Sales Strategy
Free Whitepaper: Creating A Seamless Cross-Channel Customer Experience September 28, 2016 (0 comments)
Merrick, NY—In today’s multichannel world, consumers manage their lives with hand-held devices that provide instant connections to their networks of friends, brands, and influencers. They don’t understand why retailers can’t move with the same speed and agility. They expect seamless, personal service across every channel. They want to be treated as individuals, not part of a segment.
Meanwhile, retailers are often stuck in silos with distinct systems and platforms that can’t see a customer holistically: their technology doesn’t recognize an individual customer across different touch points, business functions, or locations, let alone provide her with a seamless experience.
For example, a woman from California ordered a winter coat online to use on frequent business trips to the Northeast. For months after her purchase, the same retailer bombarded her with targeted ads for the same coat she’d already bought. As she observed, “if they sent ads for boots, gloves, or wooly scarves to go with the coat, I could understand. But I’d already bought the coat! How many coats do they think I need?”
Another woman ordered flowers online to present to the speakers at a conference. Three of the four bouquets she ordered were beautiful, but the fourth arrived with a cracked vase and wilted flowers. She called, emailed, and tried to live chat with the florist to get the issue resolved, to no avail. Only after tweeting about it did the company reach out and replace the wilted flowers.
“It shouldn’t have to be that hard,” she lamented.
Indeed, it shouldn’t—for customer or retailer. Many retail organizations may offer excellent online experiences, in-store experiences, and telephone experiences—but often those are excellent only when customers “stay in lane;” i.e. shopping and buying through a single channel. But when they don’t, the experience breaks down. Point-of-sale systems that capture in-store purchase data often can’t communicate with online payment systems. E-commerce applications may recognize a customer’s computer but not her mobile device. Marketing automation can tell what email message a customer received, but can’t recognize a response from direct mail. CRM databases store customer contact data, but may not contain purchase information, and so forth. But building direct integrations between applications to bridge these data silos can be complex and costly.
A new white paper about seamless cross-channel marketing helps explain how retailers can follow all the data to create a seamless customer experience, rather than get trapped in silos of data that may be useful individually but aren’t designed to “talk” to one another. The result, of course, is a disrupted consumer experience, such as the lady with too many coats or the wilted flowers. By integrating these different channels, a retailer can provide the customer with a smooth and rewarding experience that leads to purchase.
Click here to download the free whitepaper.
Top image: Pitney-Bowes