We’ve established that an omnichannel customer experience is the most effective strategy for improving the overall customer experience.
However, now that you’re mindful of it and have an omnichannel strategy in place, how is it going? Are there things to keep in mind to improve it? Read below to hear more about the importance of and best practices to improve the omnichannel customer experience.
The importance of omnichannel communication
An omnichannel model takes all channels of communication and brings them together for a full view of your overall customer experience. Rather than siloing the interactions, having all your channels work concurrently make a seamless experience between each that emphasizes your brand.
You also gain a larger data pool. Bringing data from your omnichannel model gives a more complete view of how your organization is functioning. Reviewing the entire data will guide you in providing an amplified omnichannel customer experience.
Keeping and even expanding your customer base is the result of a successful omnichannel customer experience. Creating loyal customers is of high value enough to your revenue’s sustainability to where efforts should be dedicated to it. A customer for life is a much higher win than a one-time deal. Having a well thought out omnichannel experience that considers many angles will be what makes them want to stay.
6 steps to improve your omnichannel customer experience
1. Analyze content
You’ll need to review two things with this: both the value of your content and how customers are meant to come across it. With the first portion, consider if your content is still relevant and up to date. Is it still speaking to who your audience is today? Are you addressing the current needs of your customers?
2. Build/review omnichannel strategy
If you don’t already have one in place, now is the time to craft your omnichannel strategy. It can start off as simple as listing out your channels, the purpose it plays in your overall strategy, content that works better for it and who on your team has more ownership on managing it. From there, you can create if/then statements to connect the path of communication when a customer interacts with one channel. The rest of your team will then be aware of the experience should they come in contact with the same customers elsewhere. A good CRM (that hopefully automates some of this) will be crucial to help you streamline this process.
Set up a monthly or quarterly review to ensure that your process is working once this strategy is in place. What makes sense now may not make sense later. Coming together to review the process regularly will help shed light on any flaws in the process, allowing you to make changes and continue to improve your omnichannel customer experience.
3. Filter everything through your customer journey map
If you’re not considering your customer journey, you’ll run into more road blocks and create more work for yourself in the future. As you craft both your content and strategy, have your customer journey map documented and readily available.
Additionally – go through your customer journey map and identify what pieces of content or points of communication happen to help pinpoint what needs to be worked on first. As you update and refresh items, go back through to make sure it still makes sense.
4. Personalize experiences
Maintaining a CRM of some sort amongst your teams will be critical to bring personalization to the table. If customers feel like your organization as a whole knows and cares about them, your customer experience will skyrocket.
With documented interactions with a customer, your agents can improve customer experiences by eliminating the need for the customer to reiterate their problem over and over with different agents.
5. Keep mobile in mind
Many, if not most, of your customers will be engaging with you via a mobile capacity. As apps and mobile-responsive browser capabilities expand, the interaction on mobile devices does as well. With any app functions, make sure to incorporate both helpful self-service documents for any troubleshooting to avoid easy-to-fix issues, as well as a clear path to find those in a highly visible area.
Doing so will free your agents to take care of higher-level calls and improve your customer’s ability to come to quick resolutions.
6. Prepare for the down times
A contingency plan is going to be crucial if technology fails. Don’t think of this pessimistically. Instead, be prepared for breaks in any system, such as your email client experiencing glitches or phone systems collapsing. Technology is fallible, like many things. Having a disaster recovery plan in place for how your agents can care for customers, as well as ensuring customer data will be secure and available, is critical for contact center operations across channels.
There’s no doubt that in this age where customers have a multitude of means to engage with brands that organizations need to be mindful of those avenues. Expansion of your business and revenue depends on it. Keep these steps readily available to your team of decision makers and strategists to see your omnichannel experience improve.
Need a tool to help you see your performance metrics so you know how to best build your omnichannel strategy? Contact the Aceyus team to see how our product can help be part of your solution.
