What is an omni-channel customer journey?

An omni-channel customer journey is simply a unified experience for your customers across platforms. Whether it is filling out a form on your website and receiving an automated email with their preferred information, or a customer reserving an item online to then go in-store and collect it. Creating an omni channel customer experience is vital for any business in 2023. With a traditional customer journey, each of these touchpoints would be separate and sometimes not even relate to each other at all. Brands are now linking each of these touchpoints together to create a much-improved customer experience. For example, listing stock in the customer’s local store on the website and allowing the customer to reserve and collect the same day. If the customer has a problem they can put in the code for their receipt and instantly reference the sale with an online customer experience manager. These simplifications of the process will lead to a much more positive customer experience.

The benefits of a customer journey include:

The benefits of using an omni channel customer experience include:

  • Linking all of your touchpoints making it easier for customers to communicate with you
  • Creating a more personable experience improving your CRM
  • Increased brand loyalty and brand advocacy as your customers recommend you to their friends
  • Improved overall customer experience and increased sales.

So our 5 tips for creating an omni channel customer journey are:

1 – Create your ideal customer personas Before you can create the ultimate customer experience, you need to focus on who your target audience is. Create 5-10 key customer personas with unique characteristics which will become the blueprint for your entire omni channel journey. Think about the demographics and how they will be most likely to interact with your brand. What are their pain points? What is going well for them? How can you support them and provide what they are looking for?

2 – Focus on the right platforms The ideal customer experience can look very different across audiences. For example, if you have a young and hyper-engaged audience who love video content, you may not place much of a focus on a Facebook campaign. When creating your personas you want to think about what this audience is after and what platforms they are likely to use/want to be linked together. This is because trying to create an experience that links to absolutely every platform will take too many resources and result in diminishing returns.

3 – Think about your tone of voice when crafting the communications and content for your omni channel customer journey. It is important to think about how your audience wants to be spoken to. If you are a luxury brand you will want to focus on eloquent language that makes your customers feel valued. Use high-quality imagery and focus on expressing the value of your product with detailed and passionate paragraphs that sell the experience of the product as much as its actual features.

4 – Look at the customer experience across platforms Now that you have crafted your personas, chosen your key platforms, and thought about the tone of voice, you now need to look at how each of your chosen platforms will link together. For example, if you have a website and face-to-face stores that operate entirely separately, then consider linking these together.  Incorporate online ordering into your stores to make your customer’s orders easier to pick up. Take a customer’s email in-store to send their receipt to them virtually. This opens up the opportunity to add them to your marketing email list (with permission of course.) You can also create an online customer chat to enable your customers to ask questions and sort out common issues with their products. There are many different methods for effortlessly linking your different customer touchpoints. Think about what will work best for your business and try to link each part of the journey together.

5 – Automate as much of the process as possible when crafting your omni-channel customer journey, you may be worried about how all of these different pieces will fit together. A simple way to solve this is to automate as much of the process as possible. A chatbot for your customer complaints on your website will allow your business to filter out many of the common customer questions. This will then free up your online team members to focus on the major customer complaints. Automating the processes, will both save you time and often increase the efficiency of each of these processes. So there are 5 tips for setting up an omni channel customer journey. Here at Sefas we are able to offer our own omni channel customer communications software. With tools such as hubmail to automate the sending of your physical communications. If you would like to find out more about how our CCM software can support your business, get in contact today.