relevant navigation links

This way you would avoid losing customers due to bad CX on your website.

10. Ensure Flexibility In Communication Channels

You should always focus on the term “omnichannel” while devising flexibility strategies in your communication channels. 

For a long lasting seamless customer experience, you should sit down with your team and brainstorm on what you want your customers to feel, touch and interact with your brand across all channels. For a true omnichannel strategy, you should have constant customer experience across all channels and platforms that the user interacts with – and it should have proper context when applicable.

With this, you are prepared to formulate your omnichannel CX strategy which suits your business needs.

Conclusion

For a successful omnichannel CX strategy, you must consider a 360-degree view of customer interactions across all the channels (digital and physical) to track channel performance, preference, and usage from a customer’s perspective. 

Every drop makes an ocean, and you should also expect a lot of strategizing experimentations to devise an effective omnichannel CX strategy. But with this article, you have all the relevant strategies which you can pick and plug into your CX model.

 

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