A potential customer might initially come across a social media post announcing your latest collection while idly scrolling on their smartphone, only to find your phone number to call and check if you have a particular item in store. Maybe they’ll remember your brand name to research more later when they’re at their computer. Then, when they come across a store with your goods, they might ask for a recommendation. All of these levels of communication are perfect opportunities for you to present your brand in the best possible light.
However, to achieve some level of centralization in customer experience across these vastly different channels, you need to adapt your strategy. There are numerous methods you can rely on in your effort to provide the finest possible experience for your customers no matter the channels they choose, but the following are tried and tested, and you can use them within your own strategy to boost engagement, conversions, and loyalty.
Find out where your customers are
Cross-channel strategies depend on this one major step in your process: selecting the channels where you should build your presence to begin with. If your target audience spends the vast majority of their time on Instagram and Snapchat, that’s where you need to be, as well. However, piling on more accounts than necessary might just create confusion both for your staff and your customers.
Analyze your digital footprint and assess where your customers are most active and where they spend most of their online time interacting with brands. This is your foundation to set the stage for your cross-channel strategy and ensure that you are where your customers need you to be.
Connect your communications dots
Once you learn about all the channels that your customers prefer, you should start developing a communications strategy to enable all of your customer-centric employees to efficiently interact with customers. To do that, many companies utilize reliable VoIP solutions that encompass everything from internet-based phone calls, call recording and analytics, all the way to emailing, texting, and faxing.
Unifying your cross-channel communications with a single platform can help your staff stay on top of all customer queries, never leave a question unanswered, and they’ll be able to learn from their interactions to improve customer experience across different channels.
Establish brand voice guidelines
You might understand the key ways in which your brand differs from your competitors, and you might do your best to integrate your core values in all content you publish, but your employees need to be able to do the same. They are the ones to ensure your brand voice persists through customer experience and defines it no matter the channel in question.
Create a go-to book of guidelines with the main traits of your brand voice, most prominent characteristics of your brand’s identity, and provide examples of acceptable and preferable communication methods.
Train all customer-centric staff
Your website is just one piece of your cross-channel puzzle. The people who write your content, post on social media, as well as people working on your phone lines to provide support – they are the ones who need to retain brand voice consistency when communicating with your customers.
Once you have your brand guidelines ready and all channels of communication established, you should conduct workshops and training to help your staff internalize the voice of your brand when interacting with customers.
Evaluate your success to adapt
While certain strategies will prove to be exceptionally successful at first, you cannot rely on your current success for the future. Of course, as long as data supports your approach, you should rely on your tried and tested methods to approach customers on all fronts. However, you should also perform ongoing analytics and create data-driven reports to give your future strategies direction.
Based on all of your analytics tools on your website and social media, combined with the results you manage to collect via your VoIP phone lines, and dedicated email surveys, you can always find ways to improve customer experience. Your main goal should be to keep listening to what your customers are saying about your brand and the entire customer journey across all touchpoints. There will come a time when you’ll need to revise your checkout process or simplify your site’s navigation, so that you can retain your reputation and boost customer satisfaction.
Your customers will change their habits over time, and you’ll find yourself adapting to their preferences along the way, too. These core strategies will enable you enough flexibility and consistency in one go to preserve your brand identity, boost recognition, while at the same time exceeding customer expectations. Customer experience should be your top priority, but only with the right tools and solutions can you see the results you need to grow your presence. Make sure to put these suggestions to use and craft a strategy that will ensure a stellar experience no matter the channel your customers choose.
