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If you aren’t sure whether your business should bother with creating an omnichannel journey for your customers, know this: Omnichannel is what today’s consumers crave, and that craving is only going to intensify over time. Omnichannel is also the future of customer service.
When executed well, an omnichannel approach creates more seamless and satisfying experiences for customers when they interact with your brand in any channel, online or off. It helps to bolster customer loyalty as well as your bottom line by driving revenue. In fact, according to omnichannel statistics compiled by Capital One Shopping, omnichannel customer engagement can increase average sales revenue by 9.5%.
So, if you haven’t implemented an omnichannel customer journey strategy yet, or you believe that what you’re doing now needs improvement, this post can help you. We’ll take a deeper dive into the many benefits of implementing such a strategy. Then, we’ll walk through eight steps you can take to create a winning approach, including how to use technology like Invoca to enhance the customer experience, even beyond the call center.
“Omni,” from the Latin word “omnis,” means “all.” If something is omnipresent, it is everywhere. If you are omnipotent, you are all-powerful.
In a marketing context, omnichannel simply means all channels. Omnichannel marketing is a strategy to ensure you offer current and potential customers consistent, connected messaging across all the channels they encounter as they proceed through your sales funnel. This includes customers who shop for your product or service online, over the phone, or in a physical store.
Omnichannel marketing is often confused with multichannel marketing. They are not the same.
Think of multichannel marketing like your local farmer’s market. The market has 20 or 30 stalls, and even though they are all in one place, the vendors operate independently and may even have overlapping products.
Omnichannel, meanwhile, is like a traditional department store. Each department is ready to serve every customer and works in concert with the other departments to provide a single, seamless shopping experience where the store’s brand is present throughout.
Businesses that take the time to create an effective omnichannel customer journey can realize multiple benefits from their efforts. Here are seven of the top ones.
Most customers today want, and increasingly expect, an omnichannel experience. When you provide them with seamless, personalized service — whether they interact with your business via their computer or phone, an app, or in-person at a brick-and-mortar store — they are more likely to feel valued and express customer satisfaction.
Companies that get the omnichannel customer journey right excel at delivering those “little moments of delight” that keep customers returning time and again.
Marketers know that attracting new customers is more expensive than keeping or retargeting existing ones. So, to quote a music icon, it pays to “love the one you’re with.”
Creating hyper-personalized experiences for customers throughout the omnichannel customer journey demonstrates that “love.” You can also forge stronger relationships with your customers by identifying touchpoints where you can optimize the journey and make it frictionless.
A formal customer experience management (CXM) plan can help you focus on that and deepen your own understanding of your customer’s journey. And the strategic use of technology tools like Invoca’s PreSense can help you deliver the personalized experiences that your customers crave. PreSense helps agents treat every customer like a VIP by linking up to the customer’s online journey and providing real-time insight into who is calling and why.
Mapping the omnichannel customer journey helps marketing teams get a clearer picture of attribution, and that can create significant benefits in the following ways:
Providing a successful omnichannel customer experience also leads to more sales and higher revenues. By identifying key touchpoints that lead to more conversions, you can drive more customers toward purchases, bringing higher revenue.
Gaining a clear view of the omnichannel customer journey also allows you to focus the bulk of your resources on your highest-performing channels, thereby driving more sales.
Friction points in the customer journey — like broken links, invalid phone numbers, and failed checkouts — are a big turnoff for customers. Removing barriers to completing transactions and creating a frictionless experience overall is what wins their business and loyalty.
In an omnichannel world, customers often change channels when interacting with a business, such as switching from a computer web browser to an app on their phone. Streamlining that journey by creating more efficient pathways, such as allowing customers to pick up where they left off regardless of the device, further enhances the customer experience.
Here’s another benefit of an effective omnichannel strategy you might not immediately consider: the mountains of customer data you can gain from every channel and use to enhance your marketing and business decision-making and planning.
Tools like revenue execution software let you link the digital data from your customers’ online activity to their offline activity, like phone conversations with your call center agents. This provides you with a huge reservoir of data about consumer behavior and intent, which you can turn into actionable insights that allow you to personalize your marketing efforts and more.
We just discussed insights, but they are such a significant benefit of creating an omnichannel customer journey that they deserve further mention.
Here’s why: A business might not definitively know what motivated a customer to make a purchase by purely examining online activity. Digital tracking shows the route taken but not necessarily the motivation. If a customer picks up the phone and makes a purchase, the agent responding has the chance to ask what motivated them.
If you can gain deeper insight into why customers want to connect with your business and decide to buy from you, it opens the door to developing more targeted marketing and sales strategies that will delight your customers — and drive revenue.
So, how do you take advantage of all these great benefits? These eight steps can help you create an effective omnichannel customer journey.
The first step is to do your homework on your customers. Your aim is to really understand what makes them your customers. You can do this by:
Once you deepen your understanding of your customers, dig in on learning about the journey they take with you, including all the points of interaction, digital and manual. Be sure to:
You have a wealth of customer data coming in from many channels that you can mine for insights. Use tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, social media analytics, and your CRM system to integrate this information so you can analyze it.
You can boost the value and relevance of your data collection and analysis efforts further by incorporating Invoca’s call tracking software. It will allow you to capture more data from phone interactions, giving you a comprehensive view of customer behavior.
It’s time to get granular with your customer data by analyzing every interaction. You should do the following as part of this process:
With help from Invoca’s artificial intelligence (AI), you can analyze phone call data at scale to surface the common pain points your customers face and dig in on sentiment analysis to identify opportunities to improve the omnichannel customer journey.
Once you’ve identified and fixed pain points and have better insight into what you’re doing right, you can take the next step and begin designing more seamless transitions for your customers on an omnichannel journey with you.
This work includes making sure that you maintain consistent branding, messaging, and a high standard of customer service across all channels, not just the major channels. Consumers are finicky and quickly move between channels, especially in the mobile era.
Also, you’ll want to invest in technology that helps reduce friction along the omnichannel customer journey. Research shows that 32% of consumers will dump a brand after just one bad experience. That could be having a phone call transferred one too many times. You can avoid that particular scenario by using Invoca’s intelligent call routing, which ensures customers connect with the most suitable agents based on their needs and previous online interactions.
When you can personalize the experience for every customer at every point in their journey with you, you’ll be well-positioned to earn not just their business, but their loyalty. To achieve this, you need to:
According to the State of the Connected Customer report from Salesforce, 73% of business buyers and 47% of consumers expect companies to anticipate their needs. Yet only 48% of business buyers and 29% of consumers think companies do this.
To anticipate your customers’ needs, you need relevant data plus actionable insights derived from that data. Without that information, you will struggle to proactively address your customers’ needs before they turn into problems. And forecasting trends? Forget about it.
Collecting voice-of-the-customer (VoC) data from phone calls with AI tools like Invoca can help you optimize and personalize marketing efforts. But that information can also help you anticipate customer behavior when you integrate and analyze it with other tools, like predictive analytics in a CRM system.
Proactive engagement with your customers also requires you to reach out to them effectively through their preferred channels, whether that’s email, social media, or phone calls. In many cases, it will be several channels. According to Salesforce’s survey, consumers use eight channels, on average, to engage with businesses. Business buyers use 10. And the split between the use of online and offline channels is roughly equal.
Lastly, you will need to monitor and measure omnichannel performance to ensure that your strategy is hitting the mark with customers.
To track performance, decide which metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) make the most sense for your needs and continuously monitor them to keep performance on track. You can measure KPIs like customer satisfaction (through CSAT scores), Net Promoter Score, and conversion rates to assess your omnichannel strategy’s effectiveness.
Use data insights, such as from your analysis of VoC data, to regularly update and fine-tune your efforts so that you can quickly address pain points that crop up and ensure that the omnichannel customer journey remains as smooth as possible.
A well-optimized omnichannel journey benefits your customers — and your bottom line. No matter what your business is, a hospital, a bank, a car dealership, or a pest control service, your customers expect to have a seamless, positive experience when they interact with you.
You can meet those expectations with the right strategy, data, and technology partners like Invoca. Our call tracking and analytics tools deliver critical insights about your customers that allow you to level up your CX, even beyond the call center.
With tools like intelligent call routing and PreSense, you can make every customer feel like your most important customer by reducing friction and personalizing their journey. And with our conversation analytics tools, you can capture insights every time customers engage with you by phone to better understand their needs and preferences and any issues they may be experiencing along their omnichannel customer journey.
These elements are foundational to creating seamless customer experiences that drive revenue and build lasting loyalty with your customers.
Want more tips for developing a true omnichannel customer journey? Check out these resources from Invoca:
If you’d like to see firsthand how Invoca’s technology can help enhance your omnichannel strategy, contact us today to set up a customized demo.
