Connecting the Dots Across a Multi-Channel World of Customer Experience Feedback

World Of customer ExperienceA new breed of customer is making life tougher for marketers. Consumers are now digitally and socially connected, constantly mobile, self-service savvy, and completely empowered. They are increasingly demanding a higher level of personalized customer experiences, which can make acquiring customer loyalty a daunting challenge.

But Tuesday’s Loyalty360 webinar titled, “Beyond Surveys: Tackling the Multi-Channel World of Customer Feedback,” offered keen insights into how marketers can build comprehensive customer experience programs to succeed in this dynamic landscape.

During this informative session, which was presented by Verint, Sean Mahoney, CCXP, Strategic Solutions Consultant, Customer Analytics, demonstrated a perceptive understanding of how to generate context rich profiles that can provide personalized customer engagement in an omni-channel world.

“Customers don’t think in terms of channels, but in terms of human context,” Mahoney explained to attendees. “It’s not Business to Consumer or B2C. It’s Bob to Celia, and Celia just wants personalized service. She wants you to have an accurate profile of her, to know her preferences, and let her change them on-demand. She also wants you to know her history, her recent activity, and maybe even her location and device.”

To gather and process this kind of information, brands simply cannot succeed by only using one channel or even by floating on multi-channel islands. Mahoney stressed the need for brands to completely connect the dots across the customer feedback spectrum. Customers channel hop. They do not exist on a single channel. So neither should brands.

In addition to surveys, brands need to engage customers and acquire feedback from social media networks, chat sessions, web-related resources, emails, SMS, and absolutely every channel in between. And in a perfect world, the data gathered from these sources should be seamlessly integrated and aggregated across and throughout an entire organization.

However, according to Mahoney, there is a big disparity between how things actually are and how things should be. Unfortunately, most brands still force customers to interact with different silos within the organization. Data is also often mismanaged and scattered in both structured and unstructured forms, which leaves the organization unable to aggregate and analyze customer knowledge in a useful manner.

“Despite having all this data available, many organizations are struggling to bring it all together and making sense of it in a unified fashion,” Mahoney said. “Our goal is to ensure that we interact with our customers as one company. And that we, organizationally, can know our customers as that one customer, regardless of channel or mode of interaction.”

In his view, this unification is how things should be. That is, one company, one customer. And this is also where multi-channel diverges from the omni-channel. Although many organizations use both terms interchangeably, Mahoney highlighted a number of key differences.

He stressed that multi-channel customer experiences, and the feedback around those experiences, are more disconnected and fractured. Phone calls, for example, are often routed to one location, emails are routed to a second, and all while the tracking interactions at store or branch levels are handled by a completely separate entity. And too often, multi-channel customer experiences never leave these specific organizational silos.

Mahoney believes the shift in focus towards the omni-channel customer experience is a much better approach.

“Regardless of the channel customers are opting to use, organizations need to bring all of those communication modalities together,” he said. “We should be able to associate each of those interactions and the corresponding assimilated and aggregated date with each customer. This will allows us to then communicate those insights and those critical findings across the organization.”

Customer experience programs must open multiple feedback channels to engage the broadest range of customers possible. However, to do so successfully, they must also be closely aligned with the customer’s journey and their expectations. Furthermore, an organization must be able to support the range of channels customers use and maintain the ability effectively connect the dots between them all.world of customer experience

To accomplish this goal, Mahoney offered a number of practical, tactical, and actionable steps that organizations can take to improve omni-channel customer experiences and the corresponding feedback that they provide.

Mahoney recommends:

1) Inventorying and understanding the channels that your customers actually use to interact with your brand.

2) Determine how you are engaging with customers and continually modifying your approach as often as necessary.

3) Removing the disconnected silos of information and linking all channels on the back end.

4) Constantly becoming aware of and evaluating new and emerging technologies.

5) Carefully planning your next steps and proper courses of action.

It might not be an easy road to tread, but today’s new breed of customer is making it a necessary path to take. As we journey towards achieving what Mahoney calls “that omni-channel nirvana.” 

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