Building Omni-Experiences that Exceed Customer Expectations

To thrive in today’s highly competitive marketplace, exceeding customer expectations is key. Customers need their communication with your team members to be smooth and efficient. They want to be able to get in touch in the way they prefer to make contact, from anywhere. And once they make contact with your business, they want to be able to pick up exactly where they left off last time.

If you’re dedicated to improving and perfecting your customer experience, you’ll need to build an omnichannel strategy. But remember, the omnichannel approach is just a vehicle for providing what customers really care about: omni-experiences.

What Is Omni-Experience?

Omnichannel experience design puts customer satisfaction first. No matter where your customer is in their journey, their experience should be consistent. Their data should flow seamlessly from interaction to interaction and be readily available to your team members at every touchpoint.

So, when we talk about omni-experience, we’re placing customer needs and expectations at the very center of the conversation. Instead of focusing on the individual methods customers use to make contact with your business, we focus on what their needs truly are, and what they’re looking to get out of those experiences.

Remember, your goal is to always make sure that you meet or exceed the standard of the last best experience that your customer had, whether it was with your company or not. Customers will be judging your brand based on their best customer experience, and if their expectations are not met, they will take their business elsewhere.

By looking outside your company’s borders, you can gain a better understanding of the full customer experience spectrum, and what’s driving the expectations of today’s customers.

Crafting a great omni-experience is about showing your customers that you understand and value them. Here are some factors to consider:

• Is your communication timely?
• Are you demonstrating that you understand your customers’ challenges?
• If your customer is purchasing something for someone else, are you marketing to the right person?
• Are you demonstrating that your company is the best-placed business to meet your customers’ needs?

Building a Blueprint and a Strategy

An effective, successful experience transformation always stems from deep and thorough customer insight. Before you can begin delivering a world-class omni-channel experience, you need a detailed blueprint of your customer experience.

You should start by identifying exactly who your customers are, what is most important to them, and what they want and need from their experience with your business.

Next, map the journey that your customer takes as they interact with members of your organization. You’ll want to utilize data points such as contact center recordings, client survey responses, and behavioral research to build a detailed understanding of the journey that your customer takes with your brand.

This likely involves several different channels or departments within your organization, and you’ll need to gather insights and perspectives from everyone who’s part of the customer journey. If you exclude a single stage, your customer journey map will be incomplete, so make sure you get all cross-functional teams working together seamlessly.

Keep Your North Star in Mind

Defining your North Star is crucial to the success of your entire omni-channel marketing approach and strategy. Your organization’s overall goals for your customer experience should be your priority as you build your omni-channel experience design.

Keep these critical questions in mind:

• How do you want your customers to view your brand personality?
• What do you want to be known for in the experiences you deliver?
• How will your customer experience set you apart from your competition?

Your North Star should provide an ongoing focal point for your team and should be reinforced with each shift you make towards a better customer experience.

Transform Your Customer Experience with Avtex

Building an outstanding omni-experience for your customers begins with getting every member of your organization on board. Each team member should have a grasp of the omnichannel meaning for your business and agree upon a selection of omnichannel examples to serve as the pinnacle of outstanding customer experience.

At Axtex, we can help with a strategy for obtaining buy-in from your employees. Plus, we can provide the tools and training that each member of your team will need in order to become part of the omni-channel experience.