Almost 46% of companies report prioritising customer experience (CX) over areas such as the product and pricing thanks to its ability to fuel everything from your chances at customer retention to invaluable marketing tools like word of mouth. This highlights the importance of nailing your customer experience throughout your business in order to get the best results from your business and the most out of your customer experience. 

The reality of continuing to offer the customer experience that customers expect (and are willing to pay more for in 86% of cases³) is complex, especially considering the large number of available communication channels. Unfortunately, call centres that only offer that single channel aren’t enough to meet a growing audience that expects quality experiences delivered across different channels and means of communication.

In this sense, customer experience in an omnichannel landscape relies not only on the calls still favoured by as many as 60% of customers, but also customer care delivered via social media messages, live chat, and more. Done well, this can extend your business reach, and ensure that consumers feel looked after regardless of their platform of choice. However, the flip side of this is that failure can lead to confusion, poor communication, and a general sense that your company doesn’t care.

In this article, we’re going to help you avoid the latter by considering the top five ways to improve your omnichannel customer experience. Let’s go! 

Method 1: Involve everyone in customer experience strategies

It’s easy to assume that customer experience is the sole responsibility of customer representatives. However, this siloed approach is rarely the right fit for even one-source solutions, let alone omnichannel operations that rely on a consistent experience across several mediums. 

Instead, involving everyone from your marketing team to accountants and even executives in the development and deployment of customer experience strategies is the only way to ensure that things run as they should across all channels. The following ideas should be considered when opening customer experience strategies across wider teams: 

• Discovering how each team interacts with the customer.
• The best method of contact for each team – whether this be via email, social media, phone calls, etc. 
• Working together as a larger team to understand the company’s customer experience culture and values. This can be through mission statements that are shared among teams. 

This method enables the oversight and coming together of entire customer journeys for the easier delivery of effective customer care. 

Making customer experience a company-wide initiative can also supercharge your ability to store and communicate data across channels. This makes it easier to cross-reference feedback, surveys, and reviews across all channels. It also helps improve each channel in its own right and bring together the results that consumers expect, seamlessly delivered, even across multi-channel landscapes. 

Method 2: Omnichannel experiences need omnichannel servicing

The need for products and services delivered across multiple channels has ultimately been fuelled by growing demands and requirements for increasingly seamless customer journeys. If customer care doesn’t expand, you risk ruining that with various platform redirections for even simple queries.

As many as 61% of consumers report difficulties seeking support across multiple channels, for example, the need to repeat themselves when communicating on a new channel. Customer experience will inevitably suffer when the service is not consistent across these channels. This would then further the risk of potential leads heading directly towards your competitors.

To avoid this, companies need to offer a range of customer service options to suit recipients, including:

• Phone: Trained phone professionals continue to appeal to both less tech-minded consumers and those looking for the ease of real conversations when addressing complex queries.
• Live chat: The quick response times possible through live chat enable the effortless addressing and resolution of simple questions. 
• Social: Social presence builds customer relationships across new demographics. Those bonds will grow even more when replies are almost instant and helpful.
• Email: Traditional email offers customer support for lengthy queries complete with paper trails that customers can use for reference.
• Website: Visible website reviews and responses provide an obvious go-to for consumers and act as a recommendation tool to highlight the value of your service. 

All of these channels must be connected internally to share information. Customers can change their method of communication with you at any time, and to be consistent with your service, information received from all channels should be accessible to the rest. 

Method 3: Personalise customer service for better experiences

It’s all too easy for omnichannel experiences that typically focus on high-volume, far-reaching operations to function at a base level of efficiency. However, good customer experience still relies on your ability to make customers feel like valued assets. Taking steps to incorporate the personal customer service valued by 80% of consumers is the best way to continue achieving that goal. 

Omnichannel strategies make this easier than you might expect in some surprising ways, primarily through interaction-fuelled data collections that form a 360° view of customer journeys. This information can then be used to detail consumer profiles. Whether your team is in-house or outsourced, making full use of this information makes for easier CS handling that improves personalised services, and ultimately, customer experience. You can easily do this through methods such as:

• Self-service solutions
• Personalised greetings
• Tailored suggestions/problem handling
• Follow up emails

Through the above methods, you reinforce the message that you care about your customers, what they have to say and where they’re saying it. This allows you to tailor experience-enhancing customer service to their needs and the platform in question. 

Method 4: Value existing customers equally to potential new ones

Great customer experience delivered through excellent service has always been essential for creating loyalty. Still,  it’s most often tailored towards converting new and potential leads. The fact that returning customers on average spend 67% more with each purchase suggests that it’s worth considering putting at least as much value on existing customers as potential new ones. 

In some ways, the steps we’ve discussed will help with this. However, brands looking to achieve bonds strong enough to enhance customer lifetime value (CLV) need to go even further. Tailoring CS around existing omnichannel data can be valuable for custom solutions that create lasting emotional bonds. 

Focusing on enhancing your customer care areas can help show existing customers how much they mean to you and why your brand is worth returning to in the future. Simple tweaks that can be used to enhance your customer care quality include:

• Streamlining your complaints policy
• Introducing or simplifying your 24/7 contact solutions
• Adding visible customer feedback onto your website and social media

Method 5: Be prepared for anything

The real value of omnichannel customer experience comes from your ability to provide seamless, uninterrupted service on-demand. This benefit isn’t guaranteed though, if you don’t prepare for the unexpected. Factors such as sudden surges in demand could leave key customer experiences faltering due to the long wait times for small queries. Due to this, consumers will inevitably go elsewhere as a result.

Being prepared and able to naturally scale demand at a moment’s notice is vital to consistent happy customers, and high quality customer service. Achieving this solely in-house is rarely simple, meaning that true preparation relies on scalable agent programmes delivered through outsourced providers with your business in mind. 

Without the costs that you would face from having large but typically unnecessary teams on stand-by, outsourcing can provide you with a much more affordable and scalable solution to match demand in real time. This reduces the risk of delays and therefore assists you in further cases where queue may spike or fall unexpectedly.

Be there for your customers with Odondo

Omnichannel customer service experiences provide customers with choice. Freedom to communicate how they wish to reduces friction. However, the broader your focus gets, the harder it can be to perfect things in-house due to escalating costs, delays, and the risks of general inefficiency.

By offering scalable solutions on-demand, Odondo’s pay-as-you-go customer service outsourcing can help you get omnichannel outlooks right without any of those struggles. Our distributed customer service agent model ensures the experiences your customers need, regardless of when, how, or where they request them. 
From eCommerce service outsourcing to managing your social media messaging or even email and call centre requirements, our agents ensure quality experiences for queries of all sizes. See these benefits and more for yourself by getting on top of omnichannel offerings with a customer service outsourcing quote today.

¹ 37 Customer Experience Statistics You Need To Know For 2022

² 60% of Customers Prefer to Call Small Businesses on the Phone

³ 86% of Customers Pay More For Better Customer Experience

⁴ 25 Amazing Omnichannel Statistics Every Marketer Should Know (Updated for 2021)

⁵ 56 Top Personalization Statistics: Facts And Trends For 2021

⁶ 7 Ways to Improve Your Omnichannel Customer Experience

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