The Five-Step Approach to Nail Cross-Channel Customer Experience
Cross-channel customer experience around businesses is quite siloed in this digitally dominant era. These silos not only limit cross-engagement opportunities but also badly affect the customer experience. And, as marketing channels continue to grow, it is becoming even more challenging to conquer customer delight. But, doesn’t that sound ironic in a world where the internet is reduced to a perpetual global village?
83% of consumers state that the ability to move from one channel to another is desirable, but only 50% of businesses support such cross-channel interactions– Genesys
Mastering the customer experience while staying relevant should be the goal of your digital commerce strategy. But, how do you manage to portray a coherent image of the brand that offers an orchestrated experience altogether? It might look daunting at first, but it can be as easy as it gets. All that an organization needs, is to align technological advancements with changing customer expectations.
The Five-Step Approach To Master CrossChannel Customer Experience Offering cross-channel services is very likely to bring accolades for your eCommerce brand in terms of ROIs, recognition, and appreciation. Cross-channel marketing can increase your response rates by 35%– IWCO Direct
Here’s how to start building an ideal cross-channel strategy to make your marketing efforts count.
1. More Channels = More Clutter There are numerous channels for engaging a customer for your digital commerce business — Website, app, email, social media, AdWords, newsletters, and more. The number of channels across the web will never stop adding up. And, if you think of going all-inclusive, chances are you’ll be losing out on revenues.
In the first place, do all the channels even deserve your time? Well, they don’t! Even if a competitor gained highly on ROIs from a particular channel, it doesn’t mean it will do that for you too. For example, Facebook Messenger is helping businesses grow by enabling real-time communication of a brand with the customers.
Over 20B messages exchanged between People and Businesses every month– Messenger But, before getting excited about the idea, do contemplate — Are your target customers even on Facebook? If you are targeting baby boomers or Generation X, chances are that you are hitting the wrong chords. Because there is no point in spending hours building a communication channel that will be like walking an empty street.
Try not to focus on hitting maximum channels, instead focus on mastering crosschannel experience across them.
2. Consistent Design Patterns The very first thing that hits the eyes of customers who interact with your digital channel is its visual design. This design is your brand’s personality that needs to reverberate consistency throughout, irrespective of it being a brick-and-mortar setup or a cashierless store setup like Amazon Go.
You can’t be telling a different story on different communication channels. Whether it is the overall design, feel, images, fonts, or even the layouts; they should be consistent across touchpoints. That builds credibility and trust for the brand as confusion steer clear for the consumers.
You could take the example of Nike here. Their simple swoosh logo that has existed over the years aligns with Nike’s website design. Be it their CTAs or the marketing copies, the black and white theme sticks to the overall image of the brand engraved in consumers’ minds. So, no matter what cross-channel eCommerce platform you deploy, the trick is simple — Make your experience design consistent in a way that it imitates a single brand impression throughout.
3. Team Skill Nurturing First of all, your team needs to be on the same page, and that is possible when they collaborate and communicate regularly. Secondly, do not miss out on nurturing their skills, i.e., focus on building cross-functional talent in the team.
Here’s are some skills that contribute to a seamless cross-channel customer journey:
a. Video Production Webinars, product videos, and brand story videos are on the rise across channels. End consumers not only love it but also respond to it instantly. Thus, video production is a skill that can help create videos that depict your brand-story perfectly. 80% of video marketers say video has directly helped increase sales– Wyzowl
b. Social Media Expertise People are growing their presence all over the social media platforms. This calls for a huge opportunity for you to invest in social media experts who know the forwards and backward of these advertising tools and can integrate it into the cross-channel commerce strategy.
Social networks are the biggest source of inspiration for consumer purchases with 37% of consumers finding purchase inspiration through the channel– PWC
c. Content Strategists Developing engaging and unique content weighs high in this customer-centric digital world. Whether it is the website or the app content, blogs, emails, newsletters, or even social media posts; you need to develop a relevant and consistent strategy. Hiring skilled content marketers would be your best bet here.
70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing– Hubspot
d. Analytics Experts Measuring your customer experience strategy can be done well by analytics experts. They are specialized individuals who can help you figure out the measure
of the impact that a particular channel creates. With knowledge of tools like Google Analytics, these experts can successfully narrow down your CX strategy.
Marketing leaders are 1.3X as likely as mainstream marketers to have a documented data and analytics strategy– Think With Google
4. Cross-Channel Analytics Guesswork does not work when concerned about getting your customer expectations right. You need to work it out with data-driven statistics that cannot go wrong. And, this is possible with having CRMs (Customer Relationship Management System) or even DXPs (Digital Experience Platform) to make the tracking simpler. These systems help unify customer’s data by representing it as a single entity. The best deal would be to integrate CRM and DXP for fool-proof customer engagement. Both systems can help integrate content, data, and brand voice. CRM will provide you with all the customer insights that will be consistent across channels. Further, you can act on this data to offer a good eCommerce experience. And, DXPs will help manage touchpoints with the help of various integrated technologies.
5. Customer Journey Mapping What path do your customers travel when browsing for a product on your website or app? That is the cross-channel customer journey you ought to track for offering to-the-point customer experience.
It might seem challenging to connect these data points, but customer journey mapping makes it a strategic process. It is like shadowing your customers and experiencing a walkthrough of their journey with your brand. Maximizing satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20% but also to lift revenue by up to 15% while lowering the cost of serving customers by as much as 20%– McKinsey
Consider creating buyer personas around target customer groups, and track them around your active channels. Where do they leave? What do they do? How much time do they spend on the digital commerce channel? Is your digital commerce strategy doing you any good? Answers to all these questions lie in customer journey maps that further help in mending the existing gaps.
Conclusion Working around cross-channel customer experience should be your number one priority because the idea is simple — Never lose context with your customers. If you come to think of it and drive your attention to customer needs, reaching your expected goals will not be a far-sighted dream.
To start with, get your understanding of what cross-channel means. Next, look for the missing pieces in your cross-channel customer experience strategy. And, finally, practice implementing a change according to what suits your business needs best. This way, you will be able to create a 360-degree experience for your search, buy, and service model, i.e., you will be able to orchestrate an optimal customer experience.
An organization’s objective revolves around satisfying and serving its customers, and that is exactly where most of the efforts should magnify.
Source
- https://www.netsolutions.com/insights/cross-channel-customer-experience/