Establishing and maintaining outstanding customer relationships in today’s digitally-driven environment means learning more about customers than ever before.
Customer experience is the practice of understanding, designing, and measuring a customer’s interactions with a brand or company. From the analytics that shape raw data into actionable insights, to the digital technologies that deliver engaging, interactive experiences, a best-in-class omnichannel customer experience is about empowering consumers to make purchases, get help or simply window shop across multiple physical and digital touchpoints.
Omnichannel interactions can be digital or physical, in-store or at-home, with a person or with a bot, owned by the brand or an impression or discussion on a third party site. Above all, consistency is key across the omni-channel spectrum to ensure integrated, seamless, personalized experiences.
A successful omnichannel customer experience is more than conversions and sales. Companies must be able to impress customers both before and after money exchanges hands with interconnected in-person, phone, web, mobile and social interactions.
Establishing and maintaining outstanding customer relationships in today’s digitally-driven environment means learning more about customers than ever before. Harnessing the power of the Internet of Things enables brands to determine what spurs customers to make decisions through data related to previous purchases, shopping habits, financial data and social media.
It’s not enough to just understand individual customers. Companies also have to look at their industry’s digital landscape.
This requires exploring both customer and company objectives. Consumers want comprehensive services and streamlined processes that have been tailored to their needs. Organizations are looking for increased customer engagement, new clientele, and increased revenue. At this stage,it’s imperative that organizations identify every channel’s strengths and weaknesses and make adjustments accordingly.
Defining measurable metrics around these goals will help businesses create optimized digital and in-person interactions based on actionable data and design customer experiences that serve everyone’s interests
The last step is building and launching comprehensive solutions using the above insights and objectives to provide superior performance across every channel.
Here, it’s about channel-specific design. That means designing mobile app experiences to retain the functionality of web-based interaction but adapting them to a smaller screen and touch-based interface. The same idea should carry over to physical experiences as well, seamlessly continuing experiences from other channels.
Partnership and integration with other brands and services is also important part of designing best-in-class omnichannel customer experiences. Companies should seek opportunities to spread their omnichannel reach and better serve customers with apps that can be incorporated into popular payment systems or built-in connections to popular social media platforms.
Companies should test metrics and methods early and often during the design process, and this evaluation needs to continue even after a plan goes live.
The roll out is a crucial point. Putting a plan into action often reveals holes that were previously overlooked and theoretical design ideas that may not work as well in the real world. Centric Digital Lab can support companies through this critical stage and continue to monitor success against measurable objectives.