Customer disengagement and customer churn are usually two faces of the same problem – not fulfilling the customer’s expectations. The most common reasons for this are not being flexible enough, looking purely at short-term gains, and basing a business on being a simple commodity, which makes you easily replaceable.
Omnichannel Marketing is definitely the greatest tool at our disposal today to ensure that a message is being received by the target audience. Omnichannel opens a whole new world of rich interactions with the consumer audience that goes far beyond the reach of old-school, classic marketing.
What is Omnichannel Marketing?
Omnichannel Marketing involves multiple channels working together to offer the customer a variety of engagements that all contribute to the overall message. Omnichannel recognizes that customers interact with brands in a number of ways, across diverse platforms, and works to provide a consistent experience across all of them.
The modern age has seen an explosion of channels available to marketers to enhance our effectiveness, enabling message delivery through many different avenues and interactions with audiences in real-time. AI chatbots, for example, are playing a key role in this area, by allowing great and complex user journeys. Chatbots are opening up new ways for companies to upsell to their current customers, or to create new business opportunities that were previously very difficult to access.
The era of marketing that involved simply spreading a message everywhere and waiting for a small portion of the audience to respond, is over. Now we can delight our audiences with quality, complex and high-value interactions that help businesses engage more effectively, and this directly translates to generating far more business.
Challenges of Omnichannel Marketing
Omnichannel requires tools that are easy to use but at the same time, can create complicated user journeys. This produces many challenges, as robust, sophisticated software needs to be developed, constantly updated and well-designed. All of this requires a lot of planning and resources, like developers who specialize in different technological areas such as SaaS, user interfaces and APIs.
Selecting an omnichannel platform that satisfies the demands of today’s consumers requires a very powerful product team putting all the pieces together and delivering it quickly, as the market is constantly changing. But you cannot simply develop and deliver on-demand if you want to be at the top – you need to anticipate what’s coming. The whole process involves a big budget and taking risks and it can be very hard, especially while racing to beat your competitors who are trying to get there before you.
A successful Omnichannel strategy requires full coordination from several departments, all working together. Sales, Product, Solutions Consultant, Development and Customer Services all need to be ready and fully aligned in understanding the customer’s needs and what their role is in the project. To assure this, it is critical that internal processes are fully defined, ideally following an Agile philosophy.
Big companies in which each department behaves as a separate entity, are dying. They cannot move quickly and their structure does not allow easy, cross-departmental coordination, which is critical nowadays. It must be ensured that an entire company is aligned and pursuing the same goal, in order to produce a successful Omni-channel Marketing strategy.
Solutions for reducing customer churn through Omnichannel
Reaching an audience in their preferred channel makes it more difficult for them to leave, because we’re able to make sure that our message is being transmitted and received effectively. By combining this with a rich interaction with the audience, we have the ability to really please our customers.
Recently at Soprano, we delivered an Omnichannel Marketing campaign that created a very pleasing user journey. We offered the recipients the option of signing up for a loyalty/fidelity card and then choose their preferred channel of communication (SMS, voice, Whatsapp, RCS, e-mail, etc). Once selected, we ran a bot-driven survey to capture the subscriber’s preferred interests so we could better adjust the offers we sent them weekly. It was a huge success and our customers discovered a new way of reaching their own customers that they had never explored before.
Customer churn is combatted by going beyond customer expectations, and modern channels now make this possible.
Soprano Design is constantly looking at industry trends and pursuing the goal of satisfying our customers. We are making a big effort with widening our supported channels, enhancing our software and delivering a flexible, easy to use Omni-channel platform that allows our customers to create their desired flows. The only limitation is their imagination!
Our answer is never no, and we are completely aligned internally on providing the best experience for our customers by implementing solutions that are beneficial for them. We are only happy when both our customers and us win.
For more information and advice on Omni-channel marketing and other products we provide.
