A Primer to Delivering Omnichannel Brand Consistency

At Avtex, we talk a lot about the importance of having an omnichannel strategy to deliver a stellar customer experience that will differentiate you from the competition. Omnichannel experiences are table stakes – they’re non-negotiable. Humans are omnichannel creatures, and consumers expect that experience to carry over to their brand interactions.

It’s not always easy to take an omnichannel approach to delivering customer experiences, though. One of the main challenges you’ll face is consistency. You want to make sure your customers have similar interactions with your brand, no matter which channel they’re using to connect with you, so they never feel like they’re engaging with a completely different company just because they switched channels.

Meeting and exceeding your customers’ expectations and maintaining a consistent brand identity across channels requires providing a fully integrated experience across the full range of channels, from physical to digital and everywhere in between.

To do this, your customer experience strategy should prioritize fluidity for your customers and data tracking for your internal team members. A cohesive, organizational understanding of where and how your customers engage with your brand is key to ensuring that consumers are able to switch between channels seamlessly, without running into any friction or disconnections.

In what follows, I’ll provide some strategies for delivering brand consistency across the channels you offer, so that no matter how your customer engages with you, they recognize the experience as uniquely linked to your brand.

Top Tips for Delivering Omnichannel Brand Consistency

Take an Individualized but Integrated Channel Approach

Each of your channels should be strategized individually, according to what it can offer and how and why customers are most likely to engage with it. For example, if chatbots are most likely used by customers who want to ask a question about a product or policy, you’ll want to design that channel to quickly answer questions and effortlessly escalate the chat to an agent when necessary.

But just because you need a unique strategy for each channel, doesn’t mean you should treat your channels as separate entities- that is don’t let them get siloed. Remember, all your channels need to work together to create a seamless experience for your customer. Think of them like an elite sports team: play to individuals’ strengths, but make sure they’re all part of an integrated strategy working toward a shared overall goal.

Focus on the Customer First

In everything you do, remember to keep the customer front of mind. Building customer-centricity is key to delivering omnichannel brand consistency.

Leverage your customer data to develop a deep understanding of your customers and how they prefer to interact with your brand. This means analyzing website data and asking for direct feedback from your customers in the form of polls, surveys, and questionnaires, among other quantitative and qualitative data collection methods.

When you know what your customers need and expect, you can meet them where they are, no matter which channel they’re using at the time.

Build an Integrated Tech Stack

Just like your channels, your technologies and tools need to work together to deliver omnichannel customer experiences. This will require you to focus on building a tech stack that enables you to understand and serve your customers’ expectations by integrating data and information across applications.

You’ll want to ensure that your key systems are working together without siloes. The power of leveraging Microsoft technology, for example, is that each system seamlessly integrates with the next. Microsoft Dynamics 365 has options for your CRM, ERP, and even Commerce, and when you harness the power of all these systems in harmony, you’ll be able to deliver omnichannel brand consistency.

If your legacy technology systems are making integration difficult, you may need to upgrade your entire system. It’s worth the investment in the short term to make sure that your technology is functioning seamlessly in the long term; not only will that enable you to deliver exceptional customer experiences, but it will also make your employees’ jobs easier, which will pay off in retention and efficiency.

Building brand consistency into your omnichannel strategy framework isn’t always easy, but it’s worth the effort to overcome the challenges - plus Avtex is here to help. Omnichannel experiences are more than just preferred – in today’s market, they’re expected, which means that organizations that don’t prioritize delivering a seamless experience to their customers risk falling behind the curve.

If you’re unsure whether your omnichannel experience is brand consistent at every touchpoint, Avtex can help. We’ll do a close audit of your current customer experience and help you implement improvements to ensure that your customers always recognize your brand, no matter what channel they’re interacting with – and that their association with your brand is always positive.