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The omnichannel approach to customer experience has become an essential investment among companies focused on maintaining a strong brand reputation. It means providing a unified experience through all channels and platforms that consumers use to interact with the brands they use. In other words, it’s become more important than ever to communicate the same messages across all channels in which customers choose to engage. Done successfully, an effective omnichannel platform will deliver a resolution-centered, personalized experience to every customer – no matter how they connect with an organization.

Seventy-three percent of consumers point to customer service as an important factor in their purchasing decisions, making the customer experience the number one driver of brand loyalty.1 While brand loyalty is an important factor in the success of a company, it is shockingly fragile. In fact, one in three consumers say they will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience. Most of the 32% of customers willing to abandon a brand after a bad experience are the Gen Z and Millennial generations, who assign lofty significance to how a brand treats and values them.1

More companies should expand to the omnichannel customer service model. It has shifted from being appreciated to being largely expected by these market-driving generations of consumers. It promotes consistent brand messaging and enables brands to protect their customer relationships across multiple platforms. Right-place, right-time engagement can be the difference between whether a customer chooses your brand or a competitor – and whether they stick with your brand for their next purchase decision.

The Risks of Neglecting Social Media Customer Experience

The average social media user has roughly 865 followers across all platforms.2 No matter how strong a company’s other means of communication – phone support, chat operations, self-service – a lack of social media engagement exposes your brand to the possibilities of neglecting customer questions and feedback, resulting in a bad reputation when it comes to customer service. All it takes is one consumer posting a bad complaint on their social media platforms for their 865 followers to see. Furthermore, 60% of customers who complain on social media expect an initial brand response within 15 minutes. Brands lacking a social media customer response strategy, or brands with understaffed digital engagement teams, have no way of redeeming social media brand perception to consumers in a time when there is a mass customer pivot to social channel utilization for customer care.

Neglecting social media can also lead to inconsistent brand experiences that break customer loyalty, lose moment-of-purchase sales opportunities, and alienate buyers in the research and observation stages. By using omnichannel communication, a brand can avoid these mistakes and keep the company’s reputation in the good graces of loyal consumers.

Social Experience Management Solution Sets

Having consistent customer service across all channels can be greatly beneficial to a growing company, so it’s important to know how to do it right. Social experience management can be broken down into three solution categories: social care, reputation management and content/community moderation. Utilizing these three categories and correctly implementing omnichannel approaches is the best way a company can provide the customer service and experiences that consumers expect to receive from their favorite brands.

Social care is the monitoring of all social media channels. The key is knowing when to listen and when to respond. It’s also essential to align all social media channels in messaging and brand voice. To do this well requires response teams ready to reply to all customer questions, complaints, and praise. Having sales conversion and cart value strategies for consumers are shopping through various media outlets is also important, as is detailed engagement and KPI reporting on engagement and brand performance

A second specialized area of social experience management is reputation management, where companies complete all online reputation assessments and social media campaign activation. Screening for inappropriate or malicious content aimed at your brand can help companies get ahead of an issue before it escalates into a problem. It’s important to brainstorm brand, product, e-commerce, and retail-based strategies that focus on review response, as well as addressing questions at the point of digital sale. These efforts can determine whether a customer decides to buy your product or return to your location.

Another key component to reputation management relates to incorporating the right social media customer engagement campaigns. A great campaign will align with the efforts of the marketing teams and agencies to maximize campaign reach and amplify the goals of current social promotions and objectives. Social media customer engagement campaigns can be fundamental to showing what values your brand has above and beyond basic digital customer care, which is another reason why it’s so important to incorporate into your brand’s strategy.

Finally, content and community moderation is another integral part of ensuring the company’s presence is being represented accurately across all platforms and that community forums are being cultivated in a way that promotes brand loyalists and new advocates alike. Moderating uploaded user/brand content (video, text and images), flagged content review as well as promoting community guideline enforcement are of high importance to grow digital communities while still following brand standards. Brands that pull all of these digital skills together to monitor all social channels, brand sites, and third-party sites can see the benefits when measuring customer experience through social engagements can set themselves apart from competitive brands.

As the omnichannel approach continues to rule customer experience strategies, having the best tools to measure interactions and implement company KPIs is of the utmost importance to ensuring a successful brand experience while boosting consumer loyalty.

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Roger Huff is Vice President, Digital Engagement Solutions at ResultsCX. His experience in the business process outsourcing industry spans 13 years, with 10 years of experience concentrated on social media customer experience management. Roger leads solution development and sales of social media and digital CX solutions that span social CX, digital reputation management, and content & community moderation services. He has worked extensively with digital, e-commerce, insurance, healthcare, and retail companies to deliver specialized solutions that elevate brand reputations.

Sources:
1: https://www.pwc.com/us/en/advisory-services/publications/consumer-intelligence-series/pwc-consumer-intelligence-series-customer-experience.pd
2 : https://www.customercaremc.com/insights/national-customer-rage-study/2020-national-customer-rage-study/

Modern warehouses are already much faster and more efficient than those 20, even ten years ago. But you’re still feeling the budget crunch every quarter. And, if you’re like us, you know that there are always things we can do to make a warehouse a little better.

So, we crunched the numbers, talked to experts, and meditated in the back of the warehouse to come up with these six methods designed to improve your warehouse efficiency, speed, accuracy, and how much we like working in a warehouse.

Improve Your Operational Software

Your first step in improving your warehouse operations is having the right tools in place to measure, track, and understand what you’ve got. A modern warehouse management system (WMS) is your safest bet to start establishing baselines of your efficiency, waste, how quickly you fill orders, and how accurate everything you do is.

We’ve all heard it a thousand times, but it remains true: you can’t improve something you don’t measure. Choose and implement a capable WMS to gain a better understanding and give your team plenty of ways to use their time and your inventory better.

Enhance Your Metrics Choices

Metrics, especially key performance indicators (KPIs), build on that introduction of a smart WMS. They help you tell the story of your business and how it can do better — and sometimes communicating KPIs is just as important as choosing the right ones.

Review the metrics you track and how you define KPIs. Do they measure productivity? Can they respond to changes to your baseline? Do they match up with current targets and accurately track as performance changes?

Don’t get overly complicated.

You want KPIs that are easy to understand and measure. Glancing at your system and dashboards with these metrics should give you an idea of the health of your business. You and your warehouse team can understand five metrics much better than 20. So, find what easily tells the most important story.

Reorganize Your Inventory Locations

Once you know what to track and can start tracking it, it’s time to review your standard day’s orders and the routes people take to pick them. Look for high-volume products and see if they’re in a good or bad location.

Put your most popular products near they critical points in your warehouse that can speed up picking and packing efforts. Usually, this includes aisle ends and exit or transition areas. However, you might also have enough volume to give them their own space that’s closest to your packing areas, with a set team of pickers grabbing only these while others grab the secondary items to complete each order.

You can speed this up further with a WMS that support voice picking and wave or batch pick and pack methods. They’re faster, more accurate, and improve your efficiency for filling orders.

Try Custom Kitting

When you redo your inventory locations and start reviewing route changes, you’re collecting a lot of data along the way. Use it.

Productivity can see significant gains when you implement custom kitting in your warehouse. Kitting can occur with the packages you sell or how you manage your warehouse, both increasing efficiency by reducing pick points. Selling kits means you can control inventory better and generate higher-value orders more often.

However, you can kit within the warehouse simply by grouping products that are typically bought together. Some companies even bag select items together to give pickers an option to grab one thing instead of many. It can help you control your space and keep inventory counts more accurate, giving you a nice boost.

Give Receiving Its Due

The warehouse mantra is often about getting orders out the door as quickly and accurately as possible. Unfortunately, that leads to bottlenecks and procrastination in the receiving department. The faster and more efficient you become, the quicker you need to get your inventory ready for use.

Make every aspect of receiving, from putting away inventory to breaking down boxes and taking out the trash, important. It should be habit, and your systems should reinforce it. The better you do this, the more accurate and reliable your data, making all these other steps more efficient.

Besides, do you really want a bad inventory count because an empty box listed as full?

Talk to Your Team

And the final way we’ll think about running a better warehouse is by asking you to stop thinking about it. All of the steps above require data and activities from your warehouse team, IT, leadership, and more. Every group interacts with each change in a variety of ways, giving them varied perspectives.

Don’t let all that experience go to waste.

Talk to your team in the warehouse, in IT and sales, and leadership. Discuss what’s working, what isn’t, and their suggestions to change things regularly. You’ll get a two-prong benefit:

-People interacting with the systems and changes have excellent vantage points to find breaking points or see additional changes that can boost your performance.

-It helps your teams feel heard, which makes them happier to come into work and more likely to implement the changes you make.

Your company pays a lot to have different experts in and around the warehouse. They’re the most significant resource for maximizing your business. And, we all like feeling respected at work.

The Importance of an Omnichannel Approach for Great Customer Experience