How to offer your customers a consistent, customised cross-channel experience

I recent­ly went to Cross Canal Day, a con­fer­ence in Paris ded­i­cat­ed to dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing. Today, I would like to dis­cuss the pre­sen­ta­tion I gave there about the impor­tance of cross chan­nel in the cus­tomer experience.

Since I start­ed work­ing in dig­i­tal almost 20 years ago, one of the main chal­lenges has been to offer the right con­tent at the right time, and to the right per­son. For a long time, this was more a vision than a real­i­ty, but the tech­no­log­i­cal progress made dur­ing the last 4 to 5 years now allows us to build a uni­fied cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, regard­less of the con­tact point on the cus­tomer journey.

Under­stand­ing the Cus­tomer Remains the Num­ber 1 Challenge
Today, cus­tomer jour­neys are nat­u­ral­ly cross chan­nel. Let’s take the exam­ple of a cus­tomer of an Inter­net ser­vice provider who has a prob­lem with his con­nec­tion. The cus­tomer will prob­a­bly start by call­ing cus­tomer ser­vice, and will receive an email invit­ing him to com­plete a sat­is­fac­tion sur­vey, and then pos­si­bly go in store if the prob­lem isn’t solved completely.

It is essen­tial to keep in mind that a brand does not sell to devices, but to peo­ple. Since each user owns 6.1 con­nect­ed devices on aver­age, the chal­lenge is to build a good rela­tion­ship with a seam­less vision and to aggre­gate all cus­tomer data cen­tral­ly in order to offer a per­son­alised and rel­e­vant experience.

At the moment, many brands are still far from this point. Con­sid­er, for exam­ple, a fash­ion brand that sends VIP offers by email, but when the cus­tomer arrives in store, he realis­es these deals are actu­al­ly acces­si­ble to all, and there­fore def­i­nite­ly not VIP.

Three Pri­or­i­ty Use Cas­es for Cross Channel
Expe­ri­ence shows that three use cas­es should be pri­ori­tised when think­ing cross channel:

• Cross-chan­nel cam­paign man­age­ment. This is about cus­tomis­ing, automat­ing, and deliv­er­ing cross-chan­nel cam­paigns, which involves build­ing a uni­fied vision with all the data but also being able to push the data accord­ing to the moment. Clear­ly, this is the first skill that must be integrated.
• Email. Often seen as the poor rela­tion of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, email mar­ket­ing can be pow­er­ful in cross chan­nel when it is used at the right time. The chal­lenge here is iden­ti­fy­ing the best moments to tar­get (after vis­it­ing the store, upon aban­don­ing a bas­ket, and so on).
• Man­ag­ing the cus­tomer jour­ney. This is about under­stand­ing a prospect, turn­ing him into brand ambas­sador through engag­ing expe­ri­ences through­out the cus­tomer jour­ney. We still come back to this idea of uni­fied vision, by break­ing silos for data … and organisations.

In con­clu­sion, it is impor­tant to keep three points in mind:

• Cross chan­nel must be a real com­pa­ny choice, a con­scious deci­sion to break silos.
• It is essen­tial not to try to do every­thing at once, but instead to start with a use case and expand.
• All this has been made pos­si­ble by tech­nol­o­gy, which good use must be made of.

What about you, what is your expe­ri­ence in cross chan­nel? Feel free to share your opin­ion in the com­ments. You can also go fur­ther by attend­ing the Cross-Chan­nel Forum, on the 7th of July in Paris!