Mastering Omnichannel Communication: Your Blueprint for Flawless Design and Delivery
The shift from print to digital exposed a need to reach customers anytime, anywhere, and in the channel of their choice.
Omnichannel communication, which incorporates digital and more traditional channels to provide a frictionless customer experience, is now vital to how businesses in highly regulated industries must meet today’s customer expectations.
But implementing an omnichannel communication strategy is a deeply complex undertaking, that must consider omnichannel design and delivery, not to mention implementing the right solution.
From understanding omnichannel design and delivery to selecting the right tools and technology, this guide is your one-stop resource for everything you need to know about mastering omnichannel communication.
What’s Inside:
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What is the Difference Between Multichannel and Omnichannel?
Omnichannel communication differs from multichannel communication in a few ways.
Multichannel communication means that a business interacts with its customers through many channels. These channels could include email, web portals, and print. However, there is little to no coordination in what the business sends its customers via each channel.
A business might send print communication that looks completely different from the email version.
Omnichannel communication is an experience where the business provides consistent, centrally managed communications across all channels. It’s about delivering a seamless, interactive, and bi-directional experience, like signing up for an account online, completing the process in-store, and receiving tailored links to additional information via email.
At its core, omnichannel communications is no longer about the product and services. It focuses on the customer and creating a unified view of that customer across all channels.
Why Omnichannel Design and Delivery Matters
To see examples of omnichannel communication in action, check out our latest webinar, “Upgrade your Member Experience: The Journey to Omnichannel Communications at Your Own Pace.”
3 Core Principles of Omnichannel Communication
1. Integration across platforms
Integration across platforms is crucial for aggregating data from different channels into a single view for the customer. You can think of this as creating a holistic approach that the customer desires, but it is also crucial to your business.
Why? Well, this approach allows you to understand your customers’ behavior more deeply and better personalize communication in ways that offer targeted recommendations.
Seamless transitions are another reason integration across platforms is vital to omnichannel communication.
The modern customer wants to avoid entering their information or repeating themselves when interacting with your organization on their preferred channels. For example, a customer might start an inquiry online through a chatbot and finish the interaction over the phone with a live agent. Ensuring these transactions go as smoothly as possible makes for superior omnichannel communication.
The most crucial purpose of integrating omnichannel communication across all platforms is to allow your operational teams to work from a unified system. You can offer customers faster response times, and better service delivery, while minimizing errors, and improving communication across related departments.
2. Personalization
Remember when we mentioned that modern customers desire an experience tailored to them? A big part of providing omnichannel communication is ensuring you enhance the customer experience, and this is why personalization is truly essential for retention, loyalty, enhanced customer experience, and a competitive advantage.
This Next in Personalization 2021 Report proves that 71% of customers want personalization, and 76% get frustrated when they don’t find it.
The report also revealed that personalization directly influences buying behavior across the customer journey, with 76% of customers considering purchasing from brands that personalize and 78% of those customers making a repeat purchase. A massive 78% of customers are also more willing to refer friends and family to a business that personalizes.
The report ultimately shows how “personalization drives performance and better customer outcomes.” More importantly, “companies that grow faster drive 40 percent more of their revenue from personalization than their slower-growing counterparts.”
3. Consistency
Integration across platforms and personalization are crucial to the success of omnichannel communication. Still, consistency is necessary to strengthen sales and marketing efforts, improve the clarity of your communications, and make it easy to collect data.
Omnichannel sales and marketing efforts become more effective when they’re consistent. Across all channels, you can present cohesive campaigns aligned with your business goals, brand, and messaging.
Omnichannel or not, clear communication is an absolute must-have for your business. Keeping your messaging consistent across all channels reduces misunderstandings and calls to your customer support.
Data collection and integration become simple with consistent practices across channels. With such a diverse collection of data, you gain better insight into your customers, which helps improve personalization efforts and strategies.
Using these principles, you can begin to work toward designing an effective omnichannel experience and the delivery of omnichannel communication.
Designing an Effective Omnichannel Experience
Before you begin implementing omnichannel communication, you must focus on the design. Sitting down to design an effective omnichannel experience requires three stages:
1. Map Out the Journey: A Customer-Centric Approach
If you’ve explored the three core principles of omnichannel communication, you’ll have noted that the customer sits at the center. That’s why designing an omnichannel communication experience must start with mapping the customer journey.
The following questions will help to guide your team in designing an omnichannel communication strategy that works for your customers:
What are the key customer touchpoints and micro-conversions?
Touchpoints include any interaction or point of contact between your business and the customer.
Building a list of all customer touchpoints is a wonderful place to start, for example, a website visit, a product purchased, confirmation messages, a phone call, and reading an email.
While these touchpoints help build the bigger picture, remember the details! Micro-conversions help gain customers who show initial interest in your business and include:
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- Visiting and reading several pages of your website.
- Watching a video.
- Commenting on a blog post.
Where can you gather information and data about your customers?
While micro-conversions might not lead to a sale, the data about these potential customers’ behavior is invaluable. It’s possible, for instance, to drive these people toward an email list and convert them into a lead. Eventually, with enough data, you can tweak your approach for even faster conversions.
And this is also true of all your touchpoints—off or online. You can gather customer data from social media, printed communications, phone calls, chat bots, links, emails, and interactive videos.
How can you use these details to create buyer personas?
Customer personas help businesses understand different customer groups’ behaviors, needs, and goals.
It’s possible to identify patterns from the pool of information you gather via all your touchpoints. These patterns help you to segment your customers.
Finally, once you’ve narrowed down your personas, you can ask several more hard-hitting questions:
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- What drives this persona to purchase this product or service?
- How would this persona react to this product?
- What channels would this persona use to find information about us?
- Which channels would this persona use to purchase a product or service?
What makes personas so critical to the success of omnichannel communication is that you can tailor the customer journey to meet the specific needs of each segment, creating a more personalized experience.
What are your customer’s pain points?
Pain points include areas where customers come across difficulties along the customer journey. Whether the messaging differs from channel to channel, finding information or even making a purchase presents challenges, and all contribute to friction that deters customers from giving you their business.
Emotions also impact how customers feel about their journey with your organization. Understanding if they’re happy, frustrated, or indifferent can help you determine where the customer journey takes them.
2. Use the Core Principles
Throughout the design process, turning to the three core principles of omnichannel communications serves to help shape the customer journey further.
1. Integration Across Platforms:
Ensures you provide a seamless experience across all touchpoints.
2. Personalization:
By offering a tailored experience across all touchpoints you enhance satisfaction, loyalty, and engagement.
3. Consistency:
Provide a cohesive experience across all touchpoints to build trust and satisfaction.
For more information on the three core principles of omnichannel communication, refer to that section of this guide.
3. Use the Right Tools and Technology – Customer Communication Management (CCM) Solutions
To facilitate seamless omnichannel delivery, you must seek out tools and technology that help deliver an integrated and personalized experience. Customer communication management (CCM) solutions make up some of the best business options, especially those in highly regulated industries.
Are you curious to know what CCM solutions deliver? Here’s a look at some of its capabilities:Manages complex business processes, including digital onboarding.
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- Handles variable data.
- Has highly advanced design abilities.
- Keeps up with regulation changes.
- Enables bi-directional interactions.
- Breaks down digital and organizational silos.
- Capability to send personalized messages on the customer’s preferred channel, at any time.
CCM solutions are vital to pull data from disparate systems, simplify the assembly of complex documents, ensure regulatory compliance, and enhance customer interactions.
What You Can Deliver with CCM Solutions
The benefits of selecting and implementing a CCM solution are far-reaching. One of the biggest benefits is how a CCM solution can streamline your operations, helping to reduce costs without sacrificing the customer experience.
Here’s a breakdown of what else you can expect to deliver with CCM:
Digital forms and processes: Pre-populate digital application forms with workflows that simplify the onboarding of new products and services.
Complex document handling: Manage complicated document assembly and delivery across all channels from a centralized hub. Gain complete control over different types of content, such as document order and compliance messaging.
Complex variable data: Businesses in highly regulated industries like banking, healthcare, and insurance must handle large volumes of complex, variable data. The right CCM solution can pull this data from different systems and easily compile it into personalized customer communications.
Interactivity: Personalize communications for a more engaging customer experience. For example, deliver interactive tables and charts or upsell/cross-sell messages via communications in the preferred channel(s).
Industry regulations: Compliance standards and regulations change often and differ from country to country. The right CCM solution will allow for collaboration, a holistic view of the entire communications package, and more control over audits, management, and regulatory language.
Connecting silos: Businesses often separate their customer communication teams for different channels or rely on third parties to manage communications for a specific channel. Usually, this leads to a fragmented customer experience and other inefficiencies. A CCM solution can help with data, channel, and organizational silos, for reduced cost, effort, and an improved omnichannel communication experience.
Delivering Omnichannel Communication
1. Choosing the Right Channels
2. Synchronizing Content
A core principle of omnichannel communication is consistency. Delivering synchronized content to ensure customers get a cohesive experience on their chosen channels helps to meet customer expectations.
Synchronized content allows for:
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- Consistent messaging and branding: Build brand identity and credibility with the same message, values, and voice across all channels.
- Coordinated campaigns: Maximize your impact and reach by running integrated marketing campaigns across different channels. Remember: channel campaigns should complement each other.
- Real-time updates: If a promotion or service ends, this content must be updated immediately across all channels.
- Cross-channel storytelling: Refers to a narrative you can tell over many channels. For example, you can start a promotion on LinkedIn that leads to more information on your website and concludes with an email sign-up.
3. Leveraging Data for Personalization
Businesses that use data strategically can deliver powerful omnichannel communication through tailored experiences that customers love. Leveraging data leads to higher engagement, strengthens loyalty, and increases satisfaction.
Much of this delivery method contains elements of designing the customer journey because it:
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- Collects and integrates customer data across all channels.
- Segments customers based on preferences and behaviors.
- Creates tailored content and offers.
- Automates campaigns across the channels.
Measuring Omnichannel Success
To ensure you’re getting the most out of your omnichannel design and delivery, measuring your success is crucial.
Let’s explore a few different methods you can implement:
Key Metrics/KPIs help support and manage your business objectives. To measure the effectiveness of your omnichannel communication design and delivery, you must monitor the following:
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- Customer engagement metrics
- Customer retention metrics
- Conversion sales metrics
- Customer experience metrics
- Operational efficiency metrics
- Digital engagement metrics
Implementing tools and technology to measure and analyze your omnichannel design and delivery performance also helps you gather the data you need to review your key metrics.
By tracking and measuring your omnichannel success, you can improve through your data and gain insight into performance across channels, identifying areas for growth in ways that help to drive business.
Overcoming Omnichannel Communication Challenges
As with any major investment, ensuring your omnichannel communication design and delivery project goes off without a hitch is easier said than done.
The good news is there are several common omnichannel challenges that most businesses bump up against. Let’s dive into them here to give you a head start in learning what you can expect:
Data management and integration: Disparate or legacy systems and databases can make creating a single view of the customer difficult.
Coordinating multiple channels: Managing interactions across many channels, such as email, a website, and physical stores, requires significant coordination across teams. Poor coordination can lead to duplications and misaligned messaging.
Cross-channel attribution: Figuring out which channel is responsible for a sale is tricky. Without accurate cross-channel attribution, you end up with misinformation about marketing and budget, as well as an incomplete understanding of the customer journey.
Security and privacy: When working with multiple platforms, there’s naturally an increased risk of data breaches and security issues. Focusing on delivering compliant personalized experiences is a complex undertaking.
Employee alignment and training: Omnichannel communication requires employees across different teams to work together. Employees will need training to provide consistent and effective customer experiences.
The Impacts of Choosing the Right Partner
If the number and depth of omnichannel communication challenges seem daunting, there’s no need to go through the design and delivery process alone. You’ve got options, and when you know what to look for, you can choose a partner that can make all your omnichannel communication dreams come true.
To move quickly in this ever-evolving business landscape, working with the right partner leads to a faster time-to-market. Working with a leading-industry expert offers quick responses to emerging opportunities and the implementation of omnichannel strategies and new channels.
You will also need to implement a solution that will grow with your company. A partner who understands how to future-proof your business will introduce you to scalable and flexible options to help you maintain a competitive edge and ensure long-term growth.
An experienced partner can also help you integrate communication platforms, automate manual processes, and streamline your omnichannel operations, all of which improve efficiency across your organization for incredible cost savings.
Reach out today! Contact one of our industry-leading experts for more information on how omnichannel communications can benefit your business.
Omnichannel Communication FAQ
What are omnichannel communication examples?
What are omnichannel communication benefits and why is omnichannel communication important?
The benefits and importance of omnichannel communication include,
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- Increased customer satisfaction
- Quick, proactive messaging
- Centralized data access
- Improved customer support processes
- Consistent customer experience
- Reduced operational costs and greater efficiency
What are omnichannel design best practices?
Best practices for omnichannel design include:
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- Personalization
- A focus on the customer experience
- Seamless customer journey
- Analytics applied to the entire dataset
- Opting for a responsive design
- Consistency throughout every channel