Do you remember the good old days of making a shopping list, going to the grocery store, getting most of your items (plus a few extra) and then returning home?
Today, most people don’t shop for their groceries with such a simple plan, let alone make bigger B2C or B2B purchase decisions without the help of timely information, data, interactive websites, expert conversations and caring customer support. How many customer touchpoints do you interact with every day?
This world of selling and serving through technology-driven experiences is now known as ‘Omnichannel engagement.’ If you haven’t heard of it yet, you will, and you will be building it into your sales and marketing – and customer service – strategies.
Omnichannel engagement is uniquely a sales, marketing & service approach that every business owner and business team will need to embrace for three reasons: competition, connectivity, and customers. It’s not a technique as much as it is a mindset and a new standard of doing business.
This new mindset and rising standard exist because people no longer just shop in stores without research and technology and service – especially when they are closing in on the buying decision. If you don’t provide the right connections through service, the customer will find a competitor who does.
The Future is Here
Imagine that in the next year, your business integrates an omni-channel approach for higher client retention. Your team develops its sales and marketing so that customers receive a fully-integrated shopping experience from the start, through purchase and onboarding, through customer service for the lifetime of their work with you. What will you have achieved?
An omnichannel approach for client retention will require individual customer touchpoints, multiple communication channels that connect without a hitch, and the fundamental ability to let customers pick up where they left off at any point in the process.
Your customers want buying to be easy. They want to stick around. They don’t want to get frustrated and leave or spend hours deciding, feeling lost and alone. They need the right input from you and your brand to build a thriving relationship that lasts. While there are infinite ways to move forward with an omnichannel strategy, this article’s goal is to leave you feeling ready for what’s coming so you can begin to make the switch to an omnichannel approach that improves your bottom line for years to come.
Leave Competition Behind with an Omnichannel Approach
At QCSS, we specialize in the call and contact-center platform and global team that allows a digitally-fueled business to deliver on an omnichannel promise.
If you do not have a contact marketing strategy along with all of your digital strategies, you’re not marketing in an omnichannel way. As your competitors increasingly add impersonal automation and frustrating walls between customers and your team, you will need the human touch more and more. This is even more true if you engage customers and leaders from the Boomer generation or Gen X. It’s also important for the more seasoned buyers from the millennial generation.
If you understand the value of an omnichannel approach, your sales and marketing will have more impact as you bring back the quality of face to face and phone communication in addition to the right technology. This powerful mix it’s not going away.
Consumers and customers today want control over their purchasing decisions. Your job is to create that for them as well as develop and deliver a remarkable suite of offerings. Are you prepared to help them buy products and services on their own terms, whenever they want, via a method that best suits them? Who is supporting your initiatives?
Make the Connection through Multiple Channels
When a business has grown to the point that one of their core values is investing back into themselves – that’s when an agency should be talking to a call center agency like ourselves or others around the globe. The best time to do that is when they have enough clients that they’re making traction but they have hand raisers in their own customer mix saying we want more.
Listen to your customers and discover the exact experience and mix of channels the need to stay with you. Track their journey better and figure out what’s not working and what is working. You need to understand what they need you to change up. That’s a time you will most likely want to leverage an agency like QCSS. That’s the time to double down on what’s going right and what could be enhanced with a partner who has your back when it comes to supporting all your customer touchpoints seamlessly.
At the end of the day, whatever you do and what however you can make an omnichannel approach happen, it is to serve them as it serves you to convert leads to revenue and beyond. If you do not convert leads to revenue, you have client churn. If you do not convert leads to revenue, potential clients leave to find an omnichannel experience that works for them. Don’t fail. Be the next best thing and make it last.
