Cross Channel Customer: Understanding the Concept
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Cross Channel Customer: Understanding the Concept
In today’s omni-channel world, customers engage with brands across various touchpoints both online and offline. This has given rise to a new type of customer: the cross channel customer. Understanding this concept is key for brands looking to provide a seamless and personalized experience.
What is a Cross Channel Customer?
A cross channel customer interacts with a brand across multiple channels, including physical stores, website, mobile apps, social media, email, and more. For example, a customer may research a product on a brand’s website, ask for advice on social media, purchase in-store, and then contact customer service via email regarding their purchase.
Key SaaS products like Zendesk and Freshdesk provide omni-channel customer support to engage with these customers. With features like centralized inboxes and contextual data, brands can maintain context across channels.
The key defining characteristic of a cross channel customer is that their buying journey spans multiple touchpoints. There is no linear path to purchase. They may switch between channels multiple times, gathering information and interacting with the brand across different platforms.
Understanding this behavior is critical, as brands must connect data across channels to understand their needs and preferences. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) like Segment and Treasure Data help create unified customer profiles by collecting and connecting data across channels.
Drivers of Cross Channel Behavior
Several factors are driving the rise of cross channel customers:
1. Omni-Channel Retail
Retailers are embracing omni-channel strategies providing customers seamless shopping across stores, ecommerce sites, mobile apps. This enables cross channel journeys.
2. Digital Transformation
As brands transform digitally, they are adding more online and mobile touchpoints like apps and social media. This provides customers more ways to interact across channels.
3. Customer Expectations
Today’s customers expect seamless, personalized experiences across channels. Meeting this expectation requires understanding cross channel behavior.
Strategies for Managing Cross Channel Customers
Here are key strategies for managing these complex customer journeys:
1. 360 Customer View
Building a “single view” of customer data across all channels provides insight into their needs and preferences as they switch between touchpoints.
Lytics is an AI-powered Customer Data Platform helping marketers achieve this 360 view.
2. Personalization
With data connected across channels, brands can engage customers with personalized messaging and offers tailored to their interests and context.
Email marketing platforms like MailChimp facilitate personalized cross-channel campaigns.
3. Consistent Messaging
While tailoring content to each channel, brands must maintain consistent core messaging on value propositions and brand identity across channels.
Marketing automation platforms like Drip empower this consistency at scale.
4. Seamless Experience
Providing a unified brand experience with shared design elements makes navigation seamless as customers switch between digital properties and physical stores.
Site design systems like Webflow enable reusable components for consistent experiences.
5. Cross Channel Attribution
Understanding influence across channels is key. Multi-touch attribution models help quantify impact to optimize cross channel spend.
Marketing analytics tools like Adobe Analytics provide robust attribution capabilities to measure this.
The Rise of Cross Channel Commerce
Enabling seamless purchasing across multiple channels is key to cross channel strategy. Emerging areas like social commerce and livestream shopping are accelerating this transition.
Platforms like Shopify empower multi-channel commerce with flexible solutions tailored to businesses across industries. Unifying data and experiences will be critical to success.
Conclusion
The cross-channel customer represents the new normal, as touchpoints proliferate and buyers expect personalized journeys. Brands must unify data and experiences across channels to engage this audience.
While cross channel management may seem daunting, leveraging customer data platforms, multi-channel marketing tools, and ecommerce solutions can simplify the process. With the right martech stack, brands can create the seamless omni-channel experiences customers have come to expect.
Harnessing cross channel data also opens new opportunities for personalization and contextual engagement at each stage of the buyer journey – essential to standing out from the competition. Ultimately understanding and serving the cross channel customer may be the biggest imperative for forward-looking brands over the coming decade across industries.
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Relevant SaaS Tools:
- Zendesk
- Freshdesk
- Segment
- Treasure Data
- Lytics
- MailChimp
- Drip
- Webflow
- Adobe Analytics
- Shopify
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