Omnichannel engagement: The key to superior customer experience

We all know that successful businesses do all they can to enhance the customer experience. While both multichannel and omnichannel marketing has been suggested, it is the latter that seems to have found favor for its host of benefits. Before we move further, let’s first understand the difference between the two:

Multichannel marketing: In a nutshell, multichannel marketing is the ability to interact with prospective customers through various channels, including social media, mobile, direct mail, print ads, landing pages, and websites. Each channel operates independently from the other marketing channels, and each has its strategy and goals.

Omnichannel marketing:Again, omnichannel marketing involves interacting with customers via various channels, but it focuses on delivering a multichannel sales approach that provides customers with an integrated experience. Unlike multichannel marketing, where each channel operates separately, omnichannel marketing involves integrating all the different channels so that it can provide a seamless, connected experience.

Out of the two, omnichannel marketing is a better solution to enhance customer experience effectively. Before we discuss why you must go for it, let the numbers speak for themselves! TEI deployed the Genesys Omnichannel engagement solution and saw an increased ROI across contact center operations of 158%. Also, according to Harvard Business Review, 73% of consumers utilize multiple channels throughout their path to make a purchase.

Here’s why you should go for omnichannel marketing

We all know how customers want convenience, which means you must deliver to them what they want in a manner that is most feasible for them. One such relevant example is the Bank of America. They understand omnichannel engagement well, which is why they provided their customers to pay monthly bills through a medium of their choice - through a mobile device, desktop apps, etc. This is why an increasing number of customers connect with the brand!

For a marketer, customer insights are gold! They help you understand the customers’ behavior and also make any changes so that the user has the best experience. Since omnichannel engagement is unified, it makes it easier to have all the data in one dashboard. When you have all this data, it helps you create better strategies for growth.

With time, customers have become more demanding, and marketers have to keep stepping up their efforts to keep pace! This also means that there is a sense of urgency in customers to have their needs met. If, as a brand, you can’t deliver real-time answers to queries, you are disappointing customers and encouraging them to leave. With omnichannel marketing, you can engage with your customers via real-time chats or video, or even through screen sharing. If you want to reach your business goals, it is important to consider customer engagement. When you provide immediate solutions, your customers rely on your brand and get more involved with the products and services.

Customers are now increasingly relying on self-service than they do on the phone. While the phone is still a popular medium for support, customers are warming up more to the web and trying to solve issues on their own. This is why comprehensive self-service support is significant through a customer knowledge base, chat, and even community forums.

Also, calling support on the phone might have a delay, but chat is faster and in real-time. Email is delayed. The business can prioritize the SLAs on customer queries without trying to juggle between multiple channels of communication, and this way, there would be an overall streamlining of the process, and standardized SLA enabled with omnichannel presence.

The bottomline

Every brand that wants to grow will have to embrace this strategy if they want to have a customer base that’s satisfied, and at the same time, generate more versions and increase their revenue. The importance of omnichannel engagement is irreplaceable!