Businesses are paying more attention to customer experience (CX). The shift follows digital disruption, the COVID-19 pandemic, tough competition and high employee turnover.
They are looking for new methods to enhance customer loyalty, trust and advocacy. But there’s a problem. Relationships are complex, and many companies overlook that in customer experience.
Poor customer service can produce disloyalty rather than loyalty. To improve customer service, businesses need an omnichannel approach that gives customers several ways to make contact and easy movement between them. That matters more now that online transactions are increasing and enquiry volumes are high.
What organisations think customers will like is often not what customers need. Customers expect responsiveness, transparency and empowerment from any interaction with a brand.
Understanding Omnichannel
What is Omnichannel?
Omnichannel is a customer-centric approach to sales, marketing and support that aims to give people the same brand experience on every channel. Someone shopping online, walking into a store, opening the mobile app or messaging on social media should meet the same brand, and should be able to switch between those channels without starting over.
Benefits of Omnichannel
Customers who can move between channels without repeating themselves are more likely to be satisfied. An experience that is smooth and personal brings customers back to the brand, which raises what each customer is worth over the life of the relationship. Consistent messaging across channels also helps build a single brand image and prevents confusion.
Service teams gain something too. When an agent can see a customer’s history from every channel, they can answer with the full picture rather than part of it, which helps resolve the issue more efficiently.
Start with a single view of the customer journey
‘But I’m already doing omnichannel!’ I hear you say. Most companies today provide some form of omnichannel experience, and stumble in the execution. Companies that engage well with customers keep about 90% of them. Companies with poor engagement retain 33%.
If you’re going to do omnichannel, you’ve got to ensure a consistent customer experience. Give customer service staff a full understanding of each customer so they can respond on the right channel, at the right time, in the best way. There is no point running chat and a feedback function if the two do not talk to each other. If your technology does not allow that, changing it now stops you falling further behind.
Work with the facts
Once you have a single view, analyse what is going on. Gather as much data as you can about the customer experience with your company. Are people reaching you from a desktop or a mobile device? Can they find what they need? How long are they waiting? Is your checkout abandonment rate high? Use the answers to understand your customers’ needs and how to better serve them, and to pinpoint where you are weak.
Developing an Omnichannel Strategy
A successful omnichannel strategy involves several key elements that work together to give customers a smooth, personal experience.
One is knowing which channels a particular customer prefers, and then prioritising them, so that people can deal with you in the way that suits them best.
Another is mapping the customer experience across every channel you run. A map identifies the touchpoints, which lets you work on the stages that need it instead of guessing. Omnichannel campaigns also need a team that owns them, with the skills in data analysis and technology to run them.
Listen to your frontline
Understanding your staff matters as much as understanding your customers, because they hear from customers every day. Measure the team’s performance. Are their interactions resulting in sales? Are they giving customers the information they need as part of the wider marketing campaigns? Are there enquiries that consistently draw bad customer ratings?
Then talk to the agents rather than only reading the data. The system may not work well for them, or the information needed to answer a customer question may be hard to find quickly. Ask what would help them.
Make CX everyone’s job
Find the weak spots in your omnichannel strategy and build a plan that includes everyone in the organisation. Your customer service team should pass useful customer feedback to the product, sales and marketing teams on a regular basis, so those teams decide with better information. Taking part in the change is everyone’s responsibility.
Make the right tech investments
It is your job to know and service your customers, but the technology you use will ultimately determine how well you do it. That starts with true omnichannel analytics reaching across every communication channel and every touchpoint between customer and business.
What separates great omnichannel customer experience (CX) from poor CX is innovation in machine learning and automation. These can predict, personalise and enhance the quality and efficiency of every interaction, self-service included, which makes the experience faster and better. Zendesk’s AnswerBot uses machine learning to suggest helpful answers based on a customer’s question, and to predict whether an article is likely to help.
Every business grapples with CX in the face of the ‘expectation economy’. What tends to succeed is a complete, data-focused strategy that runs across all the channels and includes everyone in the company.
