As you start reading this article, a customer probably puts a query on one of your social media channels.
While you progress to the following line, another customer is browsing through your website, which he found through Instagram ads.
Similarly, some might be entering physical stores at this moment while others are typing out their hard feelings, if any, about your brand online.
And you are sitting here, trying to cater to all these customers across several channels.
Keeping up with it is no easy experience, and finding out where they start from is even more complicated.
That’s where ensuring an omnichannel customer experience comes into play.
To answer all the queries in your head, we are here with an omnichannel customer experience guide that covers the whats, whys, and hows to deliver the exceptional experience your customers deserve.
What is Omnichannel customer experience?
An omnichannel customer experience aims to create a seamless and satisfying buying experience across various channels, including email, social media, physical stores, and websites. The idea is to provide a consistent experience across all channels to ensure we cater to customers’ different needs via different platforms. Whether online or offline, customers should feel like they are engaging with the same brand, be it messaging, service, or experience.
Let’s take an example of a sports brand to understand this better. A customer is looking for a new pair of sneakers. He starts browsing through Instagram and finds an ad for a brand with the latest collection. Intrigued, he clicks on the ad, which takes him to the website. He experiences different styles on the website, reads reviews, and adds some options to the cart.
Later in the day, when the customer is out, he receives a notification reminding him of the options waiting in the cart. He decides to visit their physical outlet to check those options out in person and is satisfied with his choices. Then, he purchases the same using the mobile app, which offers a loyalty program with many more benefits in his hands.
Now, notice the experience flow from social media to websites to physical stores and mobile app shopping. Imagine if the brand just focused on its physical stores with no Instagram advertising.
Or if the options that the customer added to the cart weren’t available in-store. Any break in the flow would have left the customer disappointed and no sales for the brand. That’s how important it is to deliver a positive experience seamlessly across every channel.
How effective is your CX strategy?
Before diving into omnichannel strategy development, let’s understand your current strategy. Conduct a customer experience audit of your existing strategy and see how effective the customer experience is across various channels. Here are some questions that will help you out:
- What are the channels where your customers interact the most?
Understanding your key customer touchpoints is crucial to analyzing and figuring out the areas of improvement. For instance, if Instagram ads are where you get most of your website traffic from, see how you can run these ads better.
- What are the tools and technologies you currently use to enhance your CX?
It’s almost impossible to go forward with omnichannel CX implementation without using tools and technologies. They make your lives easier and handle mundane tasks better. List the tools you already use and find the tedious tasks that require additional investment.
- What are your customers saying about your brand online?
Now comes collecting data on how happy your customers are with your brand. This includes online reviews, comments on different platforms, and how frequently complaints exist with your products and services. Since social media is becoming a platform for outbursts when customers get disappointed, investing in a social listening platform can heavily benefit you. You can read more about it in our complete guide to social listening.
- What are the competitors upto?
Lastly comes comparing your CX metrics to the top competitors in the industry. It will help you understand where you will fall short and devise plans accordingly. This will also help you differentiate yourself from competitors and highlight the factors that make you stand out regarding customer experience.
Building a cohesive customer experience across channels
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to building customer experience. But here are some tips and strategies that never fall short.
Understand your customer’s needs and wants
Aim to deliver a customer experience that aligns with what your customers need. If you are highly active in responding to customer emails while customers are waiting for instant responses on their Tweets or Instagram, then there is an issue you need to resolve.
That’s where understanding your customers better comes into play. Build buyer personas that talk about the most common attributes of your customers. Collect data on their buying behavior, engagement patterns, preferences, etc. And that requires scouring through your existing customer base to understand the type of buyers you deal with. You can also contact customers and conduct surveys to get to know them better.
Map out the customer journey
Take note of all the touchpoints where customers interact with your business. This could include website visits, social media engagement, email communications, phone calls, in-store visits, and more. The idea is to map out all possible channels and interactions. Collect data on customer interactions from various sources such as website analytics, CRM systems, customer surveys, and social media insights.
Based on the collected information, segment your customers into different personas and define the customer journey stages. Next, map out the journey from the initial awareness, where they know about your brand and its products, to consideration, purchase, post-purchase, and advocacy.
You can use customer journey orchestration platforms or a simple spreadsheet to get a clearer picture. Aim to know how the customer moves forward and jot down each step.
Go through customer feedback
Customer feedback gives you a deep dive into what customers like or dislike about their experience across different channels. Whether good or bad, it will help you understand your customers’ preferences, pain points, and expectations to tailor your customer journeys. Here are some specific things it will help you identify:
- It helps identify usability issues on the website, a gap in product availability across channels, or inconsistent messaging
- Highlight specific concerns customers come across during brand interaction
- Help you understand the strategies that lead to a positive experience
- Collect data that helps in personalizing your omnichannel strategies better
- Understand what people are saying about your brand online to improve your online reputation score
Therefore, work on collecting customer feedback using surveys, interviews with individuals or focus groups, and reading reviews online.
Investing in the right tools and technology
You collect customer data from various sources. Investing in the right tools that integrate with your existing ones to centralize customer information is crucial. It helps avoid duplication and ensure consistency across multiple channels.
When your customer experience platforms integrate seamlessly with CRM, marketing automation, and data analytics platforms, it gives you a complete overview of your customers and helps run targeted campaigns.
One core area of focus here is investing in scalable tools and technologies. As you acquire new customers, enter new markets, or introduce new products and services, integrated systems should ensure that customer data remains accessible and aligned with the business needs.
Identify both internal and external stakeholders
When your tools collect accurate customer data, it must also reach the right hands. That’s where focusing on both internal and external stakeholders comes into play. Internal stakeholders include marketing teams, customer service reps, data analysis, product development executives, and senior management.
At the same time, keep your external stakeholders, such as business partners, suppliers, investors, shareholders, and customers, in the loop. This ensures you keep everyone on the same page regarding brand image consistency.
Focus on enhancing post-purchase experience
Customers shouldn’t feel lost after purchasing your product. Strive to be the type of brand to assist customers after they buy your products. Firstly, give them directions on how to use the product and make the most of their purchase. A how-to infographic in their emails is the right way to go.
Even if you don’t go the extra mile, show them you aim to create a lasting relationship with their brand. A simple WhatsApp message would suffice. Here’s how Urbanic does it:
We love how they value their customers and use a special surprise as a motivator to understand their customers better. Your ost-purchase experience strategy should focus on communicating with customers and reminding them the brand is here to assist them.
Enhancing the omnichannel customer experience
Now that we have covered building a cohesive customer experience in our omnichannel customer experience guide, let’s move to the right ways of enhancing the experience.
Listen to your customers online
Most of the conversations regarding brands happen on social media platforms these days. Either you listen to these conversations online and improve your offerings accordingly, or you lose your loyal customers based on brands who do. But you can’t possibly scroll through every tweet online or Instagram comment throughout the day.
That’s where you must invest in tools like Radarr’s social media listening and monitoring that keep up with every conversation about your brand online. Connect your critical social channels and extract every core insight hassle-free.
It also allows you to add keywords or topics you want to listen to. So, it’s not just about reviews regarding your products or services but keeping up with industry trends and insights.
And it solves your most important problem — helps you stay on top of all conversations in one feed—no need to dive back and forth to see what’s happening on different social channels. Access every conversation you need in one dashboard and better understand your customers.
Learn from your top competitors
Some brands are exceptionally good at handling negative feedback online. Instead of ignoring those comments, deleting them, or arguing with the customers, they respond rightly. It’s not just about negative comments; brands even engage with random Tweets that call them out on something.
Take Allen Solly, for example; they made a basic error of typing coming soon as comming soon, and here’s what followed:
The idea is to go the extra mile to engage with your customers online. Similarly, look at competitors’ strategies in your industry to understand how they engage with customers online. Refine your strategy accordingly and make an extra effort to respond.
Provide exceptional customer support
If customers get stuck, your brand should do everything possible to help them. Some will search for the answer in a knowledge base. Regardless to say, have one with all the answers to common queries. Others will interact with your chatbots, which must have personalized responses to their queries. Regardless of their effectiveness, keep your customer support agents ready to assist further.
Even if you believe you aren’t getting many queries through emails, have personalized responses ready when you do. Lastly, create a community where customers can engage and discuss common issues. It will help them connect better and find answers quickly.
Enhance your omnichannel customer experience with Radarr
These days, having an omnichannel approach isn’t just an option—it’s essential. Recognizing that the customer journey can commence from various touchpoints, it’s crucial to adapt. This is where Radarr steps in, with AI and machine learning capabilities, to integrate and extract insights from all digital channels seamlessly.
With Radarr, no customer inquiry goes unnoticed. Picture the satisfaction of knowing that every social media comment or message receives a timely response. Regardless of your presence across platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and more, Radarr consolidates all social profiles into a user-friendly dashboard.
Effortlessly craft standardized responses to common queries, ensuring consistent engagement. Moreover, Radarr employs sentiment analysis to prioritize conversations, allowing you to focus on addressing the most crucial ones promptly.
Curious about how Radarr can further enhance customer experience? Book a demo today!
