The clock is ticking for retail: create a truly multi-channel customer experience or perish. A recent consumer survey released by ATG reveals:
- 78 percent said they use two or more channels to browse, research and make purchases; 30 percent said they use three channels or more
- 43 percent said they start their research online or through a mobile device, but then need to call a customer service or call center representative to complete the transaction because the necessary product or service information cannot be found online
- 39 percent said they browse via the online or mobile channel and then make purchases in the store because they prefer to touch and feel the product; 36 percent said they do this to compare several brands of the same product
Consumers are embracing the freedom the new multi-channel environment provides them in evaluating products and services to ensure that whatever purchase they make is the right one. Retailers are starting to follow suit, but they face some significant barriers in doing so:
- Touchpoint Coordination—Many retail organizations manage in-store experience, e-commerce, customer service, and marketing communications in separate silos, making it hard to coordinate and synchronize efforts across touchpoints and leading to inconsistency and mixed messages to customers.
- Brand Differentiation—Gone are the days where a cool website will get you noticed. As more retailers embrace emerging touchpoints—social media, mobile, apps, etc.—it will become increasingly difficult for any one retailer to differentiate in such a high-noise environment. Retailers need to bulletproof the value propositions that drive all go-to-market activities, reinforcing the company’s key differentiators that best meet customer needs.
- Data Collection and Capture—New channels are both a blessing and a curse: while they can provide retailers with the chance to collect previously impossible amounts of customer data, rarely do they have the systems or people in place to use this data to build a single customer view. This problem is often exacerbated by the same org structure issues that make touchpoint coordination difficult: if the groups don’t report into a single source, their data probably doesn’t get aggregated either.
While there is no quick fix for any of these issues, there are a couple of ways retailers can begin to close the gap to ensure success in the new multi-channel environment:
- Use a jobs/outcomes framework to organize customer understanding. Retailers should use the consumer data they collect to better understand the specific tasks customers are trying to complete when they interact with the company at specific touchpoints and how customers will measure the success of those interactions. In organizations where individual touchpoints and data sources are owned by many different groups, cross-functional coordination will be necessary to build a holistic picture. Framing customer understanding in this way can help identify the most critical customer touchpoints that retailers need to get right. MLC members, check out this tutorial for more information on jobs and outcomes.
- Ensure that key touchpoints demonstrate the brand’s unique strengths. Rather than try to improve performance across all channels, retailers should instead focus on ensuring that the critical few key touchpoints will shape customer opinion and engagement, accurately reflect the brand’s unique differentiating strengths. Check out Pat’s post from a few weeks back for a framework for shaping the customer experience this way.
- Identify and fix misaligned touchpoints. Once the critical touchpoints have been optimized, it’s important to make sure that the others don’t detract from the experience with off-brand service delivery or inconsistent messaging. Retailers need to identify these “brand busters” quickly and find simple solutions for bringing them in line with other touchpoints. MLC members, if you’re interested in seeing a framework for ensuring touchpoint alignment, click here.
Taking this approach to customer experience will help retailers move from merely interacting with customers across multiple touchpoints to creating a seamless, truly multi-channel experience.
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