What did you just call me?
Omnichannel is the shiz right now, since people are more than used to the fact that, for example, a company’s Twitter account is a direct contact with the company itself. Someone in there listens, and the audience expects to be heard as well.
But Omnichannel isn’t the only dancer in this tango. Multi-device is also a fact to take into account when working on your overall customer experience.
Those are big words there pal, mind explaining them?
I’ll explain Omnichannel with a story:
Johnny is looking for a new pair of headphones. He Googles up a few articles and reviews, looks at a couple of confrontational Youtube videos and asks his friends on Facebook and Twitter if anyone can recommend a model.
What Johnny doesn’t think about is that he’s leaving a trail of digital footsteps on each and every platform he leaves his search keywords on.
Our example brand “UltraSonic Audio Accessories” has a very proactive social media manager who is constantly monitoring all social media platform and who keeps tabs on relevant search query keywords. How very omnichannel of him!
What he found out is that Johnny was Tweeting about looking for headphones. Now he can contact Johnny personally on Twitter and offer him to visit their website, giving him a deep link directly to a product he might be interested in, according to hints to his music preferences on his Facebook page.
Johnny is smart and he prefers to go and test the headphones before buying them online, so he asks the social media manager where he could find a store selling that specific model.
After giving him the address to the store, our savvy social media manager contacts the store manager and informs him that Johnny is about to drop by, looking for the specific model.
Not only UltraSonic has gained a potential customer, thanks to the awesome social media manager, but Johnny is gonna feel super spoiled when he walks into the store and the seller will recognise him (by a photo from social media) and will call him by name, show him the model he was looking for and suggest other models with similar specs.
Hows that for an awesome experience for ya!?
This story is about an awesome omnichannel customer experience
Which is exactly what converts a potential customer into a brand advocate, bragging about the amazing experience he had with this brand on all his social media channels and by word-of-mouth to his real-life friends.
A memorable experience created thanks to social media and a close monitoring, listening and taking action. The important part is that this experience couldn’t have come to be if the seller wouldn’t have known about his arrival.
What the manager did was flatten a brand’s structure by making sure to act as the connection between social media, website, store and other workers.
Is it really that easy?
I actually never said it WAS easy. Of course, the less people in your company, the easier it is to synchronise customer experience across channels.
In case you have a bigger brand, a good CRM is a must for good omnichannel CX. Nothing makes a client feel more frustrated than having to give his contact information several times to the same brand.
The important thing to remember is that we have to put ourselves in our clients’ shoes. When a client contacts the brand he believes he’s talking to the brand, and not to a social media manager who has Tweetdeck open.
Telling the client, who contacted us on Twitter, to call a 1-800 number ain’t gonna cut it. Nor will telling them to perform a search on the website. We HAVE to remember that we’re giving a service, not striking through contacts popping up.
Customer service is a huge part of the overall customer experience and if the person who’s having a message exchange with a client is not doing his work properly, then all the money and time invested in developing the rest of our CX is, simply put, wasted.
