Omni-Channel: How to Show up in Front of Your Dream Customers, Consistently

Today, consumers are more connected with access to more touchpoints from retailers than ever — 73% use multiple channels during their shopping journey. With this profound shift in the customer journey, merchants must provide a seamless customer experience across all platforms, channels and devices to stay in the game. 

Enter omni-channel. It provides a unified experience for customers who are shopping across multiple channels and devices, including brick and mortar stores. Technology is the bedrock of the omni-channel experience and major innovations focused on helping retailers attract and cater to cross-channel shoppers have come to the fore. 

Let’s take a closer look at some of the ways your brand can leverage an omni-channel strategy so you can show up in front of your dream customers, consistently. 

Your Shoppers Should Always Feel Local 

International omni-channel marketing, in a nutshell, allows you to maintain your brand and its channels across the globe. To build trust, your shoppers should recognize your brand and yet feel local regardless of device, platform or location. 

Localized content shows that you respect the language and culture of the country you’re selling in. Essentially a form of localization and personalization, the content you show needs to mean something to the right people.

How to localize your customers’ experience to make them feel at home?

• Offer language and currency conversions at checkout. This will result in fewer abandoned carts and reassure the customer that there will be no nasty surprises, such as added VAT.
• Adapt your content based on location. For example, provide reviews from French-speaking people for users who are browsing your store in France. Klevu partner TurnTo enables UGC reviews to be displayed in different languages for specific locales.

Provide Omni-channel Customer Service 

62% of customers surveyed in 2018 said they contacted customer service in the past month. They don’t stick to just one channel, though, with surveys showing that 47% of people used between three and five channels to ask customer service questions. Today’s customers expect to receive timely support from your brand on the channel of their choice, be it over the phone, by text, email, live chat or social media.

You need to integrate offline and online channels to deliver outstanding customer support. If a customer emails you on a Tuesday and calls you on a Wednesday, they expect to pick the conversation up where they left it. 

How to give cohesive customer support in an omni-channel world: 

• Implement machine learning solutions to equip your customer service team with data such as customer history, product information and behavioral interactions. They’ll be able to switch seamlessly between multiple channels in the same interaction, preserving the context of each conversation. 
• Consider outsourcing your customer service. Simplr.ai analyzes and evaluates your company’s needs and tone of voice, so if you choose to outsource your customer service to its network of US-based work-from-home Simplr Specialists, they’ll be true to your brand’s voice. Simplr trains its team to handle multiple channels of communication in a single customer interaction, too — it’s the omni-channel way.
• Utilize omni-channel chatbots that integrate across different channels. Chatbots that leverage machine learning can predict what customers want to buy and converse naturally with them as they provide intelligent customer service, 24/7.

Deliver a Painless Checkout 

It’s no secret that checkouts can be a real point of frustration for customers — they’re one of the prime reasons for abandoned carts. 

The checkout process can become fragmented when the buyer journey is split across different channels. That’s why it’s vital that retailers break down any checkout barriers to ensure a hassle-free shopping experience across all of their channels.

How to eliminate checkout barriers that stop your customers placing an order?

• Add more of your customers’ preferred payment methods to streamline the checkout experience. Use surveys, customer interviews and social media to find out how your customers prefer to pay (whether Apple Pay, Point of Sales systems, PayPal or Klarna) and add the most popular options.
• Provide your customers with a persistent shopping cart across all of your channels. If your a customer places an item in their cart while shopping on their mobile and later switches to their desktop, the item should be waiting for them.
• Leverage machine learning technology to collect data that speeds up the sign-in process. By putting into place an authentication system, customers can then sign-in easier and faster based on behavioral data, location or device.

Deliver Omni-Channel Personalization

We live in a fast-paced digitized world, where shoppers expect to be recognized at every step of their personal buying journey, whether online of offline. New technologies allow you to use data to create personalized customer experiences at scale across multiple channels. It translates to immense growth potential.

How to provide channel agnostic personalization:

• Leverage high-tech solutions to provide your shoppers with on-site product recommendations that are personalized and based on their past purchasing browsing behavior. Never presenting customers with a product they have zero interest in will increase conversions and loyalty. Klevu’s Personalized Search Recommendations allow merchants to promote trending and recently viewed products to the customer when they click on the search box and activate the search function. Pretty neat.
• Retarget shoppers on social media with personalized promotions and ads based on their browsing and shopping history with you. This can reduce abandoned carts by bringing them back into the game, enticing them with products and offers you already know they’re interested in. 

A Strategy to Show Up in Front of Your Customers, Consistently 

An omni-channel shopping experience is exactly what shoppers expect — but 55% of companies still have no strategy to deliver it. Make no mistake, brands whose customer touchpoints don’t work together synergistically to create one streamlined buying experience risk losing their customers to competitors. And competition in the e-commerce space is getting fiercer each day.

By adopting and implementing these strategies your brand will show up in front of your customers consistently, attract customers of the future, and drive sales in an increasingly omni-channel world.

To learn more about how Klevu can help with your brand’s omni-channel strategy, schedule a live demo.