How To Create A Blended Customer Experience

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Innovative retailers today are developing ways to connect digital and physical experiences for consumers by offering personalized ones. The biggest organizations have found significant ways to enhance and personalize their digital customer experience. 97% of consumers see no need to go into a physical store, and 70% welcome an optimized experience.

This is why social media is beginning to create exciting opportunities for brands to connect with the fuel of the retail space. Online retailers have less control over customer experience than marketplaces such as Amazon or eBay, but customer interaction should not be overlooked.

To survive in business, connecting the brand with the broader digital ecosystem is critical to ensuring that dialogue is maintained as customers walk into the store and continue after they leave. Consumers want to be able to reach brands via the channel of their choice, whether in e-mail, social media, chat, or by telephone. Most social media customer journeys begin to discover products and there is a strong desire for people to experience brands in real life.

The problem is that most call centers start as phone-based call centers, adding channel after channel. Agents are assigned to specific channels, many of whom work via email and telephone and have no access to customer data or interactions on other channels.

Creating a customer experience through a single point of contact is the most effective way to provide a first-class customer experience even with small employees. The knowledge base for customer service is the tool that improves CX.

A Guide To Blended Customer Experience

A better approach is to develop an omnichannel retail strategy that creates an integrated user experience across mobile shopping and brick-and-mortar stores. Many customer journeys begin in the digital world, but a mixed service experience across human and digital channels can come together to provide a seamless and effortless service.

Systems that integrate, talk to each other, and exchange data are crucial to providing an advisory sales approach to customer requirements.

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Using effective data management, retailers can create an accurate profile of individual customers based on their interests and attributes and then use the data to their advantage. When it comes to the human experience, the measures of customer satisfaction scores (CSATs) and net promoter scores (NPS) are for customer efforts, rather than focusing on call waiting times and frequency of calls.

Companies can regain customer loyalty and open up new opportunities by understanding the importance of providing a mixed service experience. Successful mixing depends on insights into what consumers are looking for, as well as prevailing technological and cultural trends that make mixed products, services, and experiences desirable. Once marketers have these insights, they can decide how to further develop their brands.

Most companies begin a transformation of the customer experience by focusing on reducing abrasive experiences, including the basic elements that irritate customers and appeal to critics within the company.

Programs that enhance the customer experience shape millions of individual interactions along the journey – a feature that depends on how customers explore, buy, use, and renew products and services. Building a customer experience culture ensures that employees interact with customers and make the right decisions about how they interact to meet or exceed customer expectations.

To develop a strategy, start by evaluating your current customer experience. Digital experiences should be optimized to take into account the shared physical experiences of the many customers of your brand.

A physical experience is an immersive, interactive, real-time experience that offers instant transactions and engagement. Phygital Marketing is a mixed customer experience where digital applications refer to the physical world and the actual space of the customer journey.  

What we do not know is whether or not the term “Phygital” will hang around after COVID-19, but the mixing of physical and digital customer experience strategies will remain. Consideration of the customer experience journey is crucial to ensure that the strategy you have developed is successful.

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Linking online and physical experiences to consumer expectations means retailers need to match inventory, item information such as reviews, pictures, videos, order history, support tickets, and more to create a true multi-channel experience.

Leading retailers succeed because consumers like it when companies improve the experience with a phone in hand.

Conclusion

It takes the best aspects of offline and online spaces to create a holistic, satisfying, and unique customer experience that sustainably shapes the brand. Technology continues to shape customer behavior and sets new expectations for brands that offer exciting, meaningful, and convenient experiences.

If a customer needs an important product that cannot be found in-store, they can order it online and pick it up at a physical store where it can be delivered. As consumers spend more and more time engaging with brands, and shopping trips are tailored to their interests and needs, competition for attention is increasing.

With Digital, you can take immersion, immediacy, and speed and combine them with human interaction in the stationary environment. An omnichannel Knowledge management system could take your customer experience to the next level with the latest technology at your disposal. 

 

Sowmya J
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