Great products are no longer enough for brands to earn and retain customers. Customers today expect businesses to understand and fulfil their unique and changing requirements and offer them personalised experiences.
Providing an omnichannel customer experience involves selling goods and providing customer service on multiple channels. Today’s customers don’t just use a single channel to interact with a business. Apart from the traditional channels like phone and email, customers also have the option to use social media to interact with and even shop from brands. Omnichannel customer experience integrates all these channels to increase customer satisfaction. It allows businesses and their customers to begin their interactions and transactions on one channel and pick up where they left off on another.
Ways To Improve The Omnichannel Customer Experience
Gather Customer Feedback
Even though data can help you to understand your customers, there is nothing like in-person interactions to get a complete insight into customer needs and behaviour. Some of the ways you can gather customer feedback personally are by conducting post-purchase surveys, exit intent surveys, and post-issue resolution surveys. Customer feedback can help you assess your business’s performance and product quality, and identify and resolve any issues in advance to ensure customer satisfaction.
Offer Customer Support On Multiple Channels
Today’s customers look for convenience in their purchasing journey. They expect businesses to support them where they are. If they don’t find the information they need about a business on their desired platform, they will turn to a competitor.
Fast customer response time is not optional today. Customer response time is the amount of time a business takes to answer customer queries and plays an important role in ensuring customer satisfaction. Offering customers fast support on all their preferred platforms will increase their trust and loyalty towards your business and in turn revenue and reputation for you.
Provide Real-Time Inventory Updates
It can be frustrating for your customers to learn that their desired product is out of stock only after placing an order for it. Providing them with real-time stock availability updates on all your platforms saves them this time and helps you to retain their satisfaction.
Offer Free And Fast Order Delivery
The words “free” and “fast” are music to the ears of today’s customers. They are the topmost reasons why customers choose to do business with brands. As a result, a fulfilment method called “Buy Online, Pick Up In-Store” (BOPIS) is becoming increasingly popular today. It allows customers to buy products from the website of a store, pay for them online, and pick them up from the store’s outlet that is nearest to them. This eliminates the wait for customers for their orders, saves them from paying shipping costs, increases their satisfaction levels, and encourages them to shop more with brands.
Simplify The Returns Process
Customers returning products are already dissatisfied with brands, and if the returns process is not easy, it can make things worse for both of them. It can result in customers permanently abandoning and leaving negative reviews for brands and switching to their competitors, causing them financial and reputational loss.
“Buy Online, Return In-Store” (BORIS) is a strategy that speeds up the returns process for customers and does not cost them. However, customers might not always be able to visit a store’s outlet to return products. Having multiple local drop-off points enables customers to visit one that is closest to them. Customers should also have the option to drop the packages at their nearest post office.
Customers should be able to find and understand the returns policy easily on your website to be able to return products without any hassle. The policy should be written in simple words and displayed on a webpage that customers visit frequently.
Create A Personalised Mobile App
Customers today use mobile apps for every task in every aspect of their lives. Mobile apps are popular as they are easy to use and can be used anywhere and on the go, even without an internet connection. They also speed up the shopping process by eliminating the need to type in a URL to start shopping.
People are more likely to use mobile apps if they are personalised. Once a customer logs into an app, it collects information like their location, demographics, their search and purchase history, wishlist, etc. You can use this data to understand customer preferences and to recommend relevant products and offers to them. Syncing customer data across all your platforms will enable you to provide them with a satisfying shopping experience on all of them. For example, once a customer purchases a product from your store using a QR code, you can send him a notification on your app with suggestions for complementary products to purchase on the app.
Map Your Customer Journey
Understanding your customers’ journey is an important step in the process of improving it. The customer journey consists of the steps taken by a customer in the process of interacting with a brand from the point of discovering a brand to making a purchase with it. Once you understand your customer journey, the next step is to identify their pain points at each step of the journey and take action to solve them. This process is called customer journey mapping. Creating just one map for your entire customer base is not enough, as each customer’s experience with your brand will be unique. You have to decide if you want to choose your loyal customer base, your new customer base, or any particular demographic of customers to create your customer journey map.
