Building A Successful Omni-Channel Customer Experience Strategy: The How-To As a business looking to survive and thrive in this dynamic, fast-paced environment, you have to adapt and constantly readjust your value proposition to sustain a competitive advantage.
By Yasser Alobaidan •
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It's no secret that modern-day corporate markets are fueled by ruthless competition and driven by change. As a business looking to survive and thrive in this dynamic, fast-paced environment, you have to adapt and constantly readjust your value proposition to sustain a competitive advantage.
Businesses have to face the fact that markets are consumer driven. If you are not there for your existing and potential customers at the right time, the right place, and in the right way, you will lose them to your competition.
It's a challenge we have successfully tackled many times at my company, Jawraa. A well-crafted and diligently executed, omnichannel, customer-experience strategy that taps into the strengths of our business has helped us leverage the latest technology and digital media tools to find innovative solutions.
Grounded in our obsession to be customer oriented, we have always set out on a mission to create and deliver transformative, meaningful experiences to our clients at every single touchpoint. In return, we've been rewarded with brand loyalty, trust, increased retention, high conversion, and ultimately, increased profits.
What constitutes a successful omni-channel customer experience strategy
An omnichannel customer experience (CX) is one where your business is continually interacting and engaging with clients and prospects through multiple offline and online channels. However, there's more to the endeavor than creating social media pages, making a few calls through your call center, and putting up your brand on a billboard.
The key to a successful omni-channel customer experience is integration across all platforms and frequencies. The customer should begin their involvement with your brand at one touchpoint, and continue seamlessly from another. Secondly, you need an independent strategy for each channel that is grounded in understanding the customer, what they are looking for, and their stage in the buyer's journey.
Different channels need to be used to engage customers, depending on their point within the sales and marketing funnel. That's why it is critical for your marketing, sales, and customer service verticals to be aligned. They need to work together to deliver a smooth, channel-relevant customer experience to each client.
Related: Four Ways To Boost Customer Experience (And Thus Hold Onto Your Clients)
So, how do you build your strategy, and execute it? Here are three things you need to do:
1. Embed CX into the company's culture The first step in building an omnichannel customer experience strategy is to care about and prioritize customer experience as company culture. Employees, especially in customer-facing roles, need to be empowered at every level to ensure efficiency of processes and customer satisfaction.
2. Re-engineer your business processes The right business processes need to be in place to activate an omnichannel CX strategy. Ensure that you have experienced marketing, sales, and customer support, where each person understands offline and online media channels and brand building strategies. Every team needs to be in sync, working together to support customers throughout their journey.
More importantly, your business processes need to embrace and lead with customer feedback. Incorporate that feedback into your product or service immediately and market it as another value proposition. It's imperative that a cycle of feedback and implementation becomes a continuous business model oriented towards success.
3. Bet on ICE Innovation Customer Experience (ICE) has to be the crux of your omnichannel CX strategy. The idea behind ICE is to leverage technology to optimize your customer interactions and transform them from a one-way communication into a two-way relationship. You do not need to carry out marketing, sales, and customer support on every channel. Instead, understand the strengths of each platform and use them accordingly.
Instagram is good for marketing, but LinkedIn is better for sales. Call centers are great for initiating contact and pushing leads into the sales funnel, but Facebook or WhatsApp messaging is better for converting leads. Your website is good for informing customers about your brand, but Twitter is better for gathering feedback. And when it comes to deciding which channel is best suited for which purpose, look at historical market data and first-hand data from channel-specific, tried-and-tested marketing and sales strategies. Remember, data never lies.
Another aspect of ICE is to use tech to keep your finger on the market's customer-satisfaction pulse. You need to keep your eyes and ears open on each channel for feedback on your own and your competitors' performance. If you hear a complaint from a potential lead, turn it into an opportunity by offering the solution to their problem. In other words, use each channel, especially social media, as a hunting ground to search for prospects, and woo them.
Practice makes perfect
If you are just starting with an omnichannel CX approach, rest assured, you won't get it right immediately. It will take some time to get good at engaging customers across multiple touchpoints and figuring out which mix of channels works best for your organization.
However, once you have figured it out, your business will reap the benefits for a long time.
