8 Unified Customer Experience Tips for Cross-Channel Marketing
What’s the best way to encourage customer loyalty?
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Good service is a must, obviously, and the products or services you offer have to deliver the kind of quality your customers expect.
Assuming you already have those elements in place, the next step is to spend some time examining the customer experience and whether it’s genuinely unified.
In this article, we’ll cover eight important tips for creating an essential unified experience, including how to:
- Create a comprehensive customer profile
- Use a consistent brand voice
- Focus on employee training
- Integrate your data
- Offer self-service tools
- Steer clear of silos
- Deploy analytics tools
- Use customer feedback to fine-tune your strategy
But first, let’s look at what a unified customer experience actually is and the big benefits of creating one.
What Is a Unified Customer Experience?
Let’s start by describing what a unified customer experience isn’t.
Picture the scene.
You’ve taken delivery of a package from one of your favorite stores, but there’s a problem with the product, and you’d like to exchange it. You decide to message for help with the company directly on one of their social media customer service channels.
The social media manager responds by reassuring you that this won’t be a problem and asks you to send an email to the company’s contact center.
You do this, explaining the problem again, but this time when you get a response, you’re told it’s company policy to only offer credit vouchers for returned goods, rather than free exchanges. The email suggests you phone their call center to talk to someone in another department.
At this point, you might reasonably be feeling a little irritated.
Nevertheless, you call them and, after waiting for some time on hold, finally get through to talk to a human — who has no idea who you are, because it turns out that the customer service representatives responding to emails don’t necessarily pass information on to the ones answering phone calls.
Commiserations. You’ve just had a very non-unified customer service experience.
The Right Way to Do It
Creating a more positive customer experience means reducing friction for customers in every way you can think of. It starts with developing a cohesive brand identity across all the analog and digital channels where you have a presence. This way, you can begin to build exceptional experiences that feel genuinely seamless.
The reality is that consumer expectations have only increased over time. These days, maintaining customer satisfaction rates can be a real challenge, so it’s vital to be methodical in your approach.
Successfully rolling out a truly seamless customer experience takes a lot of hard work, but it can be done, and it’s a terrific way of achieving a competitive edge in a crowded market.
Here’s a breakdown of the elements of unified customer experience from G2.
[Source: G2]
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The Benefits of Delivering a Unified Customer Experience
So, what tangible benefits will you see when you bring that seamless customer journey to fruition? Here are just a few of the advantages for your business.
1. Improved Customer Satisfaction
When you deliver a consistent experience, the result is happier customers. Let’s return to our original hypothetical example. Imagine that when you emailed the company to follow up on your query, you got a response that showed the customer service representatives you’d previously interacted with had already shared your story, and the email included clear instructions for how to return the product for a free exchange.
In this scenario, you wouldn’t have to deal with conflicting information. You wouldn’t have needed to spend so long on hold either. Instead, you could have just got on with your day — problem solved.
There are no two ways about it: enabling a seamless experience for customers, which puts them at the center of your processes, is crucial for long-term business success.
2. Better Customer Retention
The other important thing to bear in mind is that making your customers happier is likely to encourage loyalty.
Consider that one of the core objectives of lifecycle marketing is to reduce the need for costly customer acquisition efforts. Vital as a strong outbound sales strategy is for attracting new clients, it’s absolutely crucial to keep the ones you already have. The average customer lifetime value has a huge impact on your bottom line in the long term.
3. Revenue Growth
Every satisfied customer has the potential to grow your loyal customer base, not only because they’ll come back time and time again, but also because they’re much more likely to become brand advocates who recommend your services to family and friends.
In other words, good customer experience design leads to an increase in future business and can ultimately boost your revenue to an all-time high.
4. Happier Employees
Some of the changes you make to facilitate a unified customer experience will benefit your employees as well. For instance, you may decide to focus on getting rid of information silos in your business to assist with the smooth flow of customer data between departments. Something as simple as switching to a cloud VoIP provider can help you achieve this and boost collaboration between internal teams at the same time.
In general, if customer interactions are increasingly positive, everybody’s day gets better. With the right tools and training in place, your staff will find more satisfaction in their day-to-day work. That alone is great news for productivity.
8 Tips for Creating the Essential Unified Experience
So, how does this work in practice? Essentially, you’ll need to take a rounded approach that blends technology, research, and careful planning. Here are eight tips to help you.
1. Create a Comprehensive Customer Profile
First and foremost, it’s vital to draw up a profile of your existing customers. The aim is to grasp the nuances of their journeys as they connect at various touchpoints.
What you’re trying to do here is develop a deeper understanding of customer preferences. As with any kind of multi-channel marketing strategy, the key is to segment your audience by demographic using techniques such as geo-targeting.
Taking existing customer interactions into account is a good idea too. For instance, if you can identify which customers are more likely to want to interact with human representatives and which prefer self-service options, you’ll be in a better position to plan how to give them what they want.
2. Use a Consistent Brand Voice
This one is essential. You must project a coherent brand identity across your marketing channels and customer support tools. One way to achieve this is to be very clear about your brand values and to incorporate them into your communications at every opportunity.
For example, if one of your core values is to support local communities, there should be plenty of information about the initiatives you’re putting in place to do that. This messaging needs to be prominent across your channels, from your website to your social media posts and email marketing.
A great example of this is Lush, as they consistently champion and highlight their ethical and sustainable products throughout their site and branding. On top of this, Lush also took their commitment to social good one step further, as they withdrew from social media in 2021 and called for safer social media practices — demonstrating their impressive and truly consistent brand voice.
[Source: Lush]
3. Focus on Team Training
A truly unified CX approach needs buy-in from everyone in your customer support team. That means putting the right kind of training in place — not only for your customer service agents but for everyone else too.
Areas to focus on include:
- Response times. Prompt assistance makes for satisfied customers.
- A coherent brand personality. Make sure everyone understands your values and practices how to talk about these with customers.
- Tools. It’s also vital that all your employees are proficient in using any platforms they need to use in the course of their work. Don’t forget to provide additional training whenever there’s an upgrade or new features are introduced.
4. Integrate Your Data
Any modern business will generate a large amount of data, and it’s crucial to integrate this properly so you can achieve genuinely valuable insights into customer behavior.
Firstly, when it comes to cross-channel marketing, customer relationship management (CRM) software is key. This is because it allows you to track and manage all of your customer communications in one place.
On top of this, integrating your data also means choosing compatible platforms. For example, if you use business phone service VoIP for your call center, then it’s better to integrate this directly with your CRM. This way, your customer service team will be able to view a full account history when customers contact them.
Similarly, it can be worth investing in enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. This type of software will also often integrate with your CRM software. But this has the added benefit of connecting all your data from across your business, giving you more holistic and detailed business insights.
5. Offer Self-Service Tools
While it’s hard to beat the level of attention and personal response given by a well-trained customer service representative in person or over the phone, self-service has a multitude of advantages. Whether it’s the 24-hour availability or simply the ease of being able to sort your own problem, self-service is increasingly popular.
When it comes to eCommerce, self-service often refers to FAQs, knowledge bases, and self-service returns policies. All of which are designed to ensure that a customer can find the answers they need, whenever is convenient for them, as well as suit customer preferences. One study finds that 67% of customers prefer self-service options.
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As such, one of the quickest ways you can please your customers is to offer a greater variety of self-service tools. Consider adding active self-service options, like chatbot support, but don’t neglect the passive ones either. For instance, this means making sure your website is both comprehensive and searchable so customers will be able to easily find what they’re looking for.
6. Steer Clear of Silos
Silos are the enemy of a unified customer experience, so they’re to be avoided at all costs.
Why? Well, say you’re a fashion eCommerce retailer and your marketing team has been working hard to sell the last of your winter sale items. This is great, but only if your inventory and delivery team are also kept up to speed, otherwise you risk stockouts and even complaints.
To avoid this, perform an honest analysis of your business setup. Check that your teams are truly integrated and analyze all of the ways that your teams rely on each other. This will help you assess where silos exist and where issues may arise.
Although it’s not realistic to insist everyone works side by side with one another — in any business, people will specialize in different roles and often use slightly different methods — what you can do is encourage cross-team collaboration so that everyone understands how the company operates as a whole. This will keep your teams aligned and make sure your messaging is consistent.
7. Deploy Analytics Tools
Technology is your friend when it comes to achieving a seamless customer experience. Using reporting and analytics tools can help you keep track of customer concerns and identify common pain points.
There are a few metrics that are particularly important to monitor. These include:
- Customer churn
- Customer satisfaction
- Customer effort score
- Net promoter score
- Average handle time
- First contact resolution rate
Some of the modern AI-driven analytics tools are pretty groundbreaking. Tools such as Heap can analyze customer behavior on a granular level, such as by individual webpage visits or generating heatmaps that show you where customers interact with your site the most.
[Source: Heap]
This is highly useful information that clues you into issues that may need resolving.
8. Use Customer Feedback to Fine-Tune Your Strategy
Any truly customer-centric approach should give priority to seeking out, collecting, and analyzing customer feedback. After all, customer acquisition can be challenging in today’s fast-moving business environment, and listening to what consumers want is key to keeping them coming back.
To reach as many people as possible, try to solicit feedback in a variety of ways. Your customers won’t all use the same methods to interact with your business, so it’s crucial to take account of that. Try a mixture of onsite pop-up surveys, emailed feedback requests, and social media channel polls.
If there are any problems to be solved or even just a few tweaks needed here and there, your customers will tell you.
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Wrap Up
The aim of the game when it comes to creating a unified experience is to make it as smooth as possible. Your customers should feel like they’re gliding through a seamless narrative, regardless of touchpoint.
If you follow all the tips above, you’ll be well on your way to creating exactly the kind of cross-channel marketing and service ecosystem your customers want to see. Good luck!
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