Moving Towards Omnichannel: Leveraging Big Data for Delightful Experiences

If you flicked through the 2021 business strategies of most customer-first organisations, you’d find ‘omnichannel channel’ on slide two under Key Objectives.?

No surprises there. Anyone who has spent time around the marketing department or pored over annual trend reports is aware of the ubiquity of omnichannel.

It’s easy to see why. The sheer value generated for executing an omnichannel strategy holds incredible value, both from a business and customer experience (CX) perspective. A well-executed omnichannel strategy results in better customer service and improved customer experiences. In addition, it creates a reduction in friction that paves the way for sales and marketing to convert, resulting in more revenue and business growth.

Additionally, at a top-line level, omnichannel makes sense. Its role is to meet and surpass customer expectations, to deliver unbeatable, personalised experiences that command brand loyalty. Who wouldn’t want that in their business?

And yet, very few companies have managed to get omnichannel right – especially in South Africa. A recent global survey by Nasdaq revealed that while 90% of CMOs have an omnichannel strategy, only 8% of them believe they're getting it right.

The result? More often than not, omnichannel teeters on near buzzword status as most business leaders admit that it's more a vision than a reality.

?Getting to Grips with Omnichannel

In practice, executing an omnichannel strategy is complex, primarily because every organisation has many moving parts. Moreover, legacy systems need to be revisited, analysed and potentially dismantled before an effective omnichannel strategy can take root.?

And of course, business doesn’t stop, meaning systems and processes need to be unravelled and implemented during the day-to-day. It’s a cumbersome, sometimes uncomfortable, process which is why many businesses slip back into multi- or cross-channel mode and abandon their omnichannel aspirations for another year.

On the other hand, some implement pseudo strategies labelled as omnichannel by optimising the customer experience within individual channels rather than across the entire experience. Indeed, it's an improvement on the CX, but it's not an authentic omnichannel experience.

?Big Data and Omnichannel Expectations

Despite these challenges for most businesses, global brands like Uber and Airbnb have already set the CX benchmark. Whether we like it or not, there is an expectation regarding how customers interact with our businesses. So much so that 87% of customers believe that brands should put more effort into providing seamless experiences.??

Luckily, most customer-first organisations are getting closer to implementing truly compelling and enriching omnichannel experiences. The key is the use of Big Data.

Data enables us to analyse customer behaviour in each channel. These insights are critical. It helps us analyse the outcomes of the customer journey and enables businesses to optimise based on informed decisions, helping us find new ways to delight customers.

But having data isn’t enough, as compromised data can do more harm than good. Therefore, it is essential that data is just available when we need it but that it's also clean and relevant. Incorrect, outdated, duplicated, incomplete or corrupted data can compromise the CX and disrupt the customer journey. Clean data, on the other hand, improves productivity and efficacy, removing the speed bumps in the buyer’s journey for a smoother, more enjoyable CX. ?

?Leaning into an Effective Martech Stack

Clean data collection and organisation is just the beginning. To truly go omnichannel, a robust marketing technology stack is essential. These include top of funnel platforms, CMS, analytics, creative and productivity tools. While these programmes are experience enablers, a considerable amount of human-centric design goes into the process to create well-structured automated marketing flows that make the journey seem effortless.??

That said, the experience of a well-structured marketing flow can come undone if the correct data is not made available to customer-facing representatives. For example, a study conducted by Accenture revealed that 89% of customers get frustrated having to repeat their issues to multiple representatives, which will make sense to anyone unwillingly passed around a call centre over the phone.

This is why, from a sales and customer service perspective, data is only valuable if it’s readily available at the right time and in the right place. Cue the importance of intuitive agent desktop systems, an essential cog in the omnichannel machine to offer customers a seamless, personalised telephonic experience.

Organisational Alignment and Implementation

The enterprise-wide nature of omnichannel is what makes it such an enjoyable experience for the customers. No matter where they go, online, over the phone, in-store or across departments, omnichannel ensure a frictionless experience throughout.

Ironically, this is what makes these strategies so difficult to implement. It stretches across an entire organisation, encompassing every department from Marketing to Product to Finance. Consider organisational silos and data integration gaps, and it becomes apparent why it's challenging to pinpoint strategy ownership and implementation.

A potential solution is to formalise a process:

Establish Leadership Teams

Create strategy custodians that’ll oversee the implementation of the strategy and galvanise their teams towards a collective goal.??

Assign Responsibility

Just as the CX permeates every channel, cross-functional teams must be assigned responsibilities within the broader strategy.

Drive CX with KPIs

Finally, introducing CX objectives into KPIs will ensure alignment across the organisation, with all stakeholders moving in the same direction.

Once the organisation is aligned, start testing small segments on a piecemeal basis while asking customers for feedback along the way.

A Real-World Example

As you’d expect, an omnichannel strategy will look different from business-to-business, based on customer needs and business objectives.

At iKhokha, we find ourselves largely in a cross-channel approach to move towards creating an omnichannel experience for our merchants. Hence, the title of this article.

We are on a journey towards a truly customer-first, omnichannel business structure. It’s a future state, but I believe it is realistic and achievable soon. To this point, we’ve identified common questions which are helping us find new ways to analyse our processes and delight our customers:

1.????What are the friction points in our cross-channel strategy?

2.????What are our customers’ expectations? Where are we falling short?

3.????Is our CX creating new pain points? If so, where?

4.????Are there any blind spots in our customer journey?

We’re also learning that customer subjectivity requires further navigation while building an enjoyable CX. Creating frictionless journeys is only one component. How these journeys make a customer feel (based on their unique biases and outlooks) is out of our control.??

Furthermore, we know that it’s not our responsibility (or within our power, for that matter) to dictate our customers’ emotional responses. It is, however, our responsibility to walk the journey with them by creating opportunities to offer them the support they need when and where they need it. It’s in these micro-moments that we can find opportunities to delight our customers.????

Omnichannel in a Scaling Environment

As I mentioned earlier, business doesn't stop for process implementation. Throw a rapidly scaling business environment into the mix, and it makes omnichannel a tricky beast to break in.

To this point, our approach at iKhokha is and must be agile. It's based on insight, formed around quick wins and backed up by measurement and optimisation. We know that CX is vital to our customers and our business growth, and omnichannel, however challenging, is the vision we’ve laid out on our roadmap. ?

If you step into the office at iKhokha HQ in Umhlanga, you'll see these words on our wall: "Think ahead. Fail Fast". Any business that pursues the path towards omnichannel knows that it isn’t easy. Finding those moments to delight our customers requires bravery, a willingness to experiment and the odd strategically calculated risk now and then.

We might not get it right straight away, but it's a process of incremental building, which, like all great work, takes both guts and time.

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