For any brand culture that focuses on improving the customer experience, we’re seeing a shift in strategy across departments or brand families to create an easy and more seamless experience for customers. Think of breaking down silos across departments as a way to create moments that matter. Here are five principles to guide you through this process:
Enterprise: Creating omnichannel moments that matter requires a shift in how the company views its customers, and as such, requires a shift in how data is shared among departments. It also involves a more in depth loyalty strategy. Loyalty isn’t just a retention tactic or a packaged program owned by marketing. The loyalty initiative should be implemented through an integrated approach and should be embraced by the entire company and all product and service offerings, partners and employees. It’s important to identify the executive stakeholder and appoint department stakeholders or “omnichannel owners” who are responsible for executing the strategy and are held accountable for the potential outcomes.
Experience & Engagement: Do you have the right data to develop an understanding of your customers or members? Being able to engage consumers in a personalized, one-to-one fashion at every applicable channel, with an appropriate message and interaction opportunity, is paramount – but it requires the right set of data to create this single view of the customer. The goal is to ultimately provide the framework for reciprocal customer-brand relationships.
Enabling Technology: Maintaining an automated and flexible omnichannel marketing strategy and overarching loyalty program requires the appropriate technology to make the strategy work seamlessly and effectively. In addition, it needs to remain robust enough to be scalable as the business expands.
Economics: It’s essential to drive incremental financial results through projection and success metrics that are based on both a sound economic and financial model, as well as a measurement process supported by easy-to-access, quality data and contextual insights. Set up benchmarks to help gauge success, identify performance metrics and align them across teams. Give dashboard access to teams and meet often to assess operational challenges and find ways to drive innovation throughout the customer experience.
Execution: The most important thing to remember when executing a brand’s omnichannel marketing or omnichannel loyalty program is to ensure it follows through on its promise. Furthermore, brands should empower employees with easy-to-access and pertinent program information and performance incentives, and train them on how and when they should engage customers and program managers. Empower employees to share ideas and experience being a customer for themselves – a great strategy for top-level executives, as well – to pinpoint gaps in the omnichannel experience and resulting communications strategy.
Most importantly, remember that the evolution to omnichannel marketing and omnichannel loyalty isn’t going to happen overnight. Focus on incremental wins that will lead to a bigger change or strategic focus over time. Finally, leverage data to determine the strategy’s impact and keep a pulse on results to gauge success and drive insights that will have a lasting effect.
