The Challenge of the Seamless Customer Experience
Brian Tervo, President & CEO, TIE Kinetix, North America, 1/17/2013
Today’s retailers face numerous hurdles to success. In addition to staying on top of new trends and technologies, they also have to fill digital and physical shelf space with rich, informative content that encourages conversations and leads to sales.
Doing this well means taking the time to consider a number of questions: What drives the consumer to act and buy? What digital channels (or combinations of sources) are the most important during the buying process? What are the roles of web, social, mobile, and in-store content? How can the process be improved?
To find the answers to these questions and understand what the ideal seamless shopping experience looks like, retailers need a complete view of the customers, their buying patterns, and how they interact with the brand. To create that complete picture, they must assemble pieces of information retrieved from disparate systems, campaigns, and personnel. In our experience working with large brands and retailers, we have come up with a couple of pointers to help understand and create a truly seamless experience for your customer.
1. Make sure your content touch points are synchronized
When working to synchronize content touch points, it’s critical that you understand where your content lives throughout the typical orientation and buying cycle. When evaluating this, here are a few questions to ask:
Are content marketing assets, such as new product details, rich media, and the latest campaigns, making it out to product detail pages where consumers are ready to buy?
Are you able to distribute the same brand experiences on affiliate, partner, and social media touch points?
When content changes over time, are all consumer touch points updated? How long does this take?
When something needs to be “turned off,” are you able to manage?
When customers interact with content within your “digital-interactive” shelf space, can you measure it and coalesce with other internal data sources?
Are you able to repurpose content quickly and effectively?
Successful retailers are enormous consumers and distributors of content and therefore need to have equally effective ways of managing information and quickly disseminating it to maximize impact.
2. Make sure your technology platforms “play nicely” together
Selling and marketing through multiple digital and/or mobile channels typically requires the use of many different technology platforms and content distribution mechanisms. All usually require some level of integration with third-party interfaces to make sure experiences are balanced and effective. Content experiences need to flow effortlessly from initial conversations with potential customers all the way through to the e-commerce or in-store purchase completion. That requires strong compatibility with systems, people, and processes with multi-disciplinary expertise.
When working to achieve this, here are two items you should address:
Focus on the core! Don’t spend too much time and effort on ad hoc processes to roll out measures and launch new initiatives. The focus needs to be on creating the end-to-end consumer experience, so if it takes too long and too much labor to push out new initiatives, you can use some marketing automation.
Use good content distribution methods to synchronize your various campaigns and demand generation efforts. Measure your ability to repurpose current digital assets throughout all of your selling channels. The more you can effectively repurpose and redistribute key messages in various channels, the more you will be able to squeeze out of every campaign while creating superior continuity throughout your target market.
There are many things to consider when creating a dynamic, vibrant, digital strategy that maximizes your online revenue potential. Thankfully, in today’s business world there are tools available that help retailers address all of those issues and create a truly seamless end-user experience.
It's vital to remain aware that potential customers are always perusing various digital spaces, and online sellers must look to use all these touch points to orient and drive a superior consumer buying experience. If the process is confusing, cumbersome, and fragmented, customers are less likely to complete a purchase, which hurts revenues. Putting forth the effort to ensure that the user experience is seamless is a critical step to nurturing lasting customer relationships and loyalty, and ultimately ensuring the success of your business.