From the first interaction, until becoming a paying customer, your prospect passes through several levels of the customer journey. The customer journey is not always linear. In fact, it is most probably a flux of physical and digital modes.
That makes optimising your cross-channel experience necessary. A cross-channel strategy can give your customers a single touchpoint for reaching your brand. For example, live chat software on your website that can tend to visitor queries. It is beneficial if your business wants to leverage the best of both online and offline selling modes.
A proper cross-channel strategy ensures that your business is able to deliver a consistent experience. It delivers several benefits that you cannot turn a blind eye towards:
- More conversions are customers are not lost between each channel of contact
- A relevant customer experience that maximises loyalty
- Reduces churn as customers are able to find support in any medium they prefer
Here is a stat from Genesys that validates the need for a consistent cross-channel experience.
83% of consumers state that the ability to move from one channel to another is desirable, but only 50% of businesses support such cross-channel interactions.
While these benefits seem irresistible, they definitely demand effort to attain. You must deploy some strategies to craft a proper customer journey.
Here are some ways you can optimise your customer journey for a seamless cross-channel experience.
5 Right Ways To Optimise Your Customer Journey
There are endless ways a brand can optimise its customer journey for superior customer experience. Here are 5 ways to get started.
- Provide cross-channel support
- Get the mobile experience right
- Match brand presets
- Use data to personalise the journey
- Gather customer feedback
1. Provide cross-channel support
Customer support is usually provided through phone or through email. Digitally-savvy customers might even dig deeper online to find support articles that help them find questions to their answers on their own.
But, how about the major chunk of customers who are landing on your website? Websites have become a major source for lead-generation and awareness creation. Similarly, there are also a bunch of customers who check out products online through websites and visit the physical store to complete their purchase. Providing cross-channel support is necessary to ensure that these customers feel well-treated at all touchpoints.
2. Get the mobile experience right
Over 80% of internet users use mobile devices to surf the web. If the adage that first impressions count is to be believed, your mobile website experience is to be treated like it is sacred.
It has the power to turn a casual visitor into an interested prospect or chasing away an interesting prospect. Needless to say, a great mobile experience can make the visitor stay and take a deep look at your product.
Mobile also plays a crucial role in the entire customer journey starting from discovery until finding the store.
Can the mobile experience be made similar to an in-store experience? Of course, yes. This can be achieved by matching the right brand presets.
3. Match brand presets
Brand presets refer to the specific visual effect that your brand uses in its text, images, logos, and other collaterals. Using brand presets to ensure that the business is able to create a similar experience for all touchpoints of the customer journey. It also makes the customer feel that they are interacting with the official website or in-store or mobile app of the business.
Without proper execution of brand presents, each channel in the cross-channel ecosystem could appear to be siloed from one another. This is a poor customer experience scenario and needs to be avoided at any cost. It is worth noting that at least 67% of customers have their standards for good experiences higher than ever before. A uniform brand preset is one of the ways to deliver a good customer experience.
4. Use data to personalise the journey
A cross-channel strategy offers more data to create the right customer journey map. It tells you how many footfalls your physical store gets, what kind of products are purchased more online, so on and so forth. Combining datasets from the online and offline channels can give a unique understanding of customer preferences and their buying behavior. This, in turn, leads to crafting a customer journey that can push the needle of sales volumes.
In other words, the data acts as a pointing finger towards crafting the right customer journey that is mapped to customer interests. However, there is one caveat that one must bear in mind. No customer journey is perfect and it is impossible to get it right the first time. It takes several reiterations before the right customer journey can be created.
Especially in a cross-channel scenario, it is necessary to leverage data to understand what will work and how quickly it can be implemented. Without data, a random customer journey will be more akin to shooting in the dark.
5. Gather customer feedback
96% of unhappy customers don’t complain to you but will tell 15 friends. Let that sink in. the worst experiences that your customers are undergoing may not even come to your knowledge. It takes active feedback gathering to know how customers feel about your product and services. Hence, the need for feedback gathering tools and processes.
Gathering customer feedback helps understand in the customer’s language the challenges and troubles they confront throughout the customer journey. It also sheds light on the many reasons why customers churn. Analyzing customer feedback can also lead to better streamlining of the customer journey by eliminating the steps that they find to be intrusive, unnecessary, or slowing down their decision-making ability.
Final Thoughts
In the past, a customer journey was almost liner. They had an interest in buying a product; they visited some stores to inquire and make a final decision. However, in today’s mobile world, customers are often nudged into making a buying decision even if they are not actively planning to purchase something.
Search engine marketing and mobile app advertising has become a force to reckon with. In the process, the customer journey starting from awareness to the decision has also undergone a tremendous change. It is no longer linear as it used to be in the past.
In fact, it is more scattered and sporadic owing to the information overload that a customer gets from online sources. This makes it imperative for businesses to invest in crafting a customer journey that is flawless and designed to match customer preferences. The strategies we discussed above should help with that.
