6 key ideas for designing a hassle-free omnichannel journey

The consumer journey is strewn with pitfalls, moments of friction, dissatisfaction when it should be fluid, seamless and particularly pleasant. In order to truly “enchant” the consumer journey, customer knowledge, contextualization and personalization of the offer must be at the center of concerns.

As a company, a certain number of Internet users contact you and have experience with your various points of contact. From your point of view, the path taken by your customers to make a purchase or to contact you is very often unclear, random or you even think that it is completely due to chance. But, think again. For customers, the slightest interaction with one of your touchpoints, one of your channels, whether digital or not, constitutes a single experience. Your role is then to standardize this customer experience and ensure that consumers are recognized via all of your points of contact.

#1. Design an experience omnichannel

Although you have certainly passed the milestone of multiplying the points of contact available for your customers to interact with you (email, chat, FAQ, social networks, etc.), it is possible that you are not yet able to to create a totally seamless experience from the user's point of view. Your new challenge is then to try to link the different possible interactions in order to create a truly personalized and contextualized experience for each of your consumers.

For this, you must be a perfect conductor and have a rock-solid organization. Regardless of the channel the consumer chooses or the touchpoint through which the interaction occurs, you need to provide your customers with consistent, simple answers on the channel they prefer.

#2. Personalize the customer journey with contextual data

It is obvious that you are collecting customer data. But are you using them to contextually personalize your customers' experience? Some tools allow you to adapt your service according to the consumer and the situation. For this, the value of the customer, the purchasing behavior or even the history of the journey can be taken into account. This way, you empower your teams with valuable insights so they can provide timely and personalized assistance to your customers based on what stage of the journey they are at.

#3. Integrating people at the right time throughout the course

Chatbos, FAQs, automatic replies, all of these elements are a great help for your business. However, the human is sometimes necessary in order to manage a litigation, to make understand information, to propose an offer. The difficulty then lies in the idea of ​​providing this “human touch” at the right time.

For this, it is important to have a certain amount of behavioral data, to have an overall knowledge of one's customers, one's own weaknesses, similar situations which may have caused problems for other consumers, etc. This way, you know when one of your advisors needs to step in to help finalize a customer's buying journey, when one of them is too unhappy and needs personalized customer service, etc.

#4. Focus on self-service

Online self-service is simply the fact for a consumer to be autonomous in the management of his “problems”. A well-known self-service for example is the FAQ. Self-service is very important for a business because it helps generate engagement from consumers. However, this implies a colossal work upstream of identifying the problems that your customers may encounter throughout their buying journey. Note that the various self-service tools you offer must be able to quickly switch to assisted service such as click to chat, click to call, automatic callback, etc., if the consumer cannot find his answers by oneself. Getting in touch with your business should be almost instantaneous.

#5. Simplify consumers' lives

Design a customer journey omnichannel optimized takes into account, for example, the sending of notifications (appointment reminders, billing notices, etc.) in order to simplify consumers' lives. By reminding them of their next appointment, you show that you care about them and you prevent them from checking their agenda or worse, from forgetting. It's up to you to use the preferred communication channel of each of your customers: e-mail, push notification or SMS. You can also, for example, offer automatic reminders. In each of your messages, do not forget to integrate information in order to contact you easily.

#6. Develop workstations omnichannel for the whole team

Finally, with the aim of proposing a customer journey omnichannel fluid, you must first help your teams manage the data from the different channels in order to obtain a 360° view of each customer. If you force your employees to juggle between different interfaces, different software and other tabs in order to get to know the customer better, the experience will certainly not be fluid and pleasant for the consumer in the end! Your systems CRM and back-office must be seamlessly integrated to help your teams easily manage customer data. Having easy access to resources makes it possible to get to know customers better and to offer them services that are perfectly suited to their needs and requests.

Using these experience-based tips omnichannel, you will increase the satisfaction rate of your customers quickly!