Customers today have more knowledge, access to information, and power than ever before. Providing an omnichannel customer experience is your best bet to delight your customers at every step of the way.
If they don’t enjoy doing business with you, they will simply jump ship to another company in the industry, one that is embracing modern channels.
If you want to impress your customers and maintain their business, you need to embrace an omnichannel experience. This way, you will be seen as best-in-class in your industry and in the business world in general, increasing your bottom line in the process.
But what is an omnichannel experience?
Why is it so important, and how can you provide your customers with a consistent way to access your business solutions?
That is what we will address in this article so that you can create a plan to use this strategy in your business.
Without further ado, let’s get started!
Table of Contents
What is an omnichannel experience?
First, let’s talk about what an omnichannel experience is in case you haven’t heard of it before.
Omnichannel refers to the integration of multiple platforms — such as instant messaging, social networks, texting, and email — in a way that creates a consistent user experience for your customers.
By leveraging an omnichannel mindset, you can serve your clients at a higher level that is more effective and convenient, which will, in turn, boost your brand’s trust and credibility.
Understand Your Audience
The first step in any business endeavor is to take a step back and look at your target audience.
By understanding your core market on a deeper level, you can ensure that your project actually meets their needs so you can earn their continued business.
Here are some key steps in understanding your audience better:
- Survey past customers to ask them what they liked (and didn’t like) about your company’s various channels.
- Use keyword research to uncover hidden problems that your market has. You can use this research to build new pages or accounts for your omnichannel experience.
- Use analytics to track your customers’ behaviors and responses to your various channel strategies and improve upon your setup with consistent iterations.
With this information, you will be able to tailor your offer to what your customers want, ensuring they continue to do business with you.
Map Your Customer Journey
Long gone are the days where your customer journey only included one or two steps, such as a phone call, in-person visit, or document sent over a fax machine.
Today, your customer can find your business and take unique journeys that involve multiple steps and platforms.
In order to determine the best way to create your omnichannel strategy, you need to map that journey out — both in terms of the sales process (as a higher-level concept) and the specific pages or applications they will use along the way to complete the sale.
That way, you can align your various platforms to feed into each other for a seamless experience.
Improve Social Media Response Time
Customers have a very low tolerance for technical difficulties or anything that may slow down the process of resolving their issues.
When they reach out to your company — especially on social media — they expect a fast response.
Resources like Twitter and Facebook are both a blessing and a curse in this sense.
Customers will expect you to have accounts on these platforms and be active and swift in responding to any inquiries.
Ensure that you are responding to queries within 30 to 60 minutes, even if you don’t completely resolve the issue right away.
If possible, use a script that automatically replies to customers on Facebook because it will boost your average response time.
A slower time could erode trust between you and your market.
Also, set up keyword tracking on your social media pages.
Certain phrases and terms will be brought to your team’s attention as an urgent request that needs a live representative to offer resolution in the fastest manner possible.
Enable Self-Service
Since many customers are more used to using the web to solve their problems, they may often prefer a self-service option.
It’s a good idea to cater to these customers not only because you will improve customer satisfaction, but you will also reduce your customer service agent costs.
A great way to provide self-service solutions is through in-depth FAQs, videos, and other documentation. Here are some things to keep in mind:
- Make your FAQs comprehensive yet easy to navigate.
- Use A/B testing to make sure your self-service resources are meeting customer needs.
- Hire excellent copywriters that turn customers into loyal fans by creating a compelling experience.
Equipping your customers with the means to resolve some common issues on their own will improve their impression of your business, while also leaving your team more time to deal with more demanding matters.
Have Responsive Design
On your company’s actual website or landing page, you need to have responsive features.
These features will ensure that your site resizes and reorganizes appropriately for a wide range of mobile, tablet, and desktop device sizes and brands.
With so many ways to access your website, you never know where your next ideal customer might come from.
Building your website with frameworks that are responsive is a must if you want to capture your traffic and convert it with your on-page sales and marketing messages.
Have a Good Mobile App
If you run a business in today’s digital age without an excellent mobile app, you will be fighting an uphill battle.
Mobile phones are the most popular and easily accessed platform for most consumers.
With a mobile app, you can allow customers to make purchases, contact support, and receive important updates directly from your brand in an easy and convenient fashion.
Here are some tips to provide a great mobile app experience:
- Offer mobile-friendly FAQs and other self-support resources.
- Make your customer service button highly visible on your main page.
- Make contacting your company easy with a button to call support or live chat on mobile.
- Integrate a tracking system for all mobile customer inquiries.
- Market your app just like you would with any other product or service so customers will actually install it.
A mobile app grants you access to your customers in a way that allows you to both solve their problems and market your products to them more efficiently.
Embrace Live Chat
Customers naturally want to solve their problems in the quickest possible way that also offers the least amount of hassle. This is especially true with high-level executives and enterprise customers who are short on time.
Nothing tells your customers that they are a high priority like responding instantly with live chat.
Here are some live chat tips to keep your customers satisfied:
- Use a reliable software that works across all of your digital channels.
- Create a chatbot script that sounds human, not robotic, and that leaves room for improvisation by your team based on the customer’s needs.
- Upload live chat logs into a CRM to refer back to and put customers’ situations into context.
- Keep manuals and help resources handy so you can send them to customers in real time.
You can even combine chatbots and live agents in your customer support, with the former handling the more routine questions and escalating the more complex issues to the latter if need arises.
Conclusion
Today’s market is more savvy and demanding than ever before. That means running a business has new challenges that didn’t exist even 10 or 15 years ago.
In order to navigate this new business world and avoid making key mistakes, you need to use omnichannel strategies that ensure your customers have a consistent experience across multiple platforms.
If you don’t, your competition could cut into your market share.
So don’t fall into the trap of ignoring all of the channels available to you. Use them as one cohesive unit.
That way, your sales, marketing, and customer service will be integrated in a way that helps your customers better and grows your brand’s revenue at the same time.
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Related posts:
- How to Provide Your Customers With an Omnichannel Experience - February 17, 2021
