Key components of a user-first, omnichannel approach

According to an Inc24 survey, the number of D2C start-ups disrupting the Indian business scenario reached 800 in 2021. Furthermore, the D2C market will be valued at $100 billion by 2025. The numbers indicate a rising trend in digital and consumer-first brands.

With a user-first approach, companies find the most efficient way to acquire customers, reduce costs and increase revenues. The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic brought consumers closer to the online space and changed shopping preferences.

However, while purchases may happen online, purchase decisions happen offline. Consecutively, 90% of retail owners believe it is vital to have an omnichannel strategy for growth.

Shifting from traditional business operating processes to a user-first omnichannel approach requires a robust roadmap and execution.

At Growth Jockey, we help you unlock 10X revenue potential through digital commerce and omnichannel strategies for business growth. With leading technology and automation consultants, your journey becomes seamless.

It is essential to know its key components to ease the journey of transitioning to a user-first omnichannel experience. Keep reading to know the fundamentals!

Why Is an Omnichannel Approach Important?

As 73% of customers have a multichannel shopping preference, businesses must meet them on their terms with a consistent and personalised experience. This is known as an omnichannel approach, and it's quickly becoming the new standard for customer experience.

Omnichannel isn't just about being present on multiple channels; it's about creating a cohesive experience that meets customers' needs, no matter where they are or what they're doing. This means creating a consistent customer journey across all channels, with each touchpoint working together to support the customer's needs.

There are many benefits of moving to an omnichannel approach, but here are three of the most important ones:

• Improved customer experience: An omnichannel approach puts the customer first as the top priority. Customers can quickly move between channels with a consistent, high-quality experience irrespective of where they interact with your brand.

• Improved brand loyalty: Businesses with an excellent multichannel customer experience have an 89% retention rate compared to weakly channelised brands.

• Improved Financial Figures: Brands with omnichannel engagement set themselves up for almost 10% higher annual income growth. Additionally, they reduce annual costs by almost 8% year-on-year!

While the above listed are merely the top three reasons to adopt a user-first omnichannel approach, many more businesses uncover for themselves.

What are the Main Components of a User-first Omnichannel Approach?

The comparison drawn by a McKinsey study shows the competitive advantage and lags of various digital-first, traditional and omnichannel businesses. The study identified three key components that make the difference.

Understand the following critical areas of an omnichannel strategy to ensure all-round execution:

1. Making Online Purchase Accessible

The current volume of e-commerce sites globally is around 12 to 24 million. However, less than 1 million of these sites make over $1000 annually. Most of these digital verticals of businesses are present for brand awareness.

Digital commerce can only be an effective channel by offering an online-purchasing capability.

Take, for example, an Australian plumbing services company in Canberra that offers 24 hour services to locals. However, the website needs to map out the customer journey fully. Here's why- to make an appointment, you must call their representative or fill out a query form.

Offering human assistance to the online customer experience must complement your user journey. When it is a crucial step in the cycle, it adds to the challenges of omnichannel strategies.

A great example of offering online-purchasing capability is the clothing giant H&M. When one visits an H&M product page; they encounter a section that informs them if the clothing is exclusively available online or not.

Such an omnichannel strategy helps businesses to:

• Increase online shopping consideration

• Offering convenient shopping options for store items

• Increase foot traffic in stores as well (If a customer finds an item online but wishes to try it before buying).

The telemedicine industry is an excellent example of leveraging the online space.

With consumer preferences shifting online, the e-pharma industry grew by around 18.17% between 2015 to 2019 is leading the multichannel approach with offline stores and an online pharmacy option.

Once businesses traditionally offer online shopping options, they will likely realise the ease of user journey mapping through it.

2. Customer Journey Mapping

According to statistics, 49% of buyers have made impulse purchases online at some point. And brands that benefit from impulse purchases have a robust omnichannel strategy for brand recall.

Your customer journey mapping must be fool-proof to move to a user-first multichannel approach. Both online and offline- essentially, each channel out there.

Critical components of a smooth customer journey can be broken down as follows:

Landing Page

Most landing pages, as found by McKinsey, use small fonts to avoid information overload. However, such website UI derails the customer from the next journey point. With the average landing page conversion rate at 26%, such graphical errors lead to a significant loss.

Offline ATL marketing efforts convert potential consumers when online channels allow a seamless experience.

A great example of making websites more user-first is First Cry. As one visits the site, they are asked for location access to get personalised product delivery options.

Site Speed

74% of internet users in the U.S. will leave a site if it fails to load in under five seconds. Stats further show, 73% of mobile users complained in the last 12 months that they encountered websites that load too slowly.

Using an omnichannel approach and ensuring brand visibility succeeds only when consumers can finally buy directly from you. Backend operating processes must be in place while ensuring frontend execution.

As mentioned earlier, the consumer journey is enhanced when complemented by the human touch. The following key component deals with this.

3. Offline Assistance for an Online Experience

According to McKinsey, half of the insurance purchasers look for advice in person while buying it online. Many insurance companies lead their online product journeys towards offline customer care services in such a case.

However, there is no coming back after an offline chat. Companies may be diverting customers away by doing this. The earlier mentioned plumbing company example, too, applies here.

Thus, a vital component of a user-first omnichannel approach is the integration of offline and online. Integrating artificial intelligence is a modern way to approach omnichannel commerce's customer service challenges.

At Growth Jockey, our technological consultants diagnose your business thoroughly and identify the gaps to fill. With a robust background in Machine Learning and AI, our dedicated team of experts helps you integrate live chat into your e-commerce journey.

With such innovations, you can unlock over 10X revenue and reduce costs. The people involved in a business are essential enablers of growth. This value is at the heart of processes at Growth Jockey, and we will now help you understand it too.

4. People Over Processes

Omnichannel approaches lead to something when a user-first culture is present in organisations internally. The most successful businesses in the world focus on 'people'. Each employee in an organisation must be on board with the omnichannel efforts.

Consequently, adopting an Agile approach to internal functions can lead to higher productivity, increased creativity, and lesser waste. Cross-functional teams enable more data-driven, well-rounded strategies than a hierarchical team.

The success rate of Agile projects globally is 64%. Moving towards omnichannel strategies is not restricted to the product or consumer. Businesses are genuinely omnichannel when the company practices a multichannel roadmap for operations.

If only 9% of Agile projects fail, there isn't much of a reason not to consider the transformation.

The Way Head

Most businesses today are shifting from traditional to online commerce and using an omnichannel approach for their brands. However, there are various challenges of omnichannel models that businesses face.

To transition smoothly into a user-first, omnichannel approach, one must first understand the key components one should focus on. This article elaborated on the four areas businesses should strengthen while going omnichannel.

Online accessibility, customer journey mapping, online-offline integration, and organisational structure substantially matter. At Growth Jockey, we offer strategic roadmaps for businesses' technological, digital, and commercial transformation.

At Growth Jockey, we are dedicated to crafting personalised models that successfully tackle the key challenges encountered by our clients across diverse industries, enabling them to enhance the user journey. Regardless of your company's size, whether it's a small-scale enterprise or a large corporation, you can now leverage advanced technology to optimise the user journey. Take a decisive step towards unlocking the next level of growth for your brand by contacting us today!