Before the expansion and massification of WEB 2.0, e-commerce, mobile applications and social networks, it was relatively simple for companies to manage communication with their customers and the data resulting from those interactions.
Until the first decade of this century, most people made their purchases in person at the stores or physical premises of their favorite companies. If after-sales service was required, the available means were telephone, e-mail or direct contact with the company’s physical headquarters. With the adoption of new technologies, this changed completely and the channels of communication between companies and their customers multiplied.
As different technologies started to appear, companies began to adopt them and open their digital channels to interact with their target audience: open their Facebook account, develop their e-commerce, digitalize their call-center, implement a CRM, publish their mobile application, have their youtube channel, communicate a lifestyle on Instagram, receive orders by Whatsapp and many other channels that today we use to contact our favorite brands.
The challenge
Since it was impossible to plan in advance which technologies were going to be available, organizations began to implement them as they appeared and learned how to manage them along the way. The result: a number of different channels that are managed by different people in the company and that produce a lot of information that feeds different databases that do not communicate with each other.
Let’s look at an example: a company that manufactures home appliances has its own physical stores, presence in department stores, its own e-commerce, sales in third-party digital marketplaces, mobile app, social networks, customer service line, maintenance service and whatsapp line.
If a customer sees a refrigerator they like in a Facebook guideline post and visits the website to learn more about the refrigerator’s features and subscribes to a newsletter to access a 10% discount on their next purchase and then visits the physical showroom with their spouse to make the decision together, the company has no way of knowing that customer is buying their product because they saw a post on Facebook as their digital channels and the information they generate are not integrated.
This makes it impossible to have a traceability of that customer’s experience and their points of contact with the brand and therefore we cannot make decisions to improve that experience and generate more sales or greater service satisfaction.
Multichannel and omnichannel
The example we have just seen is a typical multichannel case: a company with many physical and digital communication channels with its customers but no consistency in communication and messaging, no traceability of all contacts, no memorable experience and most importantly, that the data generated is not integrated and therefore cannot be used to make decisions that generate more business and better service.
Omnichannel is a concept born precisely from this situation that arises when there are multiple channels of communication between a brand and its target audience but they are disconnected. Omnichannel puts the customer at the center of all strategies and its main objective is to provide a consistent, memorable and positive customer experience regardless of the channel through which the customer is being contacted. In addition, omnichannel seeks that all the information and data generated in these interactions are integrated in order to manage and have traceability of the customer journey and to make decisions that optimize and continuously improve this experience.
Customer-centric digital transformation
The ultimate goal of all digital transformation processes must be to improve the customer experience, whether internal or external.
One of the main initiatives that generally appears in a consultative process of digital maturity in an organization is precisely the integration of the customer journey or digital customer journey.
What are the steps we must take into account to start this process?
The first thing we must do is to map the customer’s journey from the moment he/she realizes or decides that he/she needs our service or product, which is the “awareness” stage, when he/she starts to look at the market offer and compare the options “consideration”, when he/she makes the decision to purchase our product or service “action or purchase”, when he/she requires a service or after-sales warranty “service” and when he/she is satisfied with our service and recommends us “advocacy”.
We must take into account all the channels involved in this process, the technological platforms, the databases generated, the areas responsible and the integrations or automations that can be carried out to optimize our customer’s journey in order to provide a consistent, memorable and positive experience at all points along the way.
This is just the beginning of a whole process associated with digital transformation called “Customer Experience Management” or customer experience management, which is the key to the success of the most important companies in the world. At Focux Digital we are experts in digital transformation methodologies, customer experience and we have our own digital maturity model to accompany your company to reach the next level of digital relationship with your customers.
