As customers, we interact with brands from a bewildering array of devices and via an ever-growing range of channels. Yet we still want to accomplish our goals as quickly, efficiently, and pleasurably as possible. But this is only possible, when all of these different channels and devices converge to produce a single, meaningful, and useful customer experience. The idea of a “holistic” customer experience across all channels is the holy grail for marketers. But it can be incredibly difficult to accomplish. What are the barriers that inhibit unified experiences and what can you do to overcome them?
The Best Experiences are Contextual and Orchestrated
Most of us instinctively recognize the qualities that contribute to a great consumer experience. Great experiences are those that respond intuitively to our needs and present us with exactly the right content to satisfy our desires – regardless of where this content is located. In other words, these experiences are:
- Contextual, meaning that they are appropriate to our immediate circumstances.
- Orchestrated, meaning that they seamlessly combine elements from different sources.
A good example of this would be a travel app that recognizes when I’m approaching a hotel at which I have a reservation and:
- Offers to check me in automatically.
- Notifies me of special discounts on additional hotel services.
- Recommends nearby attractions I might like based on information from my social feed.
An experience like this is both helpful and relevant. Better still, I can respond to this information immediately, because it’s presented as a single orchestrated experience in a single app.
If we can all recognize the value of this kind of experience, why doesn’t it happen more often? Why aren’t more online marketers prepared to deliver digital experiences that are truly holistic and responsive?
The Challenge: One Company, Many Voices
The primary reason is that companies and their marketing teams are saddled with organizational structures and technology platforms that were designed for a completely different online ecosystem.
In the early days of the web and mobile delivery, people assumed that online media would operate much like existing, traditional media channels – linear, discrete, and largely non-interactive. They also assumed that consumers would happily restrict their interactions to a single channel at a time. After all, no one has ever listened to a radio ad for a store and then got angry at the sales associate for not recognizing them when they showed up to buy something.
But old habits die hard.
By the time companies had begun to recognize just how different online media is, they had already invested considerable time and resources into building separate technology silos for things like digital marketing, ecommerce, and online customer support. And they compounded the problem by hiring teams of people to run these applications who have entirely different business objectives and rarely speak to each other.
Given all of this, it’s no surprise that most brands can’t talk to their customers with a single voice.
It is possible to overcome these challenges but it isn’t something that can be tackled overnight. However, there are some things that you can start doing today.
Map Customer Journeys
You can’t satisfy your customers’ needs and desires until you understand how they want to interact with your organization.
Too many companies start by making assumptions about customer behavior without actually doing the hard work of comparing these assumptions to real-world behavior. Those that do are often surprised by what they discover.
Smart brands take the time to document the most important customer personas and understand their critical “user stories,” “pain points” and “moments of truth”.
This kind of customer journey mapping can serve many purposes – from near-term tactical problem solving to long-term strategic business planning – but it all begins from the same place: a diligent, bottom-up analysis of what your customers want and how they attempt to achieve their goals. The outcome of this process is a series of useful insights and assumptions that must then be tested, validated, and put into practice.
Coordinate Your Teams – Orchestrate Your Content
Defining customer journey maps is only the first step. In order to deliver great experiences across channels business users must be able to leverage this knowledge to deliver experiences that combine and deliver content from different enterprise systems and repositories.
One of the great things about the customer journey process is that it can reveal exactly how, when, and where different teams, departments, and technologies must interact in order to deliver the desired experiences. But just knowing now how these different components must work together doesn’t mean that the integration will be easy.
To achieve the goal of holistic end-to-end experiences, you must be able to break down both organizational and technical silos:
- Business side: You need to establish processes and incentives that actively unite teams that might not be used to working together. These united teams are then responsible for designing the experiences that correspond to the identified needs or your most important customer personas.
- Technical side: You must be able to activate this experience at the appropriate point in time by automating the delivery of relevant experiences based on contextual data and comprised of content assembled from multiple sources.
This doesn’t mean, however, that you should duplicate all relevant content items and associated information (e.g. brand assets, product listings, social content, customer service records) into a single, centrally-managed repository. Copied assets require more storage infrastructure and must be constantly synchronized with the original content to ensure that it’s kept up to date. A better approach is to store and manage dynamic links to the original assets, which allows you to store them in the specialized systems for which they were designed.
More Integration, Less ‘One-Size-Fits-All’ Hype
Once you have documented your customers’ journeys and identified the team and systems that must be coordinated, how do you go about putting together an integrated solution to deliver these orchestrated experiences?
Many software vendors have decided that the best way to mitigate the ever-present problem of integration is to provide an all-in-one enterprise software suite. At first glance, many of these suites seem to provide a broad range of digital marketing or ecommerce capabilities, but a more thorough evaluation typically reveals that the whole is somewhat less impressive than its individual parts.
The promised “simple” solution that solves all integration challenges often force customers to purchase expensive add-on modules that replicate the proven and mature functionality of existing technology investments. Such an approach typically rewards the vendor more than the customer. To make matters worse, business users then have to navigate through pieced-together user interfaces that are no better than the original disconnected approach.
Choose The Right Tools To Empower Your Business Users, Streamline Your Processes
Although automation can play an important role in delivering the kind of real-time experiences that online customers increasingly expect, the best customer experiences demand a human touch and must be designed by experts who truly understand both the customer and the brand.
Too many digital marketing and ecommerce systems seem to have been designed strictly for technical users. When line of business experts or customer advocates are prevented from directly accessing a company’s online systems due to technical complexity, the outcome is rarely positive. In order to innovate and respond quickly to changing customer demands, business users need to have their hands on the controls.
Great customer experiences ultimately depend upon three things:
- Great business user experiences.
- Efficient automation.
- The opportunity to optimize the experience.
Business users must be empowered to orchestrate content originating from a variety of sources from a single user interface, rather than forcing them to learn – and switch between – several different UI concepts. A single, integrated user interface enables them to provide a superior visitor experience and not be limited by learning a new product or user metaphor. In order to achieve this, the flow of information across systems is key, as is the ability to re-use content within new contexts across various online touchpoints.
But once these experiences have been created, companies must be able to deliver them in real-time to any channel or device based on sometimes subtle shifts in customer behavior. This is not something that can be accomplished manually.
Even an army of empowered business users can’t deliver real-time experiences for thousands of customers shopping for tens of thousands of products. The right tool is one that can act as a central management and delivering hub, capable of aggregating content from any source and automatically delivering it to any channel.
But we all know that things change. From hour to hour, day to day, and month to month, customer behavior shifts. New products are introduced. New access technologies emerge. New competitors dominate. In order to remain effective over the long run, smart tools must provide actionable insights for evolving and optimizing the experience.
3 Keys to Success
All of this may sound overwhelming, but it doesn’t need to be. There are some practical steps that companies can follow to increase their chance of success when rolling out holistic, multi-channel customer-centric experience:
1. Assemble the Right Team
The only way to overcome the organizational and technical barriers to creating and implementing truly holistic customer experiences is to assemble an internal team that represents the critical customer touchpoints with your organization. This means including representatives from marketing, ecommerce, customer support, and more.
It is equally important for you to include members of the IT team will can help the team understand the key information and content sources and who will be able to take your customer journey maps and turn them into practical plan for integration and development.
Finally, you need to get buy in from C‑level executives, because if they don’t see this as a priority there is no way that you will be able to bring all the necessary moving parts into alignment.
2. Identify Short-Term Wins
Online interactions are often complicated. Many companies with thousands of products and customers spread all over the globe. And many have implemented numerous software systems to manage customer data and coordinate the delivery of online content.
If you try to capture all of this and integrate everything, you can easily enter a state of “analysis paralysis” and spiraling costs.
A better way to kick off the process is to put together a plan that allows for a short-term win. Start by asking yourself these kinds of questions:
- What are your customers’ biggest pain point?
- Where are the biggest achievable opportunities?
- Which departments are most open to change?
3. Move Quickly – But Innovate Incrementally
Once you have a plan in place, you need to move quickly to capitalize on the opportunity. But this doesn’t mean that you need to do everything all at once.
Some will suggest that the only way forward is a complete “re-platforming” of your entire technical ecosystem. And in some situations, this approach might be the only possibility. But for most companies, this kind of “rip-and-replace” strategy is unnecessarily risky and expensive.
You can accelerate your time to market and manage your level of risk by taking an evolutionary approach that lays a sustainable foundation for future growth. Companies should consider a “grow-as-you-go” approach that starts with making enhancements to their existing online properties – while simultaneously building a foundation for a true integrated platform that can deliver blended brand experiences across all of a company’s web properties.
What are you doing, or have you done, to ensure you deliver unified, holistic customer experiences?