Learn More about Omnichannel: A Multitasking Way to Satisfy Customer
Customers are easily inundated by ads, be it via emails, notifications, chats, calls, or by any other means as long as they connected with satellite. Moreover, with more than half of email traffic and up to 3.5 tweets considered as spam, thus it is easy for companies to drown their potential customer in the sea of information.
Unfortunately, traditional marketing channels are often segregated and this creates a huge missed opportunity. In this case, you may consider omnichannel as an effective approach to make your users easier to get to your website. Omnichannel itself is a customer-centered engagement that consistently provides customers service experiences.
The key part of this strategy is to satisfy your customers’ needs at the same time the needs appear. Through omnichannel, companies can gather and analyze customers’ behavior, needs and information all across the interconnected channels. Ultimately, it will provide users with a whole new level of closeness between customers and the brand.
However, by simply establishing various channels doesn’t automatically make you have an omnichannel. More than that, you have to interconnect these channels and drive them to work for the customers. This is in accordance with what Hubspot says: “All omnichannel experiences will use multiple channels, but not all multi-channel experiences are omnichannel.”
By utilizing an omnichannel, you can make the channels you have to interact with one another in real-time. In other words, you can provide your customers with rapid access to information, products and services at any time and any place. As time has become a luxury in people’s lives, speedy service is as important as the products themselves.
A Way to Go Omnichannel
Nowadays, only a handful of people are loyal to a single channel. Even for Facebook, where its monthly active users have reached up to 2.2 billion people is not excluded from this issue. Moreover, this problem is escalated to the point where people are reluctant to download new apps. Thus, it is really challenging for any companies to promote their brand-new apps.
To solve this problem, some companies, especially retail businesses such as Bukalapak and Lazada, have decided to utilize multi-channel utilizing presently existing platforms with huge user base like Facebook and Line to generate business.
However, as huge as Facebook’s and Line’s user bases are, it might not align well with your target customers, thus it may not be enough to only depend on existing applications. This leave companies in a dilemma, when you want to build a new app yourself, it will not attract much attention, and on the other hand by only using the huge user base app won’t do enough.
By using the omnichannel system, companies can generate customer service chat apps that can connect the agents to the customers via various different channels. All the agent needs to do is to operate a single platform to greatly enhance its efficiency.
Going by this strategy is not a bad decision, as according to Aberdeen Group, companies with omnichannel customer care strategies have 91% better year-over-year (YOY) customer retention rates. Not only that, Square’s survey have also found that over 1,100 business owners revealed, 40% of their selling activities occur on social media while 16% occurs on Amazon. This clearly shows that this sort of strategy is on point to solve customers’ behavior challenge.
On the other hand, the shifting behavior of consumers is pushing us, marketers, to make individual approaches to every type of customers.
To address that problem, omnichannel strategy is essential as it can help you to understand the various paths that customers take before making a purchase.
Hence, to build an outstanding omnichannel, you need to learn about the marketing strategy first through step-by-step insights that you can contemplate on.
Step-by-Step Omnichannel Marketing
To build a decent omnichannel marketing strategy, companies must be aware about touchpoints and channels to avoid inefficiency and should focus on the popular ones. Touchpoint is defined as every direct and indirect interaction towards customers, including both offline and online interactions while channels are seen as a communication platform used by customers to interact with a brand.
Touchpoints are different from when customers learn about our products up to the purchase and usage phase of the product itself. In this marketing strategy, we recognize five touchpoints known as the Five A’s (aware, appeal, ask, act, and advocate). Also, this strategy is focused on the integration of popular channels in the Five A’s and utilize them to their full extent as described in the steps below (Kotler, Kartajaya, and Setiawan: 2017):
1)The first thing to do is to map out the popular channels, both online and offline intermediaries, that can be used to interact with your brand. These channels can be categorized into two groups: The first is Communication Channel, a transmission of content and information, in the form of television ads, content websites, and also social media. The other one is Sales, a channel that facilitates transactions, such as e-commerce websites, sales force, and exhibition. Sometimes, both of them are seen as one concept without any distinctions.
On the other hand, a touchpoint can be composed by one or more channels. For instance, a customer might learn about a product from multiple sources: print ads, online banner ads, contact centers, and salespeople. This is where customers are at the “aware” touchpoint (refer to image above), while the ads, contact centers, as well as the salespeople are the channels that build up the touchpoint.
Similarly, a channel might serve different touchpoints, such as when people see an ad or are accessing contact centers, they might be in aware, appeal, and ask phase all at the same time. For example, a single banner ad might have a QR code that can direct customers to contact centers where they can immediately make an enquiry right after seeing the ad and learning about the product.
For marketers, more touchpoints and channels lead to more market coverage for their brands. However, it also means more complexity in designing a coherent omnichannel marketing strategy. Marketers need to find the right balance between market coverage and simplicity in planning their omnichannel marketing strategy.
2)Secondly, you have to define which channel is more critical than others. This is because different people require different approaches, resulting in many possible customer- paths. A single path is arranged from the Five A’s above, with every possible channel in each touchpoint. Just imagine a scenario, where a customer who wants to buy a car, sees an online ad and learns about the product by accessing the content from the ad, before finally going to the stores to test-drive and buy the car.
That one scenario is considered as a single customer-path.In the same example but a different scenario, instead of seeing the ad, the customer might look at the product content itself, assuming that they already have the intention to buy.
Thus, they can directly go to an online discussion platform. In this scenario, the particular customer needs to be convinced to buy the product through our product description and reviews. Immediately, they may do a test-drive after that and then decide to buy the car.
From the examples above, we can conclude that different customers need different path. Hence, not all popular channels are good to be utilized in your marketing plan. Only a handful of them that are considered more critical and effective, and can be integrated within your strategy.
To know which channels are more critical than others, you can use the Pareto Principle (Kotler, Kartajaya, and Setiawan: 2017) by reducing the number of possible paths to the top 20% from the level of popularity. After that, you can assume that 80% of your potential customers will follow that path.
3)After that reduction, you can evaluate the most important channels derived from the touchpoints and improve them. Find the most critical, the one that without it will incur huge losses to your business. You can consider which one is more suited to your plan, products, and business process. For example, in this digital era, most people are surfing on the Internet. You can then focus on online channels more and see what improvements can be implemented within it.
By going omnichannel, you can let the customers to steer the process whichever way they want. Providing seamless yet consistent experience from the very start to the very end will ensure better personalized engagement. Even if this overall process is indeed hard, by getting help from a trusted partner, this obstacle can be easily deal with.
- This article created jointly with Ageng Prabandaru
Book reference:
Kotler P.,Kartajaya H., and Setiawan I. 2017. Marketing 4.0: Moving from Traditional to Digital. New Jersey, USA.
