Omni-Channel Customer Engagement Article

We know that when it comes to the “ideal customer experience,” there’s no such thing. Every company is different: they offer different products and services and have customers of very different demographics. What works to sell children’s clothing isn’t going to work to sell high-ticket cars or machine parts for manufacturing. Even within the same company, there are vastly different levels of customer engagement. What you do to reel in a prospect in a social media campaign, for example, is going to be different from what you might do to upsell an existing long-time customer.

Part of tailoring the customer experience is knowing where your customers and prospects are in relation to your organization. The closer you bring a customer to your organization, the more personalized and specific you can get with your interactions. Get too friendly with a prospect who only stopped by to look at your Facebook (News - Alert) page, and you might rattle the customer and drive her away. Be too generic with an established customer, and the same might happen.

In a recent Forbes’ article, Blake Morgan refers to it as the “6 Rings of the Modern Customer Service Experience.” In the outer, most distant ring are external stakeholders, which include customers in general, prospects, partners, influencers and the general public. Moving in, you find social media, in-app messaging, branded communities, Web, phone, email, chat, retail stores and text messaging in the fifth ring, called “channels.” In the fourth ring, personalization, is creating a consistent message to the customer that follows them from channel to channel and is updated in real-time. The third ring, CRM, includes a seamless customer journey, the result of matched customer profiles from various channels. The second ring, collaboration tools, is technology for contact centers to link to other departments. The innermost ring Morgan calls “the seamless experience.”

“If the customer is the focal point of your service strategy, you will have considered the experience of the customer at every point along the way,” she wrote. “Is your customer journey more of game of hurdles than an escalator ride? Once you identify those hurdles for the customer, you will better be able to remove them. Ask your customers—especially your most loyal customers. If you need to incentive them in a big way to give you feedback, fine. That feedback is worth its weight in gold. With the proliferation of channels it’s no easy feat to create a seamless experience for the customer today.”

Reaching the final ring, of course, requires that companies master each step along the way. This means they must understand who their customers and prospects are and build an omnichannel foundation on which to cultivate customer relationships. Personalization requires that you keep a broad and available collection of knowledge bases that are easily accessible to customer-facing workers (as well as up-do-date and easy to use). This will include customer relationship management (CRM, or the third ring). To be effective, however, it needs to be collaborative so agents can tap one another for product or customer information. Only when these elements all come together can the final ring, the seamless experience, be attained.

According to Morgan, it’s a logical way to begin thinking about how to build the ideal customer experience.

“Customer experience is not easy at any company,” she wrote. “But it’s worth it! Spend some time thinking of how you can make yours better and you will reap the many benefits of a high functioning culture with a happy customer base.”