Editorial
The Gist
- Strategy shift. Omnichannel customer journey strategies prioritize personalization over mere consistency across channels.
- AI boost. AI in customer experience enables seamless and dynamic interactions, lifting the effectiveness of omnichannel strategies.
- Data power. AI personalization leverages customer data for meaningful engagement, driving loyalty and satisfaction.
Omnichannel engagement is no longer bound to just providing an identical experience across all channels; it’s about providing a personalized experience that is tailored to each individual customer. While most organizations aim for an omnichannel customer journey, many focus on multichannel instead. With multichannel, the focus is the channel; there’s still a consistent brand and message, but it’s the same message across channels. For instance, with multichannel, the same user may be offered a $100 coupon across channels like email, Facebook and Instagram.
With omnichannel customer journey strategies, the user may see the $100 coupon via email, be shown educational videos on Instagram to get them to reengage with the website, and once on the website, then show the $100 coupon again.
Navigating the Omnichannel Customer Journey: From Data to Personalization
Omnichannel is centralized around the customer journey. It provides a personalized experience rather than a consistent experience. This means that companies need to collect data about their customers to account for how a customer’s journey changes based on the previous interactions on different channels.
The key tenants of an omnichannel customer journey strategy are:
- Consistency: Customers should have a consistent experience across all channels, regardless of which channel they choose to interact with a company.
- Personalization: Customers should be able to personalize their interactions with a company, and the company should be able to personalize its interactions with customers.
- Relevance: The company should provide customers with relevant content and offers based on their past interactions on any channel — in person or online channels.
- Engagement: The company should engage with customers in a way that is meaningful and relevant to them.
- Measurement: The company should measure the effectiveness of its omnichannel engagement efforts.
Related Article: Implementing AI in Omnichannel Strategies for Seamless Customer Experiences
Tech Limits and the Struggle for Omnichannel Experiences
So many of our everyday digital experiences are restricted by the technology stack that provides the interactions. I hear from many peers and customers that they can’t improve an experience due to specific technology or IT backlog to change that technology. Many times, a specific technology solution is implemented for a single department or specific channel need; there wasn’t consideration for how that solution may restrict or integrate with other solutions to enable omnichannel experiences.
Mastering omnichannel engagement also means teams need to build digital experience tech stacks that enable them to utilize data to create personalized experiences, administer a uniform experience across all channels and access a unified view of the customer across all channels.
Related Article: Seamless Omnichannel Strategy: Best Practices for Customer Engagement
Administering a Uniform Experience Across All Channels
The first step to mastering omnichannel engagement is to understand your customers' needs and expectations. It’s important for marketers to challenge themselves to think about what customers are looking for when they interact with your brand, how they want to be contacted, and identifying what their pain points are. Ask yourself, what is their journey today?
Tailor Your Omnichannel Customer Journey
Once you understand your customers, you can start to tailor your omnichannel strategy to meet their needs. I recommend using an Experiencing Mapping tool to design the preferred journey. As you see below, this map lays out the customer interaction, touchpoints, emotions, and the data and systems being used. By mapping out the existing journey, you will identify key pain points and better understand your customers.
Not All Channels Are Equal
With this map, you can identify the right channels to reach your desired customer. Not all channels are created equal; some channels are better suited for certain types of interactions than others. For example, you might use email for more transactional interactions, while you might use social media for more social interactions; you’ll want to identify the right channel to meet your intent and goals. You will also be able to identify which systems and data that will be tracked to leverage.
Considering Content and Personalization
Creating engaging content and experiences across all channels by aligning with your content strategy and layering your personalization approach is key to high customer engagement. Your content strategy should contain “consistent” messaging that is on brand as well — it should also indicate the areas of personalization such as demographic categories, individual customer behavior, etc.
You can design atomized content that can be dynamically used based on your content strategy and personalization approach. For example, you may have banner images for specific regions, or product lifestyle shots for certain demographics, or unique text for individual customers. This atomized content can be repurposed across channels to deliver an experience that builds on personalized interactions across channels.
Related Article: AI in Marketing: More Personalization in the Next Decade
Track Your Omnichannel Customer Journey Engagement
Finally, It’s crucial for companies to track your customer engagement across all channels and identify areas where you can optimize results. It’s important to remember that no matter how much planning you do, you cannot always predict how your content strategy will land in the real world with real humans; it’s important to measure what is working and identify areas that aren’t and improve those key areas.
Establishing a Unified View of the Customer Across All Channels
Composable technologies are paramount to solving these challenges. Within your organization, you should be able to swap out different technologies without disrupting the existing framework.This will provide you the flexibility to introduce new technologies for new channels. Organizations who have a composable infrastructure can employ composable content, data, design and journeys to catalyze composable engagement.
Share & Integrate Data
These technologies need to be able to share data and integrate via APIs or out-of-the-box connectors to deliver omnichannel custome journey experiences. I recommend implementing a CDP for any organization that is striving to reach omnichannel success. A CDP takes data sources from across your technology stack, creates a single 360 customer view, and builds audience segments and selects the right channel to activate downstream.
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Final Thoughts on Omnichannel Customer Journeys
Currently, AI capabilities help in cohesively executing omnichannel customer journey strategies, including automating and scaling experiences across channels. AI aids companies in delivering a seamless and personalized experience to their customers and is critical to the success of the omnichannel strategy — enhancing the key tenants such as personalization and data analytics, which provide insights into customer behavior. Prioritizing omnichannels engagement will improve the overall customer experience which can lead to increased loyalty and satisfaction.
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