What to Build into Your Omnichannel CX Strategy
Twenty-five years ago, we relied heavily on human interactions to drive the most elegant customer experiences. But things have changed. Technology is replacing human interactions and has become fundamental for creating an omnichannel CX.
The glory days of in-store shopping and phone-based/in-person customer service are over.
Although we still rely on handoffs from tech to real people to get that last mile of Customer Experience right, we can expect to see more fully automated CX without any handoffs to actual human beings in just a few years.
To prepare for this future, we need to be learning today how to use communication technology tools and psychology to augment the automation that is slowly replacing human interactions.
Communication touch points are at the core of omnichannel CX
Effective communication is needed at many points along the Customer Experience journey. Communication touch points reinforce the attentive, positive experience customers perceive.
As we move forward into the future, it will be necessary for the CX journey to integrate communication technology components that ensure customers are aware they are being understood along the way and can trust the service they’re receiving. These communications must occur in the right moments and formats for a positive perceived experience.
Communication technology in the CX of the future will sort through preference-based data sets and integrate disparate systems to present us with choices and expedite our interactions.
All areas where CX is important (purchasing, buying, shipping, returns, customer service etc.) will be better automated and integrated. Buyers will spend less time researching, buying and getting post-sale support. This is because automation will give them better options and more accurate information, making decisions easier.
But without a carefully constructed communication wrapper, we’ll have a hard time achieving a better outcome than when humans were powering CX. This is why communication tech must be at the core of CX design – the less we involve real humans in the journey, the more we must rely on technology to achieve the same emotional and psychological outcomes.
How to prepare for the changes
Whenever we replace a human experience in our CX design, we should think deeply about the psychological, human and emotional experience that a human can deliver. We need to capture those aspects in the technology-driven experience.
We can all relate to the poor customer service experience of having a phone system prompt us to press a button to proceed, waiting 15+ minutes only to be handed off by the approach to the wrong person who’s unable to help us. Then when we finally got to the right person, we didn’t get the type of experience we felt we had been waiting for so patiently.
We can learn from our emotional responses to these poor CX experiences. We can also mentally rewind to that ‘golden age of human-powered CX 25+ years ago to find the best practices of great CX when real people were hand-holding the experience. There are countless examples of emotionally engaging CX journeys we can learn from the past.
Tech firms of the future may begin employing a psychologist as a valuable part of the CX design process. A psychologist with a solid business understanding and a basic understanding of how the technology can assist with CX could help them to think more deeply about what is lost when we automate humans out of something and help to develop the communication scripts that need to be part of this new type of CX design.
How communication technology can enable businesses to build an omnichannel CX strategy
Communication technology, specifically CPaaS (communications platforms as a service), offers many communication channels today for customers who want to get ahead of the curve as the world moves into this era of fully automated omnichannel CX.
People generally compartmentalise their communications into at least several significant channels daily, switching between email, SMS, social media, video conferencing and so on. This presents real CX challenges for businesses and brands who wish to engage their customers in meaningful CX experiences.
Technology allows you to deploy an omnichannel customer experience strategy. The good news is that integrating and orchestrating communications channels properly into a CX design can create a fantastic CX journey. The good news is that by integrating and producing communications channels properly into a CX design, a tremendous CX journey can be accomplished.
With the right technology, gather the proper UI, UX and CX people to think deeply upfront before processes or existing CX flows are changed. Challenge them to consider human interaction and emotion and incorporate these aspects when making significant automation decisions.
Brands that prioritise communications in their CX design will delight their customers. Elegant, future-proof CX is within our grasp!
Learn more about how to reach and engage your customers with Soprano’s complete omnichannel platform.