A seamless customer journey starts with an honest assessment of your operations.

Most retailers know they need to create value not only through their products and services but also from the experience they provide for their customers. The smartest retailers, however, invest in optimizing the entire customer experience.

Companies who get it right understand that when a brand delivers a seamless, integrated customer experience across their systems, programs, platforms, and touchpoints, many benefits accrue simultaneously: customer satisfaction improves, sales increase, customer lifetime value multiplies.

Yet leaders face a clear challenge: How can you actually ensure a truly seamless customer experience from consideration to purchase? They might get one facet of the experience right, even two or three, but few companies consistently enable smooth and consistent customer journeys. There are usually bumps along the way. Based on our experience, the question requires a hard look at your capabilities, processes, and MarTech (or marketing technology) stacks and partners.

Customer Experience: The New Equalizer

We’re at the place where companies are competing to gain consumers’ approval on the overall experience as much as the quality of their products and services. The key enabler? A smooth and connected customer journey. Without question, digital technology has completely changed how customers interact with retailers. In today’s market, consumers expect a seamless approach through all shopping channels and through all forms of interaction (including mobile devices or brick-and-mortar locations). Customers expect consistent, positive experiences, where all channels have complete and accurate information about their browsing and buying history.

Indeed, this new consumer is savvy, connected, and always in control. Even though they don’t see all the behind-the-scenes mechanisms at work at the brands they love, they know what great customer experience looks like. They are delighted when a brand gets it right, and they feel the pain and frustration when a brand gets it wrong.

To satisfy these demands, retailers are increasingly managing journeys as they would any product or service. In fact, they’re increasingly competing on the strength of the journey itself. Journeys are becoming central to the customer experience of a brand and can be as important as innovative products as a source of competitive advantage.

As retailers, the goal is to achieve Unified Commerce, where every part of the customer-facing business is seamlessly connected, affording a clearer view of all your channels, payments, product information, and customer interactions. That means connecting the programs, content, and data management (i.e., store signage, brand marketing, products, payments and loyalty programs, inventory merchandising, store and online offers, messaging, and analytics) with your systems (i.e., web and e-commerce systems, payment systems, loyalty systems, delivery networks, etc.). In the ideal, customers should be able to start an order on their desktop and finish that order on their mobile app if they get sidetracked or are on the go. If they are proven coffee drinkers, they should get offers for coffee—not tea. In other words, Unified Commerce helps every part of your operation work in harmony with all the other parts. You can quickly identify issues‚ improve efficiency‚ and deliver better customer experiences. The customer feels that you get them, which is the ultimate goal.

Complexity is the New (and Old) Challenge for a Seamless Customer Journey

The proliferation of new digital technologies, processes, and organizational structures to manage these journeys has created a tremendous amount of complexity for organizations. Companies may find themselves having to reconcile:

• Disparate customer-facing solutions
• Often conflicting goals across siloed work teams
• Costly and often disconnected back-end systems and processes
• Friction between customer touchpoints
• Data and organizational siloes
• Lack of integration between loyalty provider and other vendors
• Varying levels of digital and tech maturity commensurate to customer expectations

Worse yet, many companies might not realize how complex their organization has become—and how that complexity might be impacting their customers’ experiences and journeys.

A Critical Point in Your Own Journey: The Assessment

Understanding where customers are, how they navigate streams in your market, and how to interact with them in a given path of purchase is now central to crafting a good customer experience, and that has implications. Among other things, companies need to shift from thinking about a value chain to an experience chain. The value chain is about moving products from the point of production to consumption. An experience chain starts with the customer and aligns the touchpoints inherent in Unified Commerce buying journeys. This goes beyond “experience marketing” where brands highlight how their products can make the buyer’s life easier or more productive. It’s about the journey from need recognition through evaluation to purchase and post-sales activities.

To create a truly motivating customer experience and seamless customer journey, you must start by asking two simple questions: Who is your customer? And what type of experience and journey do you want to create for them?

An end-to-end assessment of the entire customer-engagement ecosystem provides a clearer understanding of the current customer journey and the gaps to delivering the ideal state. Evaluate every touchpoint, from messaging to copy placement to links and banners to online and offline connectivity.

Once the gaps are identified, work with stakeholders and partners to prioritize needed fixes and take action. The investment in giving customers the experiences they expect has many benefits, including:

• Increased customer spending and retention
• Eliminated costs of older architecture and unnecessary technical debt
• Updated infrastructure that provides flexibility, scalability, redundancy, and improved operational efficiency
• Reduced friction through the closure of obvious gaps
• Business alignment that delivers a predictable, intentional, and consistent retail brand experience at every touchpoint

When a promised experience and related journey are running on all cylinders, you will drive more revenue and improve the brand’s positioning in your customers’ hearts and minds, helping them get even closer to the brand they love.

Impact 21 knows the value of an intentional and proactive customer focus and has dedicated an entire practice to it. Our Customer Strategy & Experience practice offers a range of services that enable brands to create intuitive, prescriptive, and connected engagement and purchase paths, maximizing customer value, advocacy, and loyalty. Find out how our team can help turn your customer-first aspirations into incremental impact for your organization.