Earlier this week I was flying through LAX, and, due to construction in the terminals, I needed to leave the terminal I arrived in, wait in a line, board a bus, and find my way into another terminal to make my connecting flight. On top of all that extra effort, delay, and confusion, it then turned out that all the good lunch options were back in the first terminal. Of course, I was thinking what everyone else was thinking: what kind of omni-channel experience was that?
If you thought omni-channel was a dead buzzword, you’re mostly right. It’s rightfully taken its place in the pantheon of business essentials, displaced by new concepts like “digital transformation” and “customer experience.” The buzzword may be behind us, but only because the frictionless, seamless omni-channel experience is simply expected by customers.
Buying groceries online and picking them up at the store. Ordering tickets to the game from home and getting into the ballpark with my mobile phone. Reserving a table on my phone and having my table ready when I arrive at the restaurant. These are the types of experiences that customers want, and what they’ve come to expect. The burden is on you to ensure that your customers can start, view, transition, and finish to and from any touchpoint, on any device, at any place, at any time. But in the end, customers are the ones who decide if your experience model is easy. So how do you keep up with this constantly growing, endlessly shifting customer demand for a better, faster experience?
We’ve assembled a few questions we ask our customers to better understand how ready they are to respond and adapt to these demands. Ask yourself:
- How well do you understand the journeys that your customers take and the interactions they make with you?
- Can you trace the relationships between your systems and operations and these interactions?
- How many of these interactions function the same way regardless of the channel, time of day, or touchpoint?
- Are you setting the right expectations and in the right way when they don’t?
- Where can you take out handoffs, wait times, and extra steps?
- Is the same content and information available to customers and employees in each interaction and channel?
- Where can you go faster?
By the way, my flight was on time and I landed safely, but you already know exactly which part of that entire experience I will remember.
