Customer experience (CX) in Saudi Arabia has become an essential aspect of all customer-business relations. But CX itself is a concept with multiple touchpoints and definitions. You can get a detailed understanding of what CX is from an earlier article here.
In simple terms, CX is your customer’s experience with your product or service; how the customer felt interacting with your product or service.
With this article, we want to make it easy for you to understand the latest in CX; the Omni-Channel Customer Experience.
It’s the experience your customer has on ALL platforms of your business. From phones, tablets, laptops to physical stores, every touchpoint is covered in the Omni-Channel Customer Experience. The main goal is to have a unified and seamless journey across them all.
Here are 4 Facts About Omni-Channel Customer Experience that will help you understand it better.
Fact 1: Omni-Channel Customer Experience is NOT Multi-Channel Customer Experience
It’s important to distinguish between an omni-channel and multi-channel customer experience.
Essentially, it all comes down to the depth of integration and the quality of customer relations.
Multi-channel customer experience makes use of multichannel marketing which is all about casting the widest net to get the most customer engagements; the more the merrier. Companies utilizing the multi-channel strategy are adopting two or more channels to engage their consumers, the most popular today being social media and email. The focus here isn’t on the experience that the customer goes through, but on the outreach.
Conversely, the omni-channel approach inter-relates every channel to engage with customers as a whole. Omni-channel aims at ensuring that customers are having a delightful overall experience with the brand through each and every channel. The focus is on building a stronger relationship between consumers and the brand and not just reeling in a lot of customers through several channels.
The quality of the relationship between business and customer takes the highest pedestal in omni-channel customer experience.
Fact 2: Omni-channel is Seamless Both Online and Offline
The omni-channel experience is seamless.
What this means is that customers should be able to start their interaction on one device pick up the interaction on another and be able to complete the interaction on a completely different device without any hindrances throughout the process.
71% of shoppers who use smartphones for research in-store say that it’s become an important part of the experience. This is an example of how customers make use of omni-channels to complete their journeys.
Providing your customers with an easy access to the products – pictures, description, and price – while also letting them know exactly how far they are located from the product, is the first step towards creating this seamless process. Customers can rely on their devices to help them shop in physical stores without having to ask a salesperson.
Creating good UX on all digital portals can enhance the omni-channel experience and pave a smoother path to a brand’s front door.
Fact 3: Omni-channel CX Extends Beyond a Single Business’s Universe
Omni-channel is about true continuity of your experience. The omni-channel experience extends beyond the borders of an individual business. Understanding this is crucial to understanding the omni-channel experience.
On applying an omni-channel experience you don’t just keep your customers and their needs in mind, but also the needs of every other potential customer. That even includes the ones that are buying products from your competition!
This means that you can’t ignore the customers that are going to your competition for their needs because it’s not about your customers or their customers, it’s about ALL customers.
The best way to achieve this is by allowing the customer to own their own data and experience and then giving them the ability to use it to guide the creation and context of all of their future experiences with your brand. This way you have created a personalized journey for each customer.
One way this can be implemented is if businesses allow information of their products to be transferable and universal for everyone to use.
This exchange of data will allow users to give brands access to the data that they have collected from other brands while researching products and services.
All experiences, both offline and online, should allow an individual to identify themselves and present a brand with the opportunity to access the individual’s preferences.
Fact 4: “The Omni-Channel Experience” is the Step Forward
A trend that is becoming more and more popular in shopping today is that customers go into physical stores and browse products, but make the actual purchase online, turning retail stores into showrooms.
“One in four who click on mobile search ads end up in a store, so we’ve realized that the in-store experience needs to continue to build on that bridge we’ve made in digital,” Evan Conway, Sprint VP
Omni-channel customer experience will bring businesses and customers closer in a universal business environment. It will contribute to this era of big data by making market information superfluous and easily available to all who wish to tap into the market.
As for customers, their interactions with products will become fluid and effortless on all platforms; physical and digital.
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