Know Your Buyer: Crafting a Robust, Personalized Omnichannel Customer Experience

A fantastic customer experience is the key to a customer-first, employee-driven business transformation. When you call to check on a refund and the customer service representative immediately recognizes you and the purpose of your call, can tell you when the refund is going  to hit your bank account, and can solve any sizing or selection issues that may have led you to seek a return, demands a new way of thinking about customer service. Rather than seeking to close tickets as quickly as possible, brands must focus on delivering the best possible experience across the board.

As customer expectations continue to evolve and shift, businesses must stay ahead of the curve in order to remain competitive. A robust, personalized omnichannel customer experience is essential for any organization that wants to retain their existing customers and attract new ones. But creating such an experience can be tricky; it requires a deep understanding of customers’ needs and preferences, as well as the ability to think modularly and flexibly while building for the future. Let’s take a closer look at some of the challenges enterprises face when attempting to create this kind of customer experience.

Staying Customer-Centric

Staying customer-centric and creating a personalized omnichannel customer experience throughout the customer journey is key for an enterprise or small organization to succeed. This means being aware of where customers are in their purchasing process and understanding how your product or service fits into that journey. Knowing this helps you tailor your messaging and interactions specifically for each individual customer. You need to think about how best to engage with them, from initial interest all the way through purchase and beyond.

It’s essential to ensure that from the start, customers feel heard and cared for. But attention should not stop there—the customer experience needs to be continually monitored and adjusted as needed so they are consistently receiving value on their journey. By focusing on keeping their customers happy throughout, businesses can reap the many rewards of a loyal customer base.

Thinking Modularly and Flexibly

It is important for businesses to think modularly and flexibly when creating a personalized omnichannel customer experience. This means having an agile approach that allows you to quickly respond to changes in technology or user behavior without having to start from scratch each time something changes or shifts. It’s also important that you consider future iterations of your product or service so that you can build for scalability down the line, while still delivering excellent results now.

When planning for the future, it’s important to be both ambitious and practical. Building modularly and flexibly helps ensure that your plans are sustainable, while also allowing you to creatively explore every possibility. It allows you to create an environment where projects can change size as needed and scale up or down easily, without interrupting progress. Modular thinking opens up more opportunities for collaboration and encourages innovation, thus leading to better outcomes in the long term. Ultimately, this kind of preparation will help set your business (or project) up for success in the future.

Taking an Incremental Approach

Creating a robust, personalized omnichannel customer experience can be overwhelming if you try to do it all at once—so don’t! Instead, adopt an incremental approach that allows you to roll out features gradually over time, while still delivering value with each step forward. This will help make the process more manageable and gives customers enough time to adjust accordingly between each phase of development.

Putting It All Together

Delivering an engaging, customized customer experience across all channels of communication is no easy feat. However, it is something that can be achieved through intentional strategy, planning, and formulated timelines. It may take some time, but with a clear roadmap, smart objectives, and consistent execution, achieving a comprehensive customer-centric service can be achieved. Experienced teams can provide valuable assistance in this process and also equip organizations with the tools to create a reliable omnichannel experience that meets the needs of their customers.

Crafting a robust, personalized omnichannel customer experience is essential for any organization looking to stay ahead of their competition and increase customer satisfaction/loyalty levels over time. To achieve results, businesses must stay focused on customers’ needs and preferences throughout their entire journey, beginning with their initial interest and continuing through purchase and future needs and offerings.

To ensure success in the long run, businesses should think modularly and flexibly, building for scalability down the line, as well as taking an incremental approach when launching any product, service or customer experience.

As examples, Amazon Prime Video’s flexible interface design, which makes it easy for users across multiple devices to find what they are looking for quickly; Spotify gives users more control over what music they want by allowing them to customize their playlists; Netflix recommendation engine provides viewers with tailored content recommendations based on past viewing history.

These examples demonstrate how businesses have successfully leveraged a robust, personalized omnichannel customer experience in order achieve success within their respective industries today. Your business could, too.

Author: Greg Kihlström is a best-selling author, speaker, entrepreneur, and currently an advisor and consultant to top companies on marketing technology, customer experience, and digital transformation initiatives as Principal and Chief Strategist at GK5A. He is also the host of The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Kihlstrom has worked with some of the world’s top brands, including Adidas, Choice Hotels, Coca-Cola, Dell, FedEx, HP, Marriott, MTV, Starbucks, Toyota, and VMware. House of the Customer is his 11th book. Learn more at gregkihlstrom.com.