Imagine you’re planning a trip to a dream vacation spot…
In scenario one, the traffic to the airport is horrendous, you barely catch your flight, your luggage gets lost, and the hotel room lacks basic amenities.
In scenario two, the drive to the airport is smooth, your flight is comfortable, your luggage arrives promptly, and the hotel welcomes you with complimentary snacks.
When the journey is seamless, the vacation is more enjoyable and stress-free.
The same holds for your customer journey. If you can ensure that every touchpoint — from your social media interactions to post-sales service — is smooth and satisfying, the entire customer experience (CX) will improve.
In this guide, you’ll learn more about what an omnichannel customer journey is, the challenges to be aware of, how to measure its success, and which tools to use for better results.
What Is the Omnichannel Customer Journey?
An omnichannel customer journey is consistent and integrated across multiple channels and touchpoints.
This includes every interaction a customer has with your brand at the following stages:
- Awareness
- Research
- Consideration
- Purchase
- Service
- Post-purchase interactions
The goal of adopting an omnichannel customer journey is to give your customers a seamless, consistent, and personalized experience, regardless of how (and when) they interact with your brand.
This might be through a social media ad, a digital marketing email, or a visit to your brick-and-mortar store.
This helps you grow customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, and customer lifetime value (CLV).
Example of the Omnichannel Customer Journey
No customer journey is linear, and people tend to dip in and out of various touchpoints. But here’s a general example of an omnichannel journey:
- Awareness: A customer sees a social media ad for a product.
- Research: They visit the brand’s website for more information.
- Consideration: They chat with a virtual assistant on the website.
- Purchase: They purchase the product online.
- Service: They call customer service with a question about using the product.
- Post-purchase: They receive a personalized email as part of a proven marketing strategy, with useful tips and recommendations for similar products.
Each of the six stages is important when it comes to impressing the customer, offering them great omnichannel customer service, getting them to buy, and retaining them as a loyal, repeat client.
If any link in this chain is unprofessional, frustrating, or untrustworthy, the customer experiences friction on their journey. Their omnichannel customer experience is compromised, making them less likely to buy or recommend your business.
Types of Touchpoints in the Customer Journey
There are two main touchpoints in the customer journey: online and offline.
Customers are likely to interact with both and at different times. That’s why each should be recognizable, trustworthy, and consistent.
Online
Touchpoints online include:
| Touchpoints | Aspects that may impact the customer’s journey experience |
|---|---|
| Websites | Design (font, color, layout, etc.), tone of voice, images, CTAs, ease of navigation |
| Mobile apps | Ease of use, design, tone of voice, images, types of notifications |
| Social media | Design, tone of voice, images and video, music, emotions, feel, writing style |
| Email marketing | Usefulness, frequency, community vs. selling, design, tone, images, CTAs |
| Online advertising | Design, messaging, tone of voice, images, music, video, emotions |
Offline
Touchpoints offline may include:
| Touchpoints | Aspects that may impact the customer’s journey experience |
|---|---|
| In-store | Design, layout, lighting, service, ease of access |
| Phone calls | Ease, tone of voice, service |
| In-person events | Design, lighting, images, text, video, music, service, product offer |
| Brochures | Design (font, color, layout, etc.), tone of voice, images, CTAs |
| Printed receipts | Design, usefulness (e.g., offering thanks or a discount opportunity) |
Challenges To Overcome in the Customer Journey
You can’t help your team meet their CS goals if you don’t know what problems they’re facing. Here are four challenges to look out for:
Fragmented customer data
An email address here, a social media account here, a cell number there. Having customer information scattered across different channels makes it difficult to keep track of where people are in their journey, understand customer needs, and provide a great user experience.
Implementing an integrated CRM system can help you centralize customer data and streamline the journey.
Inconsistent messaging
Inconsistent messaging and differing tones of voice across channels make it more difficult for the customer to understand your brand, build loyalty, and trust it enough to make a purchase.
For example, a website chatbot with a very corporate or unhelpful tone of voice could appear abrupt and off-putting to a customer who discovered the brand through its playful and irreverent social media account.
Channel silos
When departments work independently in silos, it’s much more difficult to present a unified, consistent message in all interactions.
Team members are not aligned or familiar with other departments’ goals or projects, and customers receive a disjointed, unhelpful experience. This could see them being bounced between departments or receiving conflicting, inconsistent messaging between touchpoints.
Lack of personalization
Customers will feel most aligned and loyal to your brand — and more likely to buy again — if you personalize their user experience.
This could be in the form of a segmented email or a gift on their birthday.
A study by McKinsey found that 76% of consumers are “more likely to consider purchasing” from a brand that personalizes interactions, including tailored messaging and targeted promotions.
Improve the Customer Journey With Contact Center Software: 9 Steps to the Perfect Omnichannel Customer Journey Map
Planning a great customer-centric omnichannel experience starts with imagining that your buyer is going on a physical trip, and you hold the customer journey map.
If you tailor your rest stops to each passenger’s needs, avoid heavy traffic, and identify bumps in the road beforehand, the journey will be much more pleasant.
And it will be far more likely to meet customer expectations than just starting the car and hoping for the best.
Here are nine ways you can give your customers the journey of a lifetime:
1. Identify the key customer touchpoints
First, you’ll want to identify and track the main cross-channel touchpoints that your customers use.
It’s much easier to do this if you use dedicated omnichannel contact center software to track customer interactions. This enables you to see which touchpoints to focus on and which are most relevant to your customer.
But if you’re not ready to try out software, you can also identify touchpoints through:
- Customer surveys and feedback: Ask your customers how they found out about your brand, which channels they used to interact with you, and which touchpoints were most important to them.
- Manual tracking and analysis: Use spreadsheets or simple databases to track customer interactions manually. Note the channels they use, the nature of the interaction, and any follow-up actions.
2. Analyze customer behavior
Look for trends in how and when customers interact with your brand across different channels. Understanding peak times and preferred touchpoints can help you allocate resources more effectively.
You can also look through complaints, support tickets, and feedback to identify common issues or friction points in the journey.
Don’t forget to segment your customers based on their behavior, preferences, and interactions. This allows you to tailor the customer journey to different groups, enhancing personalization and satisfaction.
Contact center software like Nextiva makes it easier to analyze customer behavior as they move through their journey.
All agents have access to customer interaction history, which gives them the context to serve better.
Nextiva also lets you set up workflows and use AI to automatically move the customer through the journey so you can focus your agents’ resources on personalizing the experience and handling more complicated issues.
3. Create customer personas
Understanding the type (or types) of customers you have lets you provide a personalized journey.
For example, with detailed personas, you can:
- Offer targeted promotions
- Provide relevant recommendations based on past purchases or purchases made by similar shoppers
- Send out personalized email campaigns
- Discover which platforms your customers spend time on and tailor your marketing efforts
Use your contact center software to track customer interactions and create personas based on their demographics, needs, and behaviors.
4. Map the journey stages
This means imagining the CX as a literal trip from A to B to C.
Or the customer moving between the stages of awareness, research, consideration, purchase, service, and customer retention (see the tables above for examples, such as a website, social media, an app, or a real-life store).
Mapping how your customers move between each stage helps you understand what they need at each touchpoint.
5. Pinpoint pain points
Identifying areas where you can improve the customer journey lets you elevate their experience, present a more consistent, personalized, and professional image, and convert them into happy, paying customers.
You can do this by taking a closer look at your ideal customers’ behavior and getting clearer on the stages they pass in their journey and when.
For example, if customers often visit your website but don’t buy, you could add a customer support chatbot to help answer their questions and convert them more consistently.
If they visit your store but like to go away and think before purchasing, you could add more information in-store to overcome their reservations. Staff could also offer to add them to an email sequence specifically designed to help them purchase a brick-and-mortar visit.
6. Develop omnichannel strategies
You can now use this data to craft targeted content and interactions for each touchpoint. When you know your ideal customer persona, behaviors, journey, and pain points, you can develop effective strategies across all channels in real time.
For example, you might identify that 90% of your customers discover your brand through social media.
So, you can focus on improving your social media content, encouraging and responding to direct messages with a consistent brand voice, giving followers social-only discounts, and gathering users’ data for follow-up marketing.
7. Personalize communications
Tailoring the customer journey not only helps people feel valued but makes your messaging more effective. That’s because it speaks to them more deeply, hits them at a relevant time, or solves a timely problem for them as and when they need it.
One way to personalize communication is to tailor your messaging to your customer’s interests, preferences, and purchase history.
You could send a gift discount ahead of their birthday, personally address emails to them after they make a purchase, ask for feedback on the specific product they bought, or offer targeted promotions on items that complement their interests or previous buys.
8. Unify customer data
A smooth and seamless experience happens when each part of your journey speaks to the other.
The easiest way to centralize customer data is through a CRM system that consolidates all interactions from various channels.
This ensures every team member can access the same comprehensive information, eliminating gaps and inconsistencies.
Once you have that system set up, focus on data consistency and cleanliness by establishing regular data audits and updates.
Make sure that data from all touchpoints — social media, email, phone calls, and in-person interactions — flows into a single, updated repository.
Finally, use APIs and integrations to connect different systems in your organization.
This allows for real-time data sharing and reduces manual data entry errors. By linking your CRM with marketing tools, customer service platforms, and other systems, you ensure that data flows smoothly and all teams have the latest information.
9. Track and measure results
Tracking and measuring changes and actions against relevant KPIs is the best way to determine your strategies’ success.
Some KPIs you might track include:
- Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
- Net promoter score (NPS)
- Customer effort score (CES)
- First contact resolution (FCR)
- Average response time
- Customer retention rate
After you analyze the data, iterate and refine your strategies to keep improving the customer journey.
How Contact Center Software Can Help
Omnichannel contact center software helps you set up and even automate certain stages of your CX management.
It lets you plan and implement the nine-step process above and automatically gathers data to optimize the strategy based on KPI metrics for higher revenue and happier customers.
Contact center software like Nextiva includes functionality and features like:
- A centralized platform for managing customer interactions across channels: Unify your business voice, integrate teams, stop working in silos, and ensure consistency at all touchpoints.
- Data analytics tools to understand customer behavior: Gain deep insights into your customer personas, their behavior, customer feedback, and preferences. Track and optimize repeatedly.
- Omnichannel routing to connect customers with the right agent: Ensure consistent and helpful responses no matter the channel — whether a chatbot, messaging app, or voice assistant.
- Tools for self-service and knowledge base management: Meet customer needs consistently without agents via intelligent virtual assistants, AI-powered live chatbots, or SMS.
- Integration with CRM systems for a unified customer view: Bring all your customer details, personas, and behavior trends under one digital roof to beat the challenges of fragmented customer data.
Make Omnichannel a Reality With Nextiva
Providing a frictionless, seamless user experience at every touchpoint gives customers a powerful first impression and makes it easy for them to buy from you.
Building an effective strategy isn’t always easy. But Nextiva’s dedicated omnichannel customer service software can help.
Its all-in-one specialist software can help brands craft a cohesive customer journey and make sense of their customers’ interactions.
The most successful brands know that a seamless customer journey and consistent communication at all channels and touchpoints are the secrets to excellent service and skyrocketing revenue.
Whether you want to focus on improving customer conversations, perfecting the CX and planning your strategy, or building your brand, Nextiva has the CX solutions you need.
