How To Improve Omnichannel Brand Experience in 2023

Customers no longer want to buy a product or service from a business and be done with it. They much rather prefer seamless customer experiences that guide them through the buying journey, from first researching the product to after-sales support. In addition, they use several channels to research products and communicate and interact with businesses. 

For this reason, omnichannel approaches to delivering brand experiences are becoming increasingly important. They help businesses deliver the consistent messaging and continuity their customers expect. In turn, this helps businesses retain their customers and generate more revenue.

But what is an omnichannel brand experience, and how can you improve yours? Here, we’ll look at these questions in more detail. We’ll also look at some data sources you can use to gather the data that form the foundation of your omnichannel approach. 

Table of contents:

• Difference between Multichannel and Omnichannel

• 10 strategies to improve your omnichannel brand experience

• Data sources for customer experience feedback
• Conclusion

What’s The Difference Between Multichannel and Omnichannel?

Let’s first look at what multichannel and omnichannel approaches are and their difference in relation to delivering brand experiences. This distinction is important as many people refer to these approaches interchangeably despite the fact that there are significant differences between them. 

Multichannel: Multichannel approaches refer to the use of multiple channels to communicate, interact, and engage with customers. For example, when using a multichannel approach, a business could use email, chatbots, social media, television, outdoor advertising, as well as customer support agents to engage with its customers. The goal of a multichannel approach is customer engagement, which is one of the most important aspects needed for effective marketing, and it focuses on the number of channels. 

Omnichannel: Like multichannel approaches, omnichannel approaches also refer to the use of multiple channels to interact and engage with customers. The difference, however, is that with omnichannel approaches, these channels are integrated to create seamless customer experiences from channel to channel.

For example, with an omnichannel approach, a customer might message a business on social media to solve a problem. This conversation can then be moved to the customer support center without any of the vital information or context being lost. In this way, it feels as if the conversation with customer support picks up where the conversation on social media left off. 

Unlike multichannel approaches that focus on customer engagement, the purpose of omnichannel approaches is to improve the customer experience, and it focuses on the quality of customer engagement. 

10 Ways To Improve Your Omnichannel Brand Experience

Let’s consider some strategies you can use to improve your business’s omnichannel brand experience. 

1. Utilize Data

When developing a strategy to improve your brand experience, it’s crucial that you use customer experience feedback data to discover customer sentiment with regard to various aspects of your business and products or services. Doing this will show you what your customers like, what they don’t, what their challenges are, and how you can solve them. 

You can gather this data for sentiment analysis from your CRM system, on social media through social media listening, web analytics, and other sources. Not only will this data help you develop an effective brand experience strategy, but also keep it consistent over time. 

1. Customer Experience Planning

To deliver an effective brand experience, it’s crucial that you plan the customer experience. This is because your customers will interact and engage with your business on a variety of platforms, and you need to ensure consistency on all these. 

This planning involves understanding what platforms your customers use and how they use them. With this understanding, you can then develop strategies for every platform that combine to form an overarching, effective brand experience strategy. 

1. Be Customer-Centric

To deliver an exceptional omnichannel brand experience, your business should be customer-centric. In other words, it should form part of your business’s mission and values. If it does, your employees will deliver a consistent experience to your customers.

In contrast, if you’re not customer-centric, no strategy or marketing will help you improve the brand experience. And the first step in doing this is to do a deep dive into who exactly is your customer. 

1. Provide a Consistent Experience

An omnichannel brand experience depends on tight integration between several channels that you use to interact and engage with your customers. It thus makes sense that, in order to provide a truly omnichannel experience, you need to be consistent on all these channels. 

This will ensure that you provide the brand experience your customers demand and expect, which, in turn, helps you retain customers and improve the customer lifetime value of every customer. 

1. Segmentation

Your customers have unique needs, requirements, and expectations. In addition, separate customers within your customer base have varying expectations. For example, when analyzing customer data, you’ll find customers with different behavior patterns. Also, customers have different demands during every stage of the customer journey.

For these reasons, it’s crucial that you segment your customers based on their behavior and where they are in the customer journey. This allows you to develop personalized customer journeys for every customer, no matter their demands or expectations. 

1. Keep Your Messaging Consistent

To deliver omnichannel brand experiences to your customers, you need to ensure that your messaging is consistent, irrespective of the touchpoint where you interact with them. This means you should deliver consistent messaging throughout your sales, marketing, and customer service operations and processes. 

1. Ensure Continuity

Another crucial component of effective omnichannel brand experiences is that you deliver continuity throughout the customer journey. This means that one touchpoint or channel should pick up the conversation or interaction with a customer where the previous one ended. 

When you do this, customers will feel like every new interaction is a continuation of the previous one. This is one of the best ways to increase customer engagement and as a result, more customer satisfaction. With this continuity, you can also guide customers more effectively through the buying journey, which results in higher conversion rates and more revenue. 

1. Use Automation

Understandably, considering everything you need to do to provide the brand experiences your customers expect, it could become time-consuming and complex. In addition, you’ll struggle to deliver consistency and continuity when you rely on manual processes.

Because of this, you should implement automation to deliver omnichannel brand experiences that can help you implement your brand experience strategy more efficiently. Keep in mind, however, that before implementing any automation platforms, you should do your research to find the right platform for your business based on your unique requirements. 

1. Contextualize

As mentioned earlier, customers have varying demands and expectations based on their specific circumstances or where they are in the customer journey. One of the most important aspects of an omnichannel brand experience is that you contextualize your engagement and interactions with customers based on these demands and expectations.

To do this, you should provide your customers with relevant and valuable content and messaging based on their needs. In other words, you should send the right messaging and content to the right customers at the right time. This will help you increase engagement. 

1. Leverage Data-Driven Marketing

Personalization is essential in marketing. As such, customers expect marketing and messaging relevant to where they are in the buying journey. Thus, to deliver omnichannel brand experiences, you’ll need to inject more personalization into your marketing efforts.

To deliver personalization, you’ll need to use data to understand your customers and their challenges. When you do, you’ll be able to engage in the ways they want and expect. And that’s why data-driven marketing is going to catapult your omnichannel brand experience strategy.

Sources You Can Collect Customer Experience Data From

There are several sources you gather user experience data from including:

• Call centers.
• Emails and chat.
• Social media.
• User review platforms.
• Website behavior.
• News monitoring.
• Purchase history. 

These sources can all provide valuable data you can use to provide omnichannel brand experiences. The key, however, is that you unify this data to build a complete picture of who your customers are. When you do, you’ll also unify your brand experience, no matter what channel your customers use to engage and interact with your business. 

Ultimately, this helps you serve your customers better and generate more revenue in the process. 

Conclusion

To serve your customers better and ensure seamless interactions and engagement through several channels, you must implement omnichannel brand experiences in your business by using customer feedback and analyzing it for sentiment and customer intent. Doing this will help you deliver more personalization, increase consistency, and enhance continuity in your interactions and engagements with customers.