Omni-Channel Means More Than You Ever Imagined
"Omni" is one of the hottest buzz adjectives in today's business landscape. This post, the first in a series on the real meaning of the term and how it manifests in many levels of customer engagement, lays out the central aspects of a successful Omni-Channel customer engagement model.
Two major concepts are packed into the term 'Omni-Channel'. First, the customer must experience one cohesive business entity, regardless of channel or device. Second, the customer must feel like he is unique, that the business understands him and tailors content and offers just for him and is aware of the full context of his engagement with the business over time. If the customer has bought ten products, but had dissatisfaction with two of them, any interaction with the customer must take this context into account. If both of these requirements are not met, the customer is left with a fragmented and inconsistent experience.
Cohesive view of the business: In an age where customer interactions span multiple channels including mobile, web, in-store, and partner channels, it is essential that context be carried across all channels. If a customer buys a swimming pool from Acme retailer through Acme's eBay channel, he must be able to receive the same service for his order as if he'd bought it from Acme's own web store. No matter how the customer interacts with Acme for customer service -- be it a call center, a self service portal, or in-store -- the service must be consistent. Any system or person who handles him needs access to the order and the full context of what has happened prior. Pricing is another dimension to the customer experience. If each channel-device combination is aware of a customer's unique profile and context, then pricing must be the same across each. The customer should not see one price through an Acme ebay store, but then another price on Acme's website and yet another price when he calls in to customer service. No matter where a customer is in the engagement process -- shopping, placing items in a cart, purchasing, seeking service on an order -- he must be able to drop out of one channel and pick up in another seamlessly. No person or system should ask the customer to re-establish context.
Personalized seamless customer engagement: Acknowledging the uniqueness of customers is the second requirement of being 'omni.' The explosion in channels of interaction and devices, as well as the ability to collect and store myriads of data about customer behavior, has given us the raw material we need to put together a detailed picture of who our customer is. From in-store experiences, we can derive what a customer picked up on impulse. From online stores (partner sites as well as our own) we know what customers browsed, put into shopping carts, and ultimately purchased. We know what they 'liked' on social media, what they tweeted about, what they searched for in a search engine, and how they traversed a site. This is indeed 'big data,' and we now have mature tools for deriving detailed, new insights from this mountain of data -- insights that give us a unique understanding of each customer. Any content presented to a customer -- from imagery to prices to auxiliary information -- should be tailored to that customer, consistently across all channels and devices.
Being 'omni' is a challenge of the first order for any business. But when you engage Dante, it is achievable.
