Achieving Omnichannel Success

It’s a brave new world when it comes to reaching out and engaging with your audience and retailers the world over are reaping the benefits of merging marketing and communication channels together into a single congruent whole.

We know that the modern consumer uses around ten or eleven separate channels to engage with their favourite brands and retailers looking to succeed in this environment need to ensure messaging and identity are consistent across every single touch point.

This means moving your brand beyond a multichannel approach and fully embracing omnichannel as the way to do business in the retail space in 2022 and beyond.

Omnichannel

The first step on the road to omnichannel success is to ensure your retail brand has all the tools in place to meet your customers where they are and make sure that, no matter how they choose to engage, they are getting a consistent experience throughout.

This starts with understanding the assorted reasons a customer may want to communicate with your brand, which channel they might prefer to use for that communication, and what kind of service they’ll likely expect when engaging with you.

For example, when it comes to sorting out simple tasks such as arranging a return or asking a frequently asked question, they are likely to see value in an automated chatbot which can quickly and easily address their query without the need to wait in a queue or engage in a protracted customer service process unnecessarily.

However, we all know AI powered chatbots are far from perfect, so make sure you provide customers with a means to quickly transfer to a human operator should the technology fail to address their issue satisfactorily. The human operator should then instantly have access to the chatbot thread to quickly get caught up on the problem.

Social Media

It will come as little surprise that many customers prefer to use social media as a primary means of communicating with brands.

This means retailers looking to succeed in an omnichannel world need to ensure their social media teams are fully equipped to handle customer service engagement on multiple platforms. Understand that different generations prefer different social media platforms, which means needing to have a presence on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and potentially others such as Snapchat, to make sure your brand is reaching, and able to be reached by, all demographics.

Social media can be tricky as a tool for direct communication as people can leave customer service queries to get lost in long comment threads where they can easily be missed. Make sure customers know they can direct message your social media teams where a customer service representative can give them a more personalised experience.

Final Thoughts

The key to omnichannel success is consistency. Making sure your brand is speaking with one voice, regardless of the channel being used is the difference between a siloed multichannel approach and a seamless and congruent omnichannel model.

However your retail customers choose to engage with your brand, they need to be confident they’re getting the same great service as if they walked into a physical store and addressed you face to face.

Omnichannel retail is certain to be part of the conversation at Retail CIO Connect 2022, being held in June at Sopwell House, St Albans, UK.

Download the agenda today for more information and insights.