What is Customer Experience in an omnichannel management model?

Customer Experience (CX) in this model evaluates a company's ability to design a desired experience and deliver it seamlessly throughout the customer lifecycle. This is achieved through the appropriate channels that users themselves choose, ensuring consistency at every touchpoint. Recommended reading: Business Strategy in the Maturity Model for Omnichannel CX Management .

How does channel choice influence customer experience?

Effective omnichannel strategy means not forcing customers to use a specific channel for a particular purpose. Instead, it allows the user to choose the medium that best suits their needs, ensuring that the services offered on each platform are appropriate and recognized for their value. Recommended reading: How a QR code influences customer experience .

What is the relationship between the SERVQUAL model and modern CX management?

The Customer Experience dimension in omnichannel management is fully consistent with the SERVQUAL model of service quality proposed in the 1980s. Although consumer behavior has evolved due to mobile technology, CX professionals should rely on these fundamentals of services marketing rather than reinventing the wheel.

What are the risks of hyper-personalization in retail?

Although personalization is a recommended practice, studies indicate that privacy concerns can negatively affect the intention to adopt services. There is a critical nuance in how users perceive that brands know their data, which can lead to rejection if it feels like an invasion of privacy.

What elements define a seamless customer experience?

A seamless experience is defined by the ability to provide an easy and pleasant interaction at all touchpoints of the customer journey. To achieve this, the company must identify relevant micro-moments, understand shipping and privacy preferences, and provide constant value beyond the simple purchase process.

Customer Experience in Omnichannel Management

What does the Customer Experience (CX) dimension of our Omnichannel CX Management Maturity Model do?

The third dimension is Customer Experience (this is a blog about omnichannel in Spanish, right?) It evaluates a company's capabilities to design a desired experience (a benchmark) and deliver it seamlessly throughout the customer lifecycle via appropriate channels that customers can choose.

So, if you use our Omnichannel CX Management Maturity Model, the criteria you will need to evaluate in this dimension are the following:

CX Evaluation Criteria

Appropriate channels: We recognize the strengths of each channel according to product types, so the services we provide through each channel are appropriate and our customers are aware of them.
Personalized experience: Based on what we observe in our customers' behavioral data, we understand their needs and provide a personalized experience.
Desired experience: In our company, we have designed a desired customer experience (i.e., a benchmark).
Channel choice: We do not force our customers to use a specific channel for a specific purpose, meaning our customers can choose the channel that best suits their needs.
Customer lifecycle: We think and design beyond the purchase process, seeking to add value throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
Micromoments: Our goal is to identify relevant experience moments in time and deliver lifelong value to our customers.
Customer preferences: Our company understands our customers' preferences regarding services such as shipping, privacy concerns, preferred contact channel, and the benefits of our products/services they value most.
Word-of-mouth: Our company understands how word-of-mouth affects our consumers' decisions in both traditional and digital environments.
Targeting: Our company can target each segment with specific products/services or marketing strategies.
Seamless experience: We can provide an easy, pleasant, and seamless experience across all touchpoints of the customer journey.

The Value of the Customer Lifecycle

Scene in a beauty salon. In the foreground, a woman works on a tablet, and in the background, seated clients and beauticians attending to them are visible.

Not starting from scratch

If you have studied the fundamentals of service marketing, you probably just remembered SERVQUAL, that service quality model proposed by Zeithaml, Parasuraman, and Berry in the late 1980s, which has obviously evolved over time.

Well, the CX dimension of the Omnichannel Customer Experience Management Maturity Model is entirely consistent with SERVQUAL and also with other recent approaches to customer experience, which I will return to soon.

Basically, if you work in CX today, you shouldn't be reinventing the wheel. Obviously, on the one hand, people's behavior has changed - mainly as a result of the omnipresence of technology and the use of mobile devices - and, on the other hand, companies have many more possibilities to design products and services for a relevant experience.

But that doesn't mean we're starting from scratch. As CX, marketing, management, and ultimately, professionals in any area we work in, we must know the basics of the discipline ("discipline" in the sense of a field of knowledge).

Personalization: a counterintuitive example

I want to take a moment to show you a counterintuitive case about one of the aspects (criteria) mentioned above.

A team of researchers (Wetzlinger et al., 2017) studied the impact of personalization on privacy concerns and the intention to adopt services in physical stores and online stores in retail. They used "virtual shelves" and NFC payments (mobile payments).

What did they find? Among other things, they saw that privacy concerns have a negative effect on the intention to adopt services in both an online and a retail context.

How do I interpret this? While personalization is an excellent practice, there is no absolute truth, and nuances can exist. One of these nuances has to do with how people perceive the fact that brands know too much about us.

Therefore, hyper-personalization has its pros and cons, as well as its sinister side (here's an interesting article on the creepy side of personalization).

If you've made it this far, it means you're interested in learning more about omnichannel customer experience management. So, you can also follow me on LinkedIn.

The original version of this article was published on LinkedIn for the Omnicanalidad en español Newsletter.

References

Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V. & Berry, LL. (1988). SERVQUAL: A multiple- Item Scale for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality. Journal of Retailing, 62(1), 12-40.
Wetzlinger, W., Auinger, A., Kindermann, H. & Schönberger, W. (2017). Acceptance of Personalization in Omnichannel Retailing. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 114-129.

Keep reading

The return of Nike: omnichannel brand experience in a marathon

Customer Experience in Omnichannel Management

CX Evaluation Criteria

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