Omnichannel

How to Implement an Effective Omnichannel Strategy?

Two words: Customer Service. That is all that stands between a good brand and one that doesn’t succeed. These days companies are running in the race for customer loyalty by leveraging customer service and better customer experiences. In fact, customer service ensures better returns for your business over product quality. After all, a customer wouldn’t want to be associated with a brand that takes you for granted.

Some of our previous posts have discussed how you can streamline your business operations and marketing strategies to offer better customer service. In this guide, we dive into how an omnichannel marketing strategy can help you achieve the same.

What is an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy?

Simply put, omnichannel is the provision of customer support over all channels. That is the entire essence of an omnichannel strategy – to be present everywhere. You need to reach your customers wherever they want and wherever they are active. It might not be necessary, but you have to be available to address them.

This holistic approach to dealing with customers helps businesses provide seamless service in an otherwise frustrating experience. An omnichannel strategy also helps deal with off-hand customer demands related to a product or a service.

In short, an omnichannel marketing strategy strives to make the customer experience hassle-free and uniformly satisfying across numerous channels. This is important as it empowers your customers and meets their requirements. It also ensures the quick resolution of customer grievances.

Here are the major benefits of an omnichannel digital strategy:

  1. Customer effort is greatly reduced as they don’t have to contact you for every small piece of information.
  2. You connect with the users, which builds rapport and helps you gain your customers’ trust.
  3. The increase in customer loyalty channels better opportunities for your business. This helps build a positive, customer-oriented reputation.

An effective Omnichannel strategy lets you increase the scope of customer support without compromising on quality.

The Role of Customer Experience in Omnichannel </H3>

An omnichannel strategy provides customers with a seamless user experience across any channel, whether social media, in-store, or SMS. This can have a considerable impact on customer satisfaction, loyalty, and, thus, retention.

It can also increase sales, customer lifetime value, and positive word-of-mouth marketing.

How to Develop an Omnichannel Marketing Framework?

Create a Buyer Persona

The first step to developing an omnichannel strategy is identifying prospective clients by creating a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a fictionalized version of your customer profile created using existing customers’ buying habits, demographics, behavior, the mode of communication they prefer, and more.

The persona must also consist of finer details such as their purchase frequency, preferred mode of payment, traffic source, and other information that helps map the customer journey in detail.

Map Your Customer Journey

In an omnichannel strategy, all customer journeys occur simultaneously over many platforms. Therefore, there must be no gaps in the system so customers can seamlessly move through their journey, from awareness to advocacy, over whichever platforms they interact with.

Mapping your customer journey will outline all the touchpoints a customer has with your business. Therefore, you can identify the opportunities and information needed to connect with your customers across varying online and offline channels. This will help connect and streamline processes at all stages of the buyer’s journey.

Choose Your Marketing Platforms

Once you understand your customer’s journey, you can choose the channels or marketing platforms through which you will conduct outreach. Consider the strengths and weaknesses of each channel for various buyer personas, and use past data to see which channels have performed better for a given metric. This will help you prioritize and develop channels that deliver strong results.

For example, for a B2B company, channels like email marketing and educational blogs are better at reaching potential customers than SMS marketing. Therefore, an omnichannel B2B strategy involves using similar channels and can be highly beneficial.

Carry Out Seamless Integration of All Channels

Integrating all marketing channels and ensuring that each share the same customer data is the backbone of an omnichannel approach. Proper integration provides seamless and consistent customer experience across all channels while avoiding duplication of work or effort.

For instance, the same data must be shared across other channels if a customer purchases in a brick-and-mortar store. At this stage, a well-integrated omnichannel strategy would help a business retain the customer or lead them into the advocacy stage in the buyer’s journey. For example, once the purchase is completed, the customer could receive an email with a discount on their next purchase.

Make Customer Support Your Topmost Priority

Customer service is crucial to ensure customer retention in the long run. While it’s essential for businesses to share data across all their marketing channels, integrating customer support channels is just as important.

Businesses must also improve the customer experience through personalization, such as using customer names in communications, suggesting products based on their previous purchases, and so on.

Measure Your Performance

Businesses must use data analytics to measure the success of their omnichannel strategy. Gather and analyze customer engagement, customer satisfaction, and revenue data to understand what’s working and what isn’t.

This data can be crucial in optimizing your strategy to meet customer demands and improve their overall experience. This could involve experimenting with new channels, refining existing ones, making changes based on customer feedback, and much more.

Successful Omnichannel Strategies

BonLook

BonLook is a prescription eyeglass brand from Canada. Being a high-touch purchase, shopping for prescription eyewear seems like an in-person activity. However, BonLook used an omnichannel strategy to integrate the in-person shopping experience with the online shopping experience and offered potential customers a shopping guide with a virtual try-on feature.

BonLook has ensured that customers are offered a seamless experience whether they shop in-store or via the virtual store on the brand’s website. Data is shared across channels so associates can track inventories and orders in real-time, whether they’re placed in-store, on the website, or the mobile app.

Rothy’s

Rothy’s is a sustainable footwear brand and a prime omnichannel strategy example for customer service. Rothy’s wanted to ensure their customers did not have to repeat their issues across varying channels before resolving them.

They implemented an omnichannel strategy that shared customer and purchase data across channels so that the support team could seamlessly resolve issues. For example, if a customer wanted to know when a certain item would be back in stock, they could reach out via social media to pose the question.

After the support team responds to the query via social media, an email could be sent out to notify the customer whenever the item comes back in stock. All actions across different channels are integrated to resolve the customer’s query. Customer support neither misses out on a sale nor hounds the customer because multiple reps reached out regarding the same issue.

Is Outsourcing Right?

Outsourcing is using a single service to cover all the channels associated with customer service. Example: Think of a time when you got a consolidated reply from a brand on social media and email. Outsourcing lets businesses focus on the product and ensure a great customer experience. However, outsourcing still leaves a lot of scope for discussion.

This is because outsourced customer service does not always originate from the brand. Delegating customer service often has pros and cons, some of which we discuss below.

Advantages Of Outsourcing Your Omnichannel Digital Strategy

Why is omnichannel important? Here are some advantages of this strategy –

  1. Cost efficiency: Since all your customer service originates from the same front, the management gets cheaper and simpler.
  2. Centralized: A single provider handles all your customer service aspects. This centralized approach provides uniformity to your approach. It also helps consolidate customer data.
  3. Less involvement: You can free up a big chunk of your time. This lets you facilitate any requirements with the product. You can rest easy as the customer is always cared for.
  4. Staff independence: No hassles in training a new batch of customer service executives. All you have to do is provide a sheet of adequate information and data to the provider.

Disadvantages Of Outsourcing Your Omnichannel Strategy

  1. Cost for value: The value-oriented features might not always apply to your business’ customer service. This often diminishes the value of the purchased plan.
  2. Less flexibility: Quite simply, you get what you pay for. You have to pick a plan, and all the activities related to the plan will apply to your customer service. No cherry-picking unless there is a provision for one.
  3. Less accurate and low control: Direct customer service often is tailored to a problem or a customer. That is why startups and small businesses have better customer service. With outsourcing, customer service turns a little less precise.
  4. Less Customer-centric: Your provider might not really care for your customers. After all, they are your customers, not theirs. This removes any scope for personalization from your customer service.

Best Practices For An Omnichannel Strategy

Craft A Plan

Take an honest look at your business activities and identify your goals. Try and ascertain the requirements and challenges of developing an omnichannel strategy for your business.

Assess your current customer support system. Identify its weaknesses from the perspective of your customers. Do not try to emulate excessive measures used by other businesses, as they might not work for your business.

The essence of crafting a business plan is to cater to your customers. Thus, it is necessary to map your omnichannel strategy to your customer’s needs.

Create a customer support experience that is helpful for your customers. Emulate what’s good, improve the basics, and craft your service niche.

 Work On The Actionable Data

Use the data related to your customers’ habits, expectations, and requirements while trying to extrapolate some actionable insights from the data.

Once you get a hold of the common issues and problems, you can address them quickly. You can also create a template to ensure an easier way to handle similar requests. You can also request the customers for their requirements through surveys. This provides a privilege to the customer.

Power of Integration

You must integrate different channels of customer service. This step lets you assess all your channels and allows you to tailor your customer service approach.

Integrating your channels enables you to provide a seamless and more targeted customer service experience.

Precision Is Key

As a business owner, you can select a trusted professional for specific areas of customer service. However, choosing a specialist does not mean isolating your customer service. You should ideally create a cohesive support model where different providers are at complete ease with each other.

You must also ensure a sustainable and successful strategy that you can carve out for your staff to avoid work-related burnout. Once you do this, you can increase the precision with which you handle your customers. This increases the overall competence and reflects directly in your company’s revenues.

Train Your Team and Customers

An ideal omnichannel strategy is about possessing the proper tools and ensuring that your team uses them to their full utility. The objective is to remain flexible and craft a resilient customer support model.

Train your support staff, weeding out any obstacles between the customers and the customer service teams. You should also focus on empowering your customers to get the most out of the channels they are on. Introduce them to resources, features, templates, and tutorials, offering them a means to use your services efficiently and with ease.

Challenges of Implementing an Omnichannel Strategy

While implementing an omnichannel strategy has several benefits, it also presents certain challenges.

Lack of Attribution

The first challenge that an omnichannel strategy presents is a general lack of attribution. This occurs when a purchase is made through one channel, but there is no clear way to track what inspired a customer to make that decision.

Suppose a customer walks into a clothing store to buy a dress they had originally seen as part of a company’s social media strategy. In that case, the store gets credit for the purchase decision.

This makes it challenging for businesses to understand which channels resonate with customers.

Connecting Online and Offline Data

Another challenge that businesses often face is of combining online and offline data. It’s significantly easier to track purchase information online, but the same can be a challenge in offline channels, such as in-store purchases.

One solution to this problem is to attribute a unique code or link to each offline source while gathering information, such as where a customer came across your business, be it on Instagram, targeted ads, or a website.

One-Size Fits All Content

One-size fits all content occurs when businesses push a single message across various channels, sounding robotic and often providing irrelevant information. This is a major drawback, as most customers expect a more personalized experience from brands they engage with.

Therefore, businesses must map the customer’s journey to understand which channel best suits each stage while customizing communication using past buyer data, preferences, feedback, and more.

FAQs

What Is The Difference Between An Omnichannel And A Multi-Channel Strategy?

While multichannel and omnichannel strategies use multiple channels to reach customers, the latter involves integrating these channels to offer a seamless experience.

What Are The Key Components Of An Effective Omnichannel Strategy?

An omnichannel marketing framework comprises several components, some of which include creating a buyer persona, mapping the buyer’s journey, selecting the right marketing channels, integrating them seamlessly, and evaluating your business’ performance.

How Can Companies Ensure The Seamless Integration Of Channels In An Omnichannel Strategy?

Integrating channels is the backbone of any successful omnichannel strategy. It can be achieved by creating a database of all the data gathered across multiple channels and providing them to all the teams involved (website, social media, in-store, etc.)

Can Omnichannel be applied to B2B and B2C businesses?

Yes, an omnichannel strategy can be applied to B2C and B2B businesses. Both involve the steps mentioned earlier to ensure effective implementation to maximize customer satisfaction.

Vijaya heads the Global Support team at JustCall, where he has played a pivotal role in expanding the support team and diversifying its channels and services. Under his guidance, the team consistently earns top customer satisfaction scores. With a passion for team-building, Vijaya is committed to empowering his staff to deliver unparalleled customer experiences. In addition to his managerial responsibilities, he is a certified Leadership Coach, specializing in helping leaders overcome their unique challenges to achieve success.

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