media update’s Adam Wakefield spoke to Godfrey Parkin, CEO of marketing consultancy Britefire, who will speaking at the Marketing Mix Shopper Insights conference on Thursday, 5 October, about why customers need to engage with at every touchpoint.

How best do you think marketers, stores, and brands can best put themselves in the customer’s shoes so they can experience what the customer experiences, and augment their strategies efficiently?

Omnichannel experience testing requires broadly the same approach as single channel testing. The complication is that you have more channels to test, and more combinations of channels to harmonise.  
  • Define your customer personas and test and review these regularly – don’t assume that you understand how customers think and behave, or what they value. Always test and correct your assumptions;
  • Set up journey maps or scenarios through all the various combinations of engagement points (search online, buy in store, return to the store; make a buying decision in store, order online for delivery to work, return online; multiple payments options; orders then changes; etc.);
  • Do CX testing, recording the pain and pleasure points that testers experience. Then do it yourself, focusing on the scenarios that created the most disconnected experiences for testers;
  • Pay attention to those actual customer behaviours you can track quantitatively – online, in-app, returns, and payment methods. Use your data to segment different customer personas and their buying patterns, and use this to challenge your original persona assumptions; and
  • Do qualitative surveys – How likely are you to recommend us to a friend, and why? Having a store app linked to a loyalty/rewards programme can help here.
 
What questions should a brand or store ask themselves so they can start at the right place?

Define what experience you want your brand to represent, in meaningful emotional terms. You can’t use motherhood terms like ‘seamless’ or ‘professional’ – every retailer thinks they deliver this, but these are not necessarily what matters to a customer. How should engaging with your brand make the customer feel?

The experience you want to deliver depends very much on the needs and expectations of your target customers. You must decide who they are and why would they buy from you, rather than any of the alternative sources out there. You lose sales at every step in the customer journey, from awareness through to final purchase and beyond into post-delivery endorsement. Why? Where did the customer feel let down? And, knowing what you know about each persona, what is the most empathetic way you can rectify this?

How have customers today changed from those of 10 years ago?

Customers today are all, irrespective of generation, better informed, more inquisitive, more selective, more time-sensitive, more vocal, and more sceptical. Because time is increasingly an issue, brands become important as shortcuts to the products or experiences they seek.

Not surprisingly, the most tech-savvy generation – teens and 20s – are more into human connections and personal advice than older shoppers, who are more DIY in their approach – social media makes you more socially needy; e-commerce makes you more self-reliant. The store experience has to become more personal and advisory for some, and more fast self-help for others. The optimal combination of these two, depending on your target market, gives you the best shot at retaining foot traffic and maximising online sales.

Speed is everything to those who know what they want, but it makes it harder to engage and upsell. This trend to “click and collect”, also known as BOPIS (buy online pickup in store) is disrupting the old model of browse, experience, buy.

You will be presenting the subject ‘Optimising Omnichannel CX for Goldfish Attention Spans’ at the Shopper Insights conference on 4 and 5 October. Which professionals do you hope to make the most impact on with your talk?

Optimising is all about doing the 20 percent of tasks which delivers 80 percent of expected performance – or at least finding that sweet spot somewhere short of unprofitable perfection. The people who can make this happen are marketing and merchandising professionals, and senior management – those who have the strategic responsibility for evolving the brand.

Techies, e-commerce developers, data scientists, app developers, social media and SEO people all have, or should have, a sharp focus on optimising their bit of the experience, and most appreciate the need to harmonise with others in the digital space.

But omnichannel is about more than the digital stuff – it is about creating a consistent customer experience through all the channels where the brand is encountered – online, in-app, in-store, on the phone, on delivery and returns, and through the post-purchase usage and endorsement phase. That’s a lot of elements that will all need tweaking so they fit elegantly without conceptual disconnects.

You won’t bake an amazing cake without a great recipe and a competent cook, no matter how perfect the individual ingredients are. The recipe – the vision for the customer experience – can’t be created at the ingredient level. It requires experienced senior management to craft a common vision so the individual components can combine exquisitely. And it takes an acceptance that you’re unlikely to get it right first time, and a commitment to ongoing experimenting and improvement in the overall mix.

How can prospective brands stay up-to-date with who their customers are and are becoming, their habits, and what is happening in the technological world?

There’s really no substitute for research, both local and international. Read voraciously, connect with fellow professionals, and stay tuned to what is happening and what is likely to happen. But don’t lose your way in the theoretical – spend time on the ground with customers and as a customer.

We are at a bit of an inflection point with retail technology. For the past ten to fifteen years, retail was mostly consumer-led. Consumers had control of the web and their information sources flourished, keeping businesses on the back foot. Today, there’s a retailer-led revolution in tech. If you look at what Amazon or Walmart or Facebook are doing in the West with customer profiling and predictive modelling, or at the almost unbelievable tech innovations in Asian retail, like drawing money using facial recognition, you have to accept that retailing, as it was, is over and a whole new dynamic is at play.

South African companies lived in denial of e-commerce for way too long, and they are all climbing on board now, just as “old-school” e-commerce is being supplanted by this new tech-rich regime: AI, personalisation, chatbots, facial-recognition marketing and payments, augmented reality, data-enhanced sales staff, and hyper-localisation. Any major retailer that is not investing in business-model R&D right now, and is not experimenting, testing, and learning, will fall by the wayside.

For more information, visit www.marketingmixconferences.co.za.

Social media is an important channel for brands to engage their customers on and knowing how to use it is key. Read more in our article, Six things marketers should be doing on social media.