Imagine this: A friend calls to invite you to an upcoming event. Later on, they text you to confirm, only to provide a completely different meeting time and location than originally discussed. While it’s true that people get their wires crossed from time to time, it’s no less frustrating when it happens.
This is what consumers feel with a disconnected customer experience. If they get conflicting information or have wildly different experiences between touchpoints with your brand, it can be a major turn-off. But unlike a personal friendship, a consumer is much more likely to cut ties with your brand over this frustration.
The solution is prioritizing a connected customer experience that provides consistent, positive encounters with your brand. In this post, we look at how to implement a connected customer experience to enhance customer interactions.
What is a connected customer experience?
Traditional customer service doesn’t cut it with modern customers. This means that simply ensuring you meet customer needs will not be enough to promote satisfaction and loyalty. For this, you need to provide a consistent experience throughout all customer interactions with your brand, be it via phone, social media, smart packaging, or in person—this is what is known as a connected customer experience.
It’s different from traditional customer service because it requires you to integrate all customer service touchpoints rather than operating in silos. Instead of the marketing team taking care of social media interactions and the customer support team overseeing email and SMS communications, you integrate workflows to make sure each team is well-equipped to offer seamless connected experiences.
But first, you need to identify critical customer service touchpoints. That’s where customer journey mapping comes into play—identifying customer experiences with your brand throughout their purchase journeys. When you create the map and highlight your touchpoints, you can determine where there is a disconnect and work toward ensuring alignment.
Examples of connected customer experience
Now that you have an idea of what connected customer experiences are, how do you create them? Here are examples for some inspiration:
In-store and online integration
The last thing you want is for customers to feel like they’re interacting with two completely different brands when they switch between in-store and online experiences.
To create a connected experience, you need to align both online and offline interactions—maintain consistency in everything from your branding elements to your messaging and ensure all your systems communicate for seamless transitions from digital to offline and vice versa.
Say you’ve implemented a QR Codes on product packaging campaign to provide access to online resources; ensure that the codes take customers who scan them after purchasing your products to the expected information or channels. If the code is intended to direct customers to a how-to video, ensure it’s ready and offers comprehensive guidance.
Personalized marketing campaigns
Want to build and enhance customer relationships? Personalized marketing campaigns are one of the best ways to do so.
Why? Because 81% of today’s consumers prefer brands that offer personalized experiences. They want you to know who they are and recommend products based on their past purchases and buying patterns to stay loyal to you—this is all part of the connected customer experience.
Say you offer multiple products; customers who buy product B don’t want you to recommend product A if it’s not related to product B or doesn’t meet any of their needs. Doing so would show a disconnect in your processes and impact customer engagement and satisfaction.
Excellent customer support
Did you know that 86% of consumers would abandon brands they trust after one to three bad experiences? With support taking up a significant part of the customer experience, you can’t afford to drop the ball here.
Seamless customer support contributes to a connected experience by allowing you to meet customer needs and resolve their issues quickly. This can result in improved satisfaction and, consequently, lower your churn rate.
Assume customers reach out to your support team because of a defective product bought in-store or online. Providing efficient customer support can show them that you’re a cohesive enterprise with a unified ecosystem and portray you in a professional light.
Unified customer data
Unified customer data facilitates a connected experience by showing customer interactions with your brand at different touchpoints. It can help you understand their preferences and behavior, promote better decision-making, and allow you to provide quicker services by eliminating data silos.
Unified customer data is the backbone of quality experiences. Say you get a complaint from a customer about delivering the wrong product via your company email. With unified customer data housed in a centralized system (like a CRM solution), you can access the customer’s purchase history and previous interactions with your brand. This context can help your support team quickly curate an effective resolution.
The importance of connected customer experience today
Connected customer experiences are more important now than ever because consumers have endless choices when it comes to products and services. If your business doesn’t meet their needs, they’ll likely look elsewhere. The proof is in the numbers—as mentioned earlier, even loyal customers will consider your competitors if you don’t offer consistently high-quality experiences.
Connected customer experiences create a seamless customer journey and can result in higher customer engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty, all of which are drivers of business growth. Again, the numbers don’t lie—83% of consumers are more loyal to brands that offer consistency across all departments. Such is the value of connected customer experience!
Key components of connected customer experience
Ready to enhance your customer experience? Here are some must-have components to support your efforts:
Integrated communication channels
Integrating communication channels like chatbots, websites, email, and social media creates an omnichannel experience for customers, allowing them to interact with you seamlessly through their preferred channels. This can result in greater customer satisfaction and, consequently, loyalty. To achieve integrated communication channels:
- Consider whether your communication and marketing tools have integration capabilities: Ideally, you need software that can integrate with other business tools for seamless data sharing and communication. Bitly is a top choice for link management and QR Code solutions, as it integrates with over 800 apps to help create a cohesive ecosystem.
- Centralize customer data: Leverage a customer relationship management (CRM) solution to help you consolidate customer data from different channels. This way, your team can use a single platform to access the most up-to-date customer information rather than jumping through multiple channels.
- Ensure real-time data updates: Keeping customer information updated in real time across all channels can prevent service discrepancies and promote consistent experiences.
- Monitor customer behavior: Leverage analytics tools to help you identify critical customer service touchpoints. This can allow you to optimize the channels your target audience favors.
Personalized customer interactions
Using customer data to create customized interactions and offers can enhance customer engagement by making your audience feel valued and understood. It can also boost satisfaction by ensuring customers only get relevant communications.
You can personalize interactions for your target audience by dividing them into segments based on various factors—like location, demographics, and behaviors—and creating content and messages likely to resonate with each segment.
You can also assess customers’ browsing and purchase histories and recommend products based on your findings to make sure they get the most relevant content.
Consistent branding across touchpoints
This is a key component as it ensures customers recognize your brand regardless of how or where they come across it. This can create a connected customer journey and position your business as professional and reliable, helping to build trust.
You can maintain cohesive branding by using your logo and consistent colors, messaging, fonts, and links across all touchpoints.
Bitly can help with this—with our branded links, you can include your domain name in URLs to promote recognizability and build trust. If you’re using connected packaging solutions like QR Codes, Bitly can help by allowing you to customize your solution to align with overall branding—you can include your logo and brand colors in your codes to reinforce brand identity.
Skeptical about the power of consistency in branding in promoting business success? Look at brands like Apple and Nike—odds are, Apple’s minimalistic design and Nike’s slogan, “Just Do It,” come to mind just from reading the names.
By maintaining consistency in branding, the brands have become instantly recognizable to everyone who interacts with them across different touchpoints, creating a sense of trust and fostering customer loyalty.
How to implement connected customer experience in 3 steps
Now that you understand the why and what of connected customer experience, let’s look into the how.
Here are three simple steps to get your connected customer experience up and running:
1. Pay attention to the tools you use before getting started
The first step is to find the best tools for creating a connected customer experience. You’ll need various solutions, including CRM software to consolidate customer data, customer support and service tools like bots for a smooth customer experience, and a data analytics platform to help monitor your customer experience.
As mentioned earlier, integration capabilities should be at the top of your list of considerations when choosing tools to promote a cohesive customer experience. Also, consider factors like ease of use, scalability, and reliability before making your choice to ensure you end up with efficient tools that can grow with you. Some popular options include Salesforce and HubSpot for CRM, Ubisend for chatbots, and Bitly Analytics for link engagement data to help monitor the customer experience across different points of contact.
2. Complete staff training on the customer-centric approach
Automation may not be enough if your team isn’t well-equipped to provide a connected customer experience. To boost your chances of success, train all staff members to adopt a customer-centric approach, especially if it’s a big change from a previous strategy.
Discuss the importance of connected experiences in the modern business landscape with them and clearly define their roles and responsibilities in implementing the new strategy for smooth adoption. Also, offer training on how to use your new tools effectively, share customer service resources like articles, and provide an internal knowledge database for reference.
3. Gather customer feedback during and after the change
What better way to determine what works and doesn’t work in the customer journey than asking for feedback straight from the source? Customer feedback is your greatest asset when enhancing the customer experience, as it provides insights from people who have experienced what you have to offer.
Collect feedback during and after the change to determine if your strategies are effective in creating a connected experience. You can conduct interviews (if you have a physical location) or use surveys and questionnaires to reach a wider audience.
Leverage Bitly Links and Bitly Codes to give customers seamless access to your chosen feedback collection tool and allow you to access engagement analytics to gauge your efforts’ performance. You can use these solutions on numerous mediums—including connected packaging, digital channels, and print media—allowing you to reach as many people as possible.
Recognize the power of a connected customer experience with Bitly
As you’ve seen from this post, implementing a connected customer experience strategy is relatively straightforward—get the right tools, train your staff, and collect feedback from your customers to assess your success.
With Bitly, you have not only the means (short links and QR Codes) for customers to easily access different touch points but also a way to assess the effectiveness of your connected experience initiatives. Through the Bitly Connections Platform, you get real-time click and scan data, which can be valuable in identifying bottlenecks in the customer journey and what consumers engage with the most to help you make well-informed decisions.
Sign up for Bitly today to help you create consistent customer experiences to enhance interactions, engagement, and retention!