What is an omnichannel customer experience?
It sounds complex, but the omnichannel experience has been evolving around us organically, without us really noticing. In fact, in recent years it’s become so much part our shopping journey we’ve come to expect it, especially from leading brands.
Put simply, it’s the seamless, positive, and relevant connection consumers have with a brand at every possible touch point.
The perfect example of an omnichannel authority is Apple. Before you buy an iPhone, the chances are you’ve been on the website, maybe popped into an Apple store to handle the device you’re considering and checked out iTunes or the App Store. You may have followed Apple on Twitter, called their support centre, or downloaded their service app. You’ve subconsciously channel hopped and enjoyed a smooth and dependable experience of the brand.
If you don’t have the marketing might of the likes of Apple, can you still provide this kind of familiarity for your customers? And do you need to?
Absolutely, yes.
As consumers we’re a demanding lot. We want this kind of access to brands. Plus, when we have it, we’re far more likely to be brand loyal. According to research carried out by Genysis a whopping 77% of consumers use more than one channel when investigating a product or looking for customer services.
So, how can you improve the omnichannel experience of your business?
Here are three suggestions to get you thinking about what you offer.
#1. Get to know your customers.
The most successful omnichannel companies really understand who their customers are and what they need. Far beyond demographics, it’s about understanding the intricacies of how they shop for the product or service you offer and what they’re willing to do, or not do, to reach the end goal of transacting with you. And to go even deeper still, to discover why they behave in a particular way, how they make decisions, and at what point in their journey will they be most influenced by your messages or agents.
A great way to do this is to simply ask for feedback. People love to give their opinions and it shows your customers that you genuinely care about the experience you offer. You could ask:
- What made you decide to look for [your service or product]?
- What is your research process for finding a [your service/product]?
- How did you find us?
- If you contacted our customer services, how satisfied were you with how we dealt with your query and how could we have been better?
- Specifically, what made you choose [your company] versus [a competitor]?
Once you have enough information you can look at strengthening the channels or specific touch points where feedback may have highlighted gaps. You might find issues with your customer services response times for example, or your website took a long time to load. The smoother the journey, the more likely people are to travel it again or recommend others to follow.
#2. Map out the customer journey (or journeys if you have multiple personas)
Do you know what routes your customers take before they buy? Are there any potential gaps where they could fall away and not complete to the end goal (the purchase)?
Understanding your customer journey has several benefits to your business.
- It helps you to create a better experience for your customers
- It highlights gaps and obstacles so you can focus on making the journey smoother
- It gives context for multiple departments e.g., sales, marketing and customer services so strategies can align. Some people ‘get’ something much more easily if it’s presented in a visual way.
- It can be used to inform your marketing strategy. So, if you’re great at conversion but not so good at retention you can adapt to strengthen the weaknesses.
- It can help you to understand your customers better. Choose a buyer persona and plot their touch points from when you capture their awareness of your company through to post sale. What is their emotional state as they move through the stages? What are you doing to affect it?
#3. Tighten up your tech
As most of us are now prolific channel hoppers, we like the transition between each touch point to be seamless. We expect our details, history and preferences to hop around with us and not only that, but we also want the technology behind each interface to work efficiently when we need it.
As consumers we’re impatient too. If your website takes too long to load, customers will find another site that’s quicker. Most people will wait 2-5 seconds for a site to load, although according to Google research a staggering 53% of users won’t wait longer than 3 seconds before abandoning a site.
Check that the images are your website aren’t huge and slowing down your loading speed. For website you need jpegs of 1MB or less rather than heftier PNGs or GIFs.
Consider embedding your videos from a hosting service such as Vimeo or YouTube. Uploading video to your site may result in a poor viewer experience due to limits in bandwidth, and that’s if you have enough storage with your site host to upload video in the first place. Video hosts like Vimeo and YouTube don’t have that issue, plus because you’re streaming directly from their servers your video will be optimised already for different browsers and devices.
Video is a powerful tool, but only if your viewers can watch seamlessly without the annoying lagging, we all hate.
Your customers will evaluate your company through your prices, the quality of your products or service, your expertise, your reliability, and your reputation. But emotion plays a significant part in the buying decision too and we tend to buy from companies we like. How does your company make someone feel? Is your website easy to navigate accessible? How do you answer the phone or handle complaints and queries? And is your approach consistent across all channels?
As a self-confessed shoe addict, I use a website frequently which feeds my addiction. It’s great. Easy to browse, intuitive filters and a fast checkout. The app however is atrocious (and it’s not good to deprive a shoe addict of a fix). It constantly glitches, can’t seem to filter on size accurately and refuses to accept my postcode. Literally my worst nightmare, and I’ve abandoned several carts in frustration. Luckily the product range and pricing on the website keeps my attention, but I would like to be able to move between the website and the app smoothly, to have the same great experience on both. I’m in the retention/nurture stage of my journey with the company, but a customer in the awareness stage might just give up.
How does all of this affect your business?
Ultimately, you want your omnichannel experience to attract, convert and nurture your prospects and customers, to smoothly lead them through your sales funnel. Because for all the effort you want to see the results on your bottom line, right? It must be worth the time and investment.
Be clear on your goals and track your metrics so that you can either see the payoff and share the success with your team or reassess what you’re doing.
And this is definitely a team effort.
If you’d like help with your marketing please get in touch
Retro River 