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The Importance of an Omnichannel Approach for Great Customer Experience

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Archives, Global Logistics, Global Trade Daily

The Importance of an Omnichannel Approach for Great Customer Experience

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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/  

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Archives, Global Trade Daily, International Trade, Trade Cycle

Sales & Operations Planning: A Long-Term Solution to Global Supply Chain Volatility

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As companies strive to provide the highest quality and service at the lowest cost, global supply chains play a vital role. Companies often approach their global supply chain planning with a “do it and forget it” attitude, expecting that a detailed identification, verification and qualification process will not require frequent revisits of past decisions. Global political climates, tariff wars, and the recent COVID-19 virus outbreak continue to illustrate the urgent need for supply chain agility, risk management and contingency planning.

Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) is a mid-term tool to ensure alignment among corporate strategic objectives, whereas Sales & Operations Execution (S&OE) is a tool to ensure balance among supply and demand. The flexibility of S&OP allows for an organization to look for imbalances at intermediate levels in a product hierarchy without getting “lost in the weeds” at detailed SKUs but not at too high of a level to be less meaningful.

In order to review this supply and demand balance, one must create supply planning groups and a structure based upon the critical success factors for delivering high levels of service. These planning groups could be internal manufacturing groups, make/buy items, a specific external supplier, or country of origin groupings. Given the extended lead times for international supply chains, S&OP is an ideal process for looking several months out into the future to perform risk analysis.

Strategic Considerations for International Sourcing

Companies initially evaluate their strategic objectives when pursuing an international sourcing initiative, but this should be revisited on a regular basis to ensure that the chosen supply chain continues to meet the companies’ needs. The lowest total cost of ownership is the primary objective, yet as manufacturing has declined in Western economies, the only source for production is often in the younger global economies such as China, India, Malaysia or countries of Eastern Europe.

Over time, labor rates and raw material costs in these countries have fluctuated due to global supply and demand. Combined with changing prices for the underlying commodities in those local markets, companies are facing more frequent price instability. Additionally, tariff uncertainty or increases force a regular review of the global supply chain to ensure strategic objectives have not changed and are still being fulfilled.

Supply Chain Complexity vs. Diversification

It is easier for a supply chain team to manage a single production site within a single manufacturer or at least from within a single country of origin. The obvious downside to that approach is that if that country is subject to a sudden tariff spike, an organization can quickly find itself with no choice but to accept the increase in costs and a likely impact to margins. As a potential alternative, a company can pursue a dual country sourcing strategy where it can cost-average its pricing to mitigate the short-term impact. Over a longer-term, a purchaser has the opportunity to switch volumes between suppliers/countries to mitigate those impacts.

How can S&OP help?

By its very design, the S&OP process is an ideal vehicle to prompt a company to ask the necessary strategic questions on a regular basis. In addition, a robust S&OP process takes into consideration changing costs and gross margin impacts to the bottom line to ensure gross margin or revenue targets are met. Stepping out of the day-to-day S&OE during the S&OP process allows for that broader perspective to evaluate “what-if” situations that could impact costs, demand, supply and margins before they reach fruition. In this manner, S&OP is a useful scenario-management tool to look at these cost changes, price increases and estimated adjustments to volumes at an aggregate level to quickly identify the potential impacts to the bottom-line without having to perform a time-consuming SKU-by-SKU analysis.

Contemporary S&OP tools often have scenario-modeling capabilities and increase the speed and accuracy of these strategic evaluation exercises. However, depending upon the scale and scope of a company’s supply chain, an expensive tool is not always necessary. Well-designed spreadsheet models populated by databases may be a sufficient starting point for a business. No matter what tool is utilized, the S&OP process is designed to identify potential issues and act as a launching point for projects elsewhere in the organization to identify methods for addressing those issues in the most cost-effective manner.

Companies with well-designed and utilized Sales & Operations Planning processes have well-demonstrated benefits of:

-Reduced stock-outs, driving higher service level

-Lower variable labor costs

-More efficient raw material, work-in-process and finished goods inventory utilization

-Lower transportation and material acquisition costs due to more stability

-Higher gross margins

-Increased top-line sales

Strategically including tariff management and other global supply chain variables in the S&OP process to evaluate possible impacts to the supply and demand balance, as well as cost structure, is critical to ensuring the continuity of supply necessary to provide high levels of service and cost management.

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Paul Baris is a supply chain expert with over 30 years of experience in the industry as a Vice President of Supply Chain for several companies as well as a consultant implementing Sales & Operations Planning, Inventory Strategy and Demand Planning practices.

Paul’s strengths include: Operational Performance, Root Cause Analysis, Lean & Six Sigma Methodology, Client & Vendor Liaison, Leadership, ERP, Strategic Procurement, Project Management, Warehouse Redesign/Implementation, Supply Chain Engineering, Statistical Process Control, 3PL Management, WMS, Demand Planning, Inventory Planning, Change Management, S&OP, and Operational Layouts. Paul is a certified supply chain professional from APICS and has a Certification in Supply Chain Management from the University of Tennessee. Paul’s professional certifications include: Change Management – Prosci ADKAR, Professional Negotiation – Karrass, Juran on Quality I & II – Kepner-Tregoe, Strategic Procurement – Stanford University, Statistical Process Control, Purchasing Strategy, Oliver Wight S&OP, and S&OP Implementation.