By delivering a consistent customer experience across all platforms you will ensure your customers are taken care off and can reach out to you in the way that best suits them without any setbacks; a sure competitive differentiator for companies entering 2016 with success in mind.

The aim of a multichannel customer experience is to provide customers with a choice for how they would like to communicate with a brand when they have a query or a complaint to make. The experience the customer has when they make that choice has to be seamless and consistent regardless of the channel chosen for a true omni-channel service.

However, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to omni-channel and many companies are at various stages of joining up their customer service channels. As far as the customer is concerned though, when they reach out via telephone, website or social media they are dealing with one brand and the experience has to be consistently good.

The ability to track customers, their communications and purchase behaviour across channels, as a result of having a 360° single customer view, is seen as the ideal omni-channel customer experience operation. Customers have growing expectations for a relationship with brands and their belief that their concerns and preferences are taken into consideration remains essential for companies wanting a competitive differentiator as they enter 2016.

In this article, we look at four ways you can use your omni-channel strategy to positively impact customer experience.

1. Developing Personalised Churn Prevention Strategies

An omni-channel approach allows you to build more intelligence about your customers. Through a combination of online, CRM and in some cases call centre data you can gain a more holistic view of your customers. As you acquire more intelligent views on customers you’ll be able to pinpoint them easier and as a result allocate more budgets for retention schemes that will be tailored and targeted to specific customer segments.

Determining how to effectively use omni-channel to drive customer retention can facilitate and improve relationships with customers that reduce churn and maximise customer value. Gathering insight from omni-channel platforms will help companies identify particular behaviours early and develop dedicated programmes to effectively provide a better customer experience.

2. Developing an Insightful Customer Channel Strategy

Looking into the behaviours of different customers and deciphering what would make them choose one touch point instead of another is essential to ensuring your channels are optimised for the type of customer that uses them. Knowing what purpose each channel, online or offline is having in serving and creating a seamless customer experience is key to providing continuity across platforms.

No two customers are the same and that means there’s no ‘one size fits all’ approach to dealing with them. What works for one client may not work for another; therefore you must be able to understand the individual needs and preferences of each customer type and tailor your service accordingly.

3. Developing a Seamless Transition From Offline to Online Channels

In order to create the best possible customer experience you must ensure that the customer’s experience of using offline and online channels are seamless. Contact channels encompass a wide variety of platforms and solutions that serve the customer; it is more than the website, online self-service or call centre, it is also about mobile solutions, chat, social channels, online self-help, in-store experience and other digital and non-digital services.

Being customer-centric and analytical in developing a customer contact strategy – where all channels have their specific purpose and target to provide the best possible experience at each and every point of customer interaction – is becoming increasingly more important to brands that want to win through customer experience and stay ahead of customer needs.

4. Developing Internal Omni-Channel Champions

The most important thing about an omni-channel strategy is a company’s ability to accurately listen to the customer across all the different channels made available to them.

A good way to do this is to keep a very high level of customer awareness within the organisation. Whether it is internal or external, try to nurture a culture where colleagues see each other as champions for providing the best possible customer experience no matter the channel they work on.

In conclusion, focusing on developing strong omni-channel strategies in 2016 will ensure companies remain on track to meet the growing demand of customers who want answers when they want and how they want them.