Omni-Channel Customer Engagement Article

What’s happening with customers today kind of reminds me of a country western song. They’re becoming more empowered and realizing they have more choices, so they’re more than happy to walk right out that door if you don’t treat ‘em right.

That means businesses need to wake up and smell the coffee – something many organizations already are doing, but even those who are starting to work on improving the customer experience may need an extra shot of caffeine on this front.

That’s because in today’s highly connected world, customers have easy access to a wider array of products and services, and information about those products and services, as well as access to an array of communications tools. So they’re now accustomed to getting quick answers and fast results. As a result, people today are faster to be disappointed with customer service, or a product or service itself, than they were before the rise of the Internet and the smartphone.

That said, both churn – which is costing brands billions of dollars – and the potential for criticism of a brand on social media – which can have a large impact on a company’s image – are becoming growing concerns for businesses.

As Nadji Tehrani and Steve Brubaker (News - Alert) write in their new book, “Taking Your Customer Care to the Next Level”, companies spend big money and significant resources to acquire new customers while they tend to give little thought about how to hold onto clients who are heading for the exits, and that’s a mistake. Delivering next-level customer care is important for a few key reasons, as the authors explain. But one the top justifications for spending the time and money to implement a new strategy to deliver next-level customer care, they say, is that it’s far less expensive to keep existing customers than it is to win and onboard new ones.

A few ways organizations can amp up their customer experience game are by using the available data on customers to deliver more personalized experiences – whether that means matching callers to a contact center representative that is best suited to meet their needs, using customer data and location information to provide people with relevant offers near a point of purchase, or better training and treating employees so they have the tools and the mindsets to offer customers the best possible experience.

Customers also tend to expect to be able to reach and interact with the companies with which they do business via the communications method of their choice – be that the Internet, a mobile app, the telephone, text, or whatever. And they expect consistency and continuity of experience across those mediums. That means businesses should look into how they can best deliver an omni-channel experience.