According to a survey from Deloitte, 92% of organizations that view customer experience as a differentiator offer multiple contact channels. But most of these retailers are only skimming the surface of the information provided from these channels.
Syed Hasan, CEO of ResponseTek, talked to Loyalty360 about the importance of an omnichannel listening strategy for brands. The ResponseTek Listening Platform™ analyzes valuable customer sentiment in real-time and scales to meet the demands of big data, eliminating silos of customer information captured across multiple channels including websites, call centers, retail or branch locations, and social platforms.
Can you talk about what some companies are doing related to an omnichannel listening strategy, and how this strategy has elicited change in their respective customer experiences?
Most clients see the importance and necessity of providing a quality and consistent experience to customers across all of their channels. This is the heart of what omnichannel means for a business. Different industries and companies are at various stages of maturity when it comes to technology, system’s updates and personnel training to be able to offer a truly seamless omnichannel experience.
We see a lot of companies setting up listening points–opportunities for customers to provide feedback–throughout their different channels and activity soliciting customer feedback. The programs that have seen the greatest amount of success are those in which the customer insights are shared across different teams and a collaborative improvement strategy is implemented.
For example, a major U.K. bank identified opportunities within their self-serve channel to make improvements to better align it with the public website and improve usability by collecting customer feedback. After the changes were implemented, customer delight scores improved by 8%, surpassing their overall goal and setting a new record!
What are the specific advantages of an omnichannel experience?
It’s not about specific advantages of having an omnichannel experience–this really just means having multiple channels that your customer can interact with your business. It’s about having a consistent and seamless omnichannel experience. The easier it is for a customer to move from one channel to the next, the more satisfied they will be. Today’s empowered consumer is beginning to expect a company to be able to keep track of them and their customer relationship regardless of the channel which they interact. By reducing the effort or repetitive actions from the customer, the more likely it is that they will be able to complete their objective. Channels need to talk to one another (through systems) and the more personalized and transferable the customer data and preferences are, the more convenient interactions become and loyal customers are.
Omnichannel listening is the foundation or cornerstone of where a company or brand should focus its scarce resources / time to effect the biggest increase in the customer experience continuum. By having a multichannel listening strategy, a company can gauge how one channel is operating versus the next and where to make improvements in a prioritized order by listening to the customer’s voice.
Can you walk us through what a company needs to do to implement an omnichannel listening strategy?
The company needs to have listening points throughout the different channels to elicit customer feedback. The questions should be relevant for the stated objectives of that particular aspect of the customer’s journey, with the ability to benchmark against other channels. This all needs to be captured in a single platform whereby employees have access to this information in real-time in order to see their performance and make improvements.
What department(s) should manage this strategy?
Any department that has any impact on the customer experience should have access to the results (which should be all levels of the business), but ultimately, the most successful programs we see are those where there is a centralized customer experience team that manages the cross-functional collecting, reporting, and communication of customer feedback and insights.
What metrics should be used to measure ongoing success of the omnichannel listening strategy?
The metrics used to measure the success of the omnichannel listening strategy, whether they be customer effort score, NPS, customer satisfaction, or something else, are really irrelevant so long as the metric is tightly aligned with the overall business strategy and stated objectives. For omnichannel programs, there should a consistent metric measured through all channels in order to set a benchmark and compare the value and delivered experience across these different customer touch points. Mapping these benchmarks across the overall customer journey should also identify at which transition points from channel to channel affect the customer experience the most.