Exclusive Trusted Magazine Q&A with Flavia Macrì, Marketing Manager.
What are the first steps a company should take when transitioning to an omni-channel strategy?
By 2025, 75% of the global workforce will be digital natives: Millennials who grew up with digital innovation, will apply it into their professional lives.
What does it mean for companies? Digital innovation has reshaped our society, and it is a must-have skill in order to excel in the ever expanding digital era. Indeed, digital landscapes evolve rapidly, and new trends may emerge while existing ones evolve in unexpected ways.
In this context, omni-channel eco-system plays a key role being an environment where interactions and transactions can take place seamlessly across various digital platforms.
Therefore, companies that want to engage their customer with an omni-channel strategy would need to take into consideration from the very beginning:
Data Integration: by integrating data from various sources, companies can have a comprehensive view of customers and business operations. This facilitates the creation of an ecosystem where information is accessible and usable across different channels. That makes possible the Personalization of Interactions, enhancing customer engagement and satisfaction.
Online and Mobile Presence: That contributes to the multi-channel ecosystem, allowing people to interact with the company through websites, apps, social media, and other digital channels.
That enhances Customer Experience Continuity: regardless of the channels utilized, customers should have a unified and positive experience.
Analytics and Measurement Tools: enabling businesses to monitor and assess the effectiveness of activities across different channels, continuously optimizing strategies.
Customer Experience:
How can businesses ensure a seamless customer experience across all channels without compromising on personalized interaction?
Customers are more connected and savvier than ever and have embraced new ways to communicate with brands, enabling companies to think how they can offer customer journeys that integrate all communication channels.
According to the survey “Unlocking the power of the connected consumer” from Deloitte, 60% of customers expect a consistent user experience, regardless of the time, place, device, or interaction channel.
To ensure a seamless customer experience across all channels, it is crucial to adapt to customer preferences. Telephone and email remain the preferred customer channels and the major challenge for companies today is to adapt to those preferred channels, to interact with them quickly and efficiently. Thus, it is pivotal to integrate the channels used by customers into the strategy, in order to deliver the best customer experience.
At the same time, we want to offer the best personalized interactions and to achieve that, face-to-face communications should be part of the omnichannel ecosystem for better quality service. Also, it includes train agents to deliver the best CX.
Key elements to implement an omnichannel strategy:
What are the essential technologies needed to implement a successful omni-channel strategy? Are there any particular tools or platforms you recommend?
Technology and tools are the architecture of the whole omni-channel strategy. However, to create a successful strategy, what we need to do first is target our customers, understanding their needs, and then orchestrate contents, time and channels:
Contents: One of the most established systematic approaches in this area is the Hero - Hub - Hygiene model, derived from YouTube's experience and promoted by Google as a global reference framework. This is a strategy for creating and promoting content that helps businesses become more visible.
Timeframe: The time dedicated to reading emails is rapidly decreasing. This trend is confirmed by research, which has highlighted a consistent reduction in the attention span dedicated to emails over the years: in 2022 the time decreased to 8.97 seconds. Although, we cannot prevent this trend towards increasingly shorter reading times, we can adopt some strategies to create more effective emails.
Channels: When it comes to channels, it is very essential to balance 3 channels categories: Paid channels (third parties that can be used, for example, to enlarge database audience), owned channels (company’s website or social media), and earned ones (earned media refers to any communication about brands including shares, mentions, replies, reviews published by external sources such as, influencers or customers).
Customer Feedback:
How should companies incorporate customer feedback into their omni-channel strategies to continuously improve customer experiences?
Incorporating customer feedback into omni-channel strategies is crucial for companies to improve customer loyalty and engagement. This 3 steps approach can support companies to use feedback to enhance customer satisfaction.
Collect Feedback Across Channels and centralized data: Implement systems to collect feedback from customers across all channels they interact with to gather insights and aggregate data from various channels into a centralized database or customer relationship management (CRM) system. This allows companies to analyse critiques holistically and identify trends and patterns.
Analyse and Interpret Feedback: Use data analytics tools to analyse customer feedback and gain actionable insights. Look for common themes, sentiments, and areas of improvement to prioritize initiatives that will have the greatest impact on customer experiences.
Iterate and Improve: Use a continuous improvement approach to iterate on omni-channel strategies based on ongoing feedback and performance metrics. Regularly review and refine strategies to stay responsive to changing customer needs and market dynamics. It could include feedback integration into product development processes to offer the customers needs and preferences.
By incorporating customer feedback into their omni-channel strategies and actively listening to customer voices, companies can gain valuable insights, strengthen customer relationships, and drive continuous improvement in customer experiences.