Remove Data Silos For A Great Omnichannel Customer Experience

Customers connect with brands over multiple channels during their buying journey- official website, app, social media and others. Their final decision to make a purchase depends on the experience the brand provides on all the channels. A great omnichannel Customer Experience is a major goal of marketers. However, in most cases, this experience is broken.

 

Omnichannel Experience is Broken

There are several examples. The other day, I booked a banker’s cheque on my bank’s website to be picked up from my nearest physical branch. But when I reached the branch to pick it up, they had absolutely no clue. There are several other examples - text messages sending you information that is obsolete, email offers not working on websites, stock information shown on websites not matching with in-store inventory and so on. 

As the number of channels, devices and applications increase, this issue worsens. As a result, the user experience is inconsistent and erratic. It is often different across different touch points.

There are several reasons for these inconsistancies.

Different Content Across Different Channels

In several traditional implementations, the content is often duplicated across channels.

Imagine this: You create some content for your website. You copy that and paste it for your next week’s newsletter in your email marketing platform. Same content now resides in 2 channels. You update it at one place, you will need to update it at other place as well. Now  let’s say you have 10 channels (email, website, website 2, social1, social 2 and so on). What about 50 channels?

The figure below summaries this issue.

So basically, each channel (or application or service) has its own content requirements. And consequently its own content repository, workflows, workflows, taxonomy and all that. You might repurpose some of it across channels but in general, each of those is an island on its own. 

And it’s not just the content silos that are all around. You also have data silos all around. Your key customer data resides in a host of zero-, first-, second- and third-party data sources. Your business logic, for example, for personalising experiences, also resides in those channels. So you have a set of personalization rules for your marketing automation or email marketing. And then you have another set of personalization rules in your site management or CMS or WCM tool. There is no easy way to standardize or even align those. This obviously leads to an inconsistent user experience. This also means you are unable to execute any Omnichannel use-cases such as Personalization, Recommendations, Analytics or Support, across all channels and at scale.

What Should You Do?

You need to think of removing these silos - silos of content, data, rules and everything.  What that means is that you have to think of newer architectural paradigms that allow you to treat some of these as principal elements of an Omnichannel stack. And it’s not just about buying fancy technology, but also about changing the way you think about Marketing. 

I’ll admit it’s easier said than done. But we can help. Reach out to me directly or Contact us by filling this form.

Oh, and by the way, I did this webinar recently in which I talked more about some of these issues and how you can address those: