Digital growth has exposed different channels of sales. The journey of a customer now comprises of various nonlinear engagement opportunities, it starts with one sales channel and ends with another one. To comply with the changing consumer behavior, sellers and brands are opting an integrated omnichannel strategy to ensure consistent shopping experience.
Omnichannel is the future. Irrespective of the sales channels that customers use, they expect a high-quality and consistent shopping experience. To meet these expectations, it has now become increasingly important for entrepreneurs to invest in strengthening the omnichannel customer experience, as it defines their success in the eCommerce realm.
Get an Edge with Customer Experience
In the competitive landscape, the Customer Experience provides a business edge over its counterparts. As per Defaqto research findings, it is expected that almost 55 percent customers will purchase from companies providing better customer service. According to Gartner , in the next couple of years’ customer experience will be the major battleground for the eCommerce companies.
Businesses need to develop a unique strategy for an omnichannel customer experience. A poor customer service is a big NO-NO for omnichannel retailing .
Since customers interact with multiple channels simultaneously, companies need to shift from emphasizing on improving the customer experience of one sales channel. To stay competitive, they need to emphasize on improving the customer experience across all sales channels.
The users shift between different touch points with the expectation that they will get the same data across these platforms. The strategy should aim at creating a coherent and consistent experience across all the touch points of the sales channels.
Experts consider, every interaction of the customer with a brand or business is a relationship. With the rise in the number of different sales channels, the relationship between customers and companies have also changed.
So, businesses better listen to customers, know how they interact with touch point, create a strategy for omnichannel customer experience and ensure that the relationship between customers and brand or company is not strained.
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Ways to Improve Omnichannel Customer Experience
There are five guiding principles that will help in creating a perfect omnichannel customer experience.
1. Improve the customer service
According to a research by Econsultancy , improvement of the customer service is the most effective approach to boost the customer journey. Ideally, the customer service should link both offline and online touch points for creating a seamless experience. It is important to diminish the gap between offline and online customer service. Reports prove that companies use both traditional voice care services and new channels like social media, chats, and email for customer care, support services, for delivering the best omnichannel experience. Different research findings have clearly stated that companies who have assigned different departments like marketing, sales and after sales, the responsibility of customer service provide better and uniform customer experience across different sales channels than the counterparts.
2. Think from customer’s perspective
With the emergence of new technologies there is an abrupt change in the customer behavior. Customer-focus approach helps the brands to earn customer loyalty and aid in customer advocacy. In an omnichannel approach, brands collect customer data from different touch points to obtain a holistic view of the customer interaction. This approach is instrumental in personalizing the customer experience. In a report of Digital Trends , it has been highlighted that majority of the customers prefer the brands that utilize personal information and provide relevant shopping experience.
3. Redefine the in-store experience
Businesses or brands need to adapt the recent trend of mobilizing in-store experience . They need to equip the employees with advanced mobile technology to personalize the in-store experience and boost customer service. Since mobile is omnipresent, introducing the mobile technology impacts the way customers interact with brands and in-store experience. Use of Beacons has turned out to be an effective strategy in this regard. When the customer visits a physical store, Beacons track the customers and send personalized offers and deals to them. This is specifically effective for outstation customers.
4. Smart promotion to address showrooming
To personalize the offer, E-tailers can implement the CRM data and attract the showrooming customers. It is needless to say that best deals attract customers. If marketers adopt smart promotion techniques that highlighting the relevant and personalized deals, it will be easy to communicate with the customers.
5. Optimize buying experience
A disjointed structure will impede the shopping experience. So, optimizing the buying experience is the key. Personalized emails and Loyalty programs are two important tools for optimizing the experience. Personalized emails usually provide information about in-store deals, special offers and route direction to the stores. Loyalty programs are used to reward and encourage customers online and in-store purchases. The Loyalty Programs are created based on shopping and browsing habits of customers. Both these tools help in providing a personalized shopping experience.
An effective strategy would be to align the business strategy, technology, processes and human resources on the same page to achieve the objective. For improving the omnichannel customer experience amalgamation of these components will show a positive result. Brands, to thrive, need to ensure that they implement an agile strategy for improving customer experience.
