Today’s leading brands report driving 3x higher likelihoods of excelling at customer experience and increasing revenue growth over the past year thanks to a complete and unified omnichannel strategy, and 4x higher likelihoods to increase customer loyalty, compared to companies with a less mature or no omnichannel strategy, according to new research from omnichannel comms firm Mitto.
The firm’s newly released State of Customer Experience survey, issued in conjunction with global research firm Demand Metric, takes a pulse check of the relationship between a company’s omnichannel maturity and customer experience outcomes, the results point to how a complete and unified omnichannel strategy enables customer support and marketing teams to deliver impactful business results.
Highlights from the report include:
Digital living and heightened consumer demands driving omnichannel needs
Consumer behavior toward brands has evolved as the pandemic has continued; 64% of marketers and 58 percent of customer support professionals in the U.S. reflected that consumers will be more demanding of how brands communicate with them in 2022.
“Customer demands are on the rise at the same time that brands are facing an increased challenge to stand out from the competition,” said Andrea Giacomini, CEO of Mitto, in a news release. “During the holiday season and beyond, companies need to consider how they can best connect with and engage their customers. Our new research shows those odds increase dramatically when a brand uses an omnichannel communications strategy to reach customers at their preferred communication channels with a seamless, consistent brand voice and experience.”
In light of consumer shifts, brands need to take stock of their current communications strategy. Nearly all (96 percent) of survey respondents said they have developed some level of an omnichannel experience strategy, but less than a quarter (23 percent) believe they have achieved omnichannel maturity, with robust tools and solutions to keep all touchpoints cohesive and in sync across the customer journey.
The report highlighted three key areas of focus in 2022 for company teams to reach omnichannel maturity:
Establishing a wide variety of channels
The digital communications landscape provides countless ways for customers to connect with businesses, and it’s important that brands have a strong presence on customers’ preferred channels.
In particular, SMS emerged as a top digital communications opportunity. Over three-quarters of this study’s participants reported that SMS is the best channel at driving customer engagement. Yet only 40 percent of marketers and 62 percent of customer support professionals said their companies currently use SMS to engage customers. That is set to change next year: along with Google Business Messages, SMS is the top named channel that customer support and marketing teams plan to adopt in 2022.
Connecting and unifying the digital communications technology landscape
The unification of customer support and marketing channels is a vital component of a mature omnichannel strategy, as it enables a 360-degree view of the customer for seamless interactions. However, less than one-fifth of customer support and marketing teams have completely unified the channels they use to interact with customers.
On an encouraging front, the vast majority of customer support professionals (98 percent) and marketing professionals (99 percent) surveyed have at least started on this unification journey.
Achieving cross-functional visibility and collaboration
Similarly, visibility into customer interactions provided in or outside of an individual’s team is an important and valuable aspect of providing a strong customer experience. Departmental silos emerged as a barrier to omnichannel communications success. Almost two-thirds of marketers (64 percent) have little to no visibility into customer conversations across platforms. This rose to 71 percent for customer support professionals.
Download the full report here.
The research drew on survey responses from 619 U.S. marketers and customer support professionals.
