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By Jennifer Torres
Omnichannel marketing is the key to meeting customers where they’re at and ensuring cohesive experiences across channels and devices.

It’s midnight in Arizona, and Martin can’t sleep. He opens his iPad and begins scrolling through a collection of flat screen TVs on the Walmart website. Within ten minutes, one catches his eye, and he drops it in his cart and finalizes the purchase.

Across the country in Florida, it’s 3 a.m., and Emily is on her smartphone eyeing a set of golf clubs a local pro shop advertised in an email. With a flick and click, they’re hers.

Once relegated to after-work hours or weekends, shoppers now make purchases around the clock — while at work, lunch, during their commute, on vacation and when they can’t sleep at 3 a.m.

And they often switch between multiple devices throughout the day. There’s the work computer, a personal laptop, home desktop, smart phone and iPad. And that doesn’t account for brick-and-mortar shoppers that want an in-store experience.

Brands can meet these customers where they are by offering products and services across various online and offline channels — on a website, app or social media account, via email or text, at retail locations and public events. Companies can capture it all through omnichannel marketing.

What Is Omnichannel Marketing?

Customers desire a positive, seamless experience — no matter the path they take or device they use. Omnichannel marketing seeks to enable that desire by creating a cohesive, unified journey for each customer across all brand channels.

Cohesiveness across channels is a critical component. As opposed to multichannel marketing, which includes multiple channels that remain separate, omnichannel allows all online and offline channels to work in unison across touchpoints, devices and departments. With it, customers can bounce from smartphone to laptop to retail store and have a smooth experience.

Major Retailers Embrace It

Many large retailers have already incorporated omnichannel strategies, making the customer journey easier and more convenient.

  • Starbucks provides an app for use both online and in-store, incorporating a rewards program that allows customers to avoid lines and order ahead, gain free refills, use birthday bonuses and earn points for free products.
  • Amazon aligns its experience across a retail website, streaming service, mobile apps and connected Alexa devices and smartwatches.
  • Walgreens unifies its brand between in-store and online purchases through a customer loyalty program app that provides rewards, discounts and information about in-store events and sales.
  • Home Depot offers an app to help customers find products online and in-store, also including live chat and image search.
  • Disney app and loyalty cards allow visitors to check ride times and book tickets without standing in a long line.

Social Media Sells

With an active, integrated presence on social media accounts, brands have the opportunity to create a community.

A report from Statista predicted that by 2026, worldwide sales through social media platforms will reach $2.9 trillion — with the most influential content for buyers coming from posts made by acquaintances and connections.

McKinsey & Company reported that, with 60% to 70% of consumers researching and making purchases online and in-store, omnichannel is here to stay and will continue to grow. Their research also revealed that social media channels influence all age groups — particularly younger customers.

Outstanding Omnichannel

If the message a brand sends is unified and consistent across all channels, it better be a good one. Knowing what’s important to consumers today can help organizations create the best communications and serve to reflect their commitment to providing a positive customer experience.

Salesforce’s 2022 analysis of consumer and business buyer data revealed several factors worthy  of consideration when creating an omnichannel platform, including:

Favourite Channels

  • Phone
  • In-person
  • Online chat

Channel Surfing

  • Customers turn to an average of nine different channels to communicate with companies.
  • 57% of customers prefer to engage through digital channels, but 43% prefer non-digital channels — meaning satisfying customers generally requires great experiences both online and offline.

Loyalty

  • 83% of customers say they’re more loyal to companies that provide consistency across departments.
  • 71% of consumers switched brands at least once in the past year. The top three reasons were better deals, better product quality and better customer service.

Experience

  • 88% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services.
  • 94% say a positive customer service experience makes them more likely to purchase again.

Emotion

  • 62% of customers feel an emotional connection to the brands they buy from most.

A recent Forrester report indicated that while customer experience rankings decreased for 19% of brands in 2022, the highest rankings were achieved by brands that provided customers with “high emotional quality” across their experiences.

And happy customers are a forgiving bunch — with data revealing that 54% of customers who feel happy, valued and appreciated are more willing to forgive brand mistakes.

Omnichannel in Action

Karla Medrano, a registered nurse and founder and operator of SGM Medical Marketing, said omnichannel marketing isn’t just about using every available channel for marketing, although that’s important too. It’s also about breaking down an organization’s various customer-facing channel-based silos.

“Being omnichannel is about taking a consumer-centric view of marketing tactics,” Medrano said. “In other words, the consumer’s experience comes first and your organization needs to be seamless in its branding, messaging and online and offline presence.”

When tasked with assisting AmbitCare in developing a stronger digital presence, Medrano employed an omnichannel strategy.

AmbitCare, a provider of free resources to physicians, caregivers and patients affected by rare diseases, had an inadequate social media presence. Medrano’s agency began to define content pillars and cohesive messaging across all channels to help potential patients learn about services. They also created content for the Spanish-speaking population.

After 60 days, said Medrano, the total net audience increased 81.3%.

Recently, her team implemented an omnichannel marketing strategy for a health/wellness start-up app specializing in post-partum. It’s still in the testing phase, but so far, Medrano said the results have been promising.

The app creators came to the agency with the issue of poor adherence rates; they wanted to find a way to help participants finish the program. Medrano created video content, personalized email templates and a system to respond to questions and concerns in a timely manner.

As a result of this strategy, Medrano said adherence rates improved by 40%.

“My omnichannel approach via texts, emails, video content and therapeutic communication to help moms through the program made them feel heard and supported,” she explained.

Omnichannel Oversights

According to a McKinsey & Company report, while the right omnichannel approach can potentially increase brand value, a disjointed or disorganized strategy can destroy it.

Medrano said that a few common errors in the omnichannel strategy include automating everything and thinking that being on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., is enough.

“Sometimes people need to know that there is a human on the other side so they can feel supported,” Medrano said. “A brand can have 10 channels and have rotten customer service vs. a brand that can have three channels and have quality customer service that includes a chat box, timely email responses, personalized attention, courtesy calls, flexible pay options, SMS and more.”

She said another mistake is not asking for customer feedback and not providing staff with proper training to ensure a cohesive conversation, tone and branding.

“Leadership doesn’t interact directly with customers, so they don’t always know what works and what doesn’t,” Medrano explained. “Every single interaction customers have with your brand…should help them feel heard and supported. Otherwise, you can potentially lose customers, receive bad reviews and lose revenue.”

Branding Blunders

With over 15 years of experience guiding large consumer brands to develop customer experiences that deliver shared value, Freelance CX Strategist Jenny Neilsen offered her list of the recurring mistakes brands make in their omnichannel marketing strategy:

  • Brands trying to scale their high-level brand messaging across channels without considering the devices or experience. Each marketing asset should be helping to move the prospect through the funnel, not just shouting the same tag line at them.
  • Saying they do omnichannel, but there is little coordination between in-house teams and agencies executing or designing the assets. All that equates to is running a lot of advertising simultaneously with little cohesion.
  • Not using what they know about their audiences to execute a smart campaign.

“Brands need to understand and use online and offline data points to deploy personalized experiences across channels and physical locations,” Neilsen said. “Every brand has hurdles when it comes to the shape and location of their data, so they either need to roll up their sleeves and make the data work for them manually or invest in technology to help them do it faster.”

It’s Not for Everyone

As founder of Jennis Consulting Group and co-founder of Founders Compass, a mentoring consultancy for new start-ups, Steve Jennis places omnichannel marketing at the bottom of the priority list for start-ups.

He believes omnichannel marketing is good for customer retention because customers return to places where they have a good buying experience. But for a new business, he classifies it as a “back-end operational process that comes after marketing and sales have been successful.” A good product coupled with solid marketing and sales should come first.

“Without good marketing and sales, omnichannel is useless as customers don’t have a good reason to buy anyway,” Jennis said. “As such, it’s pretty low down as a priority for a start-up unless it gives you a real competitive advantage. But better products, marketing and sales will be more effective at that than channel choices.”

By Jennifer Torres

Sourced from CMSWIRE

By Phil Britt

Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs are evolving from basic survey and customer feedback programs to more comprehensive programs that companies are using in a variety of ways for a mix of benefits.

In the 2021 Insight Voice of the Customer Survey,  global venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners found that half of the companies it surveyed had VoC programs.

Those that aren’t could be missing out because VoC programs have the potential to drive considerable company ROI by driving product innovation, demand gen, and higher rates of retention, Insight Partners said in a blog. “As a company’s customer base grows, VoC offers a scalable customer engagement platform that doubles up to generate rich customer insights while also fostering customer-centricity, brand affinity, and product stickiness.”

According to Levi Kugel, Quantum Metric director of customer success strategy, accelerating customer satisfaction is a key element but what’s going on in the trenches out there in organization’s. In a recent roundtable, a couple of Insight’s portfolio companies discussed their uses of VoC programs.

Using Voice of the Customer to Influence Strategy

VoC was in the founding DNA of the company with simple customer onboarding and exit surveys, said Real CMO Lynda Radosevich. “Then we started doing qualitative surveys to get more insight into what people were happy or unhappy with. Our VoC influences our product direction and strategy. What I most appreciate is that we have data going back to the beginning. Don’t be afraid to start gathering, even if you don’t have a strategy yet. You will find uses for it. We’ve used data for investors, we’ve used it for product roadmaps, we’ve used it to completely change our quarterly goals.”

Beyond the different VoC uses discussed by Quantum Metric and Real, other organizations are deploying VoC programs for other uses.

Creating and Organizing Comprehensive VoC Feedback

“VoC is an ‘essential’ — brands need to meet their customers where they are, whether that’s SMS, web, mobile app, social, or other digital channels, in order to fully capture the right insights at the right moment across the right channel,” said Jonathan D’Sousa, Emplifi vice president, product, social commerce cloud and service cloud. “It’s increasingly important to have VoC platforms support omnichannel feedback, and to be able to scale and support new channels on the horizon. This is especially the case with social media channels and their constant evolution.

VoC is becoming an integrated capability, D’Sousa added. “Customers are moving away from stand-alone survey tools, and look to VoC capabilities integrated within their marketing, customer service, and social commerce software tools and platforms. This is because ‘customer experience’ is relevant throughout the customer journey from marketing to sale to service to loyalty, and these touchpoints (and associated data) help shape VoC research.”

Many tools now provide templated surveys and feedback frameworks on everything from website design, product design, employee response surveys to typical service representative or brand experience feedback — this allows organizations to focus more on analysis and less on survey design.

Better Organization of Customer Journey Feedback

Too often feedback is merely thrown at executives without the proper context of who gave it, when it was received and where along the customer journey the feedback came in, according to David Ciccarelli, CEO of Voices.

To better organize such feedback, whoever is leading the VoC program needs to distill the customer journey into four or five steps, Ciccarelli said. “By keeping it high level and everyone agrees that those are the critical touch points, then plotting feedback along the journey will provide the missing context. By doing this it’s easier for executives to see and understand where the issues are and the volume of feedback at key touch points.”

Companies are then organizing the customer journey and highlighting comments in speech bubbles, coloured red, yellow or green depending on the sentiment.

Voice of the Customer Is Helping to Replace Cookies

“As the death of the cookie slowly overtakes advertisers and developers’ plans, first-party data has taken on a role of increased importance –– with the Voice of the Customer leading the charge,” said Anatoly Sharifulin, AppFollow CEO and founder. “Average rating and reviews are the most honest source of feedback from users and should be considered as the window to the voice of the customer. Understanding how users are feeling, and how they are communicating their ideas and perceptions is key to opening important conversations about your product.

Final Thoughts

Your customers hold the key to your business’ success. Voice of the Customer is an essential way of cracking that customer code to help improve your product, services and support.

Feature Image Credit: Unsplash/Roman Kraft

By Phil Britt

Sourced from CMSWire

By Naveen Joshi

Voice of the Customer technology is the latest among the different ways in which businesses keep their finger on the pulse of their customer base.

With the help of technologies like analytics and AI, Voice of the Customer can eventually become the primary source of market intelligence for businesses.

20 years ago in an interview, Jeff Bezos, the founder of a humble start-up named Amazon.com, emphasized his company’s focus on providing “great customer service” as their guiding mantra. That was the plan — simply to provide excellent customer service. And the success of the multi-billion dollar enterprise today is a testament to the effectiveness of that strategy. There are numerous other examples of businesses that have thrived by making their customers their singular point of focus, understanding their needs and problems, and solving those problems — profitably. Put simply, these businesses “listened” to the voice of the customer. And realizing this, businesses have been adopting different tools, technologies, and practices to gain a deeper understanding of their target customer base. From simple customer feedback forms to complex behavioural analytics, businesses are leaving no stone unturned to know what their customers want. And ‘voice of the customers’ technology is among the latest methods that businesses are adopting for gathering customer sentiments, feedback, and expectations.

What is ‘Voice of the Customer’ Technology?

Voice of customer technology is the set of processes and tools used to capture the customers’ sentiments, feedback, likes, and dislikes. The information gathered is used to provide customers with improved products and services.

The term ‘voice of the customer’ has already been used in the field of product development. In a product management practice known as Quality Function Deployment (QFD), the voice of the customer, i.e., the customers’ needs and expectations as expressed by the customers are translated into benefits and features of products. These translate into specifications and design requirements for the engineers and the manufacturers. These features are then Incorporated into the product design. Using such an approach during product development ensures that products developed are always designed to maximize customer satisfaction.

Voice of the customer technology is used for a similar purpose — using customers’ feedback and opinions to improve their products and services.

How are Businesses Leveraging Voice of the Customer?

Voice of the customer technology is being used by many leading businesses to gather data from customers through a variety of sources. These processes have include technologies like data analytics and, recently, artificial intelligence to translate the insights provided by customers into product and service quality. Following are a few ways in which voice of the customer technology is being used:

Voice of the Customer Technology

1. Gathering Customer Feedback

The best source of information for businesses regarding the efficacy of their operations in ensuring customer satisfaction is the customers’ personal feedback. Businesses, during different parts of the marketing and sales processes all for customer feedback. This may include gathering feedback through email, website, and also surveys. Customers voluntarily express their likes and dislikes regarding the different aspects of businesses’ products or services. The responses gathered through such mediums are used to derive valuable insights using data analytics. Businesses can also use artificial intelligence and natural language processing to make sense of the large volume of feedback and reviews received from customers and identify patterns that can drive product improvement.

2. Monitoring Customer Interactions

In addition to analysing the direct feedback received from customers, businesses also monitor the interactions of customers with the business. For instance, businesses can analyze the chat conversations between customers and customer care executives if the business to know what customers are interested in and what problems they consistently have.

3. Analysing Customer Behaviour

Voice of the customer technology also includes social media analytics to gauge customer sentiment regarding brands as well as specific offerings. This can help businesses understand the general reception of their products among the mainstream audience. Businesses can use content analytics to gain market intelligence and understand trends that are relevant to their target demographics. With the advent of technologies like IoT, businesses can also analyse customer behaviour when they are in contact with the business (e.g., a retail store) or while using the product or service. This can enable businesses to gain even deeper insights into customer needs and preferences.

Why Businesses Need Voice of the Customer Technology?

Voice of the customer technology can be used by businesses as a way to guide both their strategic and operational decisions in a direction that ensures maximum customer satisfaction.

1. Improving product and service quality

The primary purpose of voice of the customer technology is to improve a business’s offerings. Voice of the customer technology and programs enable organizations to receive valuable feedback from customers that can guide product designers to build satisfactory products. This especially helps when voice of the customer is used before launching new products. Conducting customer surveys and along with them, the right questions can give product teams unprecedented perspectives while making product-related decisions.

2. Enhancing Customer Experience

Using voice of the customer technology enables businesses to respond better to customer needs in all situations. Thus, businesses are able to create great customer experiences. Using voice of the customer applications, businesses can deliver services that can cater to the specific needs of different customers, which helps in improving customer engagement and loyalty.

Nearly every industry is transitioning away from a transactional model where customer interactions were one-off occurrences. Most businesses, even those that sell physical goods, are now focusing on providing their customers with brand experiences instead of just packaged products. And offering customers a good brand experience requires a deep understanding of the customer’s needs and demands. And what better way to get this information than from the customers themselves?

3. Fixing Recurring Issues

Actively listening to the opinions, reviews, and comments of customers and the general public can help burgesses understand the biggest and the most recurrent problems among their customers with their products or services. This can help them fix these problems in their products or services and ensure that these problems don’t repeat again. This goes a long way in improving customer trust and loyalty. Additionally, businesses can also listen for their target demographic’s problems and create whole new products to solve them, generating new revenue streams in the process.

4. Staying Agile

Ultimately, using voice of the customer technology helps businesses stay agile in a highly dynamic market. Customer needs are evolving rapidly with time, and the businesses that are able to keep up with these demands are the ones that are thriving in any given industry. Knowing this, businesses are adopting voice of the customer technology to keep abreast of the changing customer needs and translating these needs into new product and service design specifications. This way, businesses are minimizing the chances of losing relevance and competitiveness.

Being the most direct source of information regarding market demand, voice of the customer progress and technology will see increased use in the future. With the development of technologies like AI, analytics, and IoT, businesses will have even better visibility into their customers’ psyche. However, information without timely action is useless, and hence businesses should also devise systems to respond to the voice of the customer in a timely fashion. To that end, the use of things like AI and IoT can be the real game-changers.

By Naveen Joshi

Naveen is the Founder and CEO of Allerin, a software solutions provider that delivers innovative and agile solutions that enable to automate, inspire and impress. He is a seasoned professional with more than 20 years of experience, with extensive experience in customizing open source products for cost optimizations of large scale IT deployment. He is currently working on Internet of Things solutions with Big Data Analytics. Naveen completed his programming qualifications in various Indian institutes.

Sourced from BBN Times