What is a unified customer experience?

Customers today have very high customer service expectations. Companies must find a way to compete in the market while providing an exceptional customer experience.

Customer satisfaction is more important than ever because loyal customers are more likely to buy again and refer a friend. Businesses must match consumer expectations, and constructing a unified customer experience is the surest method.

A unified customer experience involves creating a consistent experience across different touchpoints and channels where customers interact with your brand. The system ensures every customer interaction involves cohesive functionality, content, and branding.

Whether the consumer interacts with your business in a physical location or mobile app, their experience must be consistently exceptional. Businesses can unify their brand when they establish a standard for customer interactions. Consumers will be more likely to depend on the company and recognize it across different channels.

Unified customer experience begins with understanding your customer’s views and experiences through their interactions with your company. This could include storing all customer data and interactions in a profile and updating them in real time. Relevant team members from any department should be able to access this data.

A business offering a unified customer experience gets a more comprehensive view of its consumers. This leads to a seamless customer journey, improving productivity, efficiency, and customer satisfaction rates.

Below are three main benefits of investing in unified customer experiences:

Reduces friction for customers

Customers want consistency when they switch between channels. Receiving different information from different channels can confuse customers and increase frustration.

A unified customer experience streamlines communication along all business–customer touchpoints and ensures you deliver a consistent brand message and voice. Companies that use a cohesive brand identity and a set of consumer promises to govern experiences increase confidence in their brand. 

Enables access to more customer data

One of the primary requirements of a unified customer experience is to ensure different teams and departments work cohesively toward a single goal: providing a consistently great customer experience.

As internal collaboration increases, many choose to have a single point of access for all data. Creating a central data lake can link the database with customer relationship management and build unified customer profiles. Teams can also streamline information sharing, enhancing communication and efficiency.

Contact center agents get more context

Contact center agents must receive contextualized data from different touchpoints about each customer to ensure they receive the same information regardless of the channel they use.

Often, a central CRM system offers the filtered information agents need. Agents can access it no matter the channel they manage. However, reps should all work from the same knowledge base to ensure messaging is consistent.

Keep these steps in mind to build a unified customer experience:

Ensure consistency in the brand identity

A unified customer experience requires a coherent brand identity. This prevents fragmentation and differences in experiences across platforms.

Integrating the channels on the backend is not everything. Businesses should also formulate a vision that guides everything from user navigation to website content and visuals.

Map out the customer journey

Mapping the customer journey is a great way to build a systematic approach to a unified customer experience. The process involves developing a visual representation of the steps the consumers follow to reach their goal, from initial awareness to purchase and advocacy.

This helps companies understand their customers’ feelings and thoughts at each stage. It also helps single out any pain points along the way. The visual representation offers insights to maximize customer experience and identify opportunities to enhance satisfaction.

A business should, alongside its brand identity, determine a set of consumer promises and target the emotions that are most likely to boost revenue.

The next step is mapping out the existing customer journey and finding opportunities to create consistency.

Invest in the right customer experience tools

Consistent and cohesive touchpoint experiences are key to satisfying consumers in the long term. You need the right technologies in place to achieve this flow.

Service agents need to see the history and context of a customer’s experience in a single view. This is their first step to delivering customer satisfaction. Notes, special considerations, and prior issues should all be easily accessible to any team member interacting with a customer.

This data may be obtained from contact forms, text messaging services, surveys, in-app chats, bot interactions, transactions, emails, and contact forms. With this data in a single place, agents get a thorough view of each consumer and how they interact with the brand.

Consider tools that can capture consumer context and store and filter it for future use. Investing in hyper-personalization technologies can also help deliver the ideal experience.

Turn the brand identity into a purpose that drives culture

Customer experience should inspire your choice of new technologies.

Cultural changes are time-consuming and may involve:

• Equipping staff with new tools

• Introducing new incentives

• Rethinking staff members’ daily activities

These changes also require every level of the company, from C-suite executives to interns, and are driven by data received.

It’s a challenging goal, but companies wanting to drive culture through data need to make data-based decisions. Getting this right can enable you to establish a purpose that motivates employees to go the extra step for customers.

Have clear feedback avenues

Clear feedback avenues give your customer experience team an opportunity to learn and optimize experiences.

Companies can also use business intelligence platforms to monitor shared metrics between departments. With these details inside a central report, departments get a unified view of customer experience and can work to improve and collaborate to achieve mutual goals.

Below are examples of technologies that can help you create and implement a unified customer experience strategy:

Customer data platform (CDP)

This software aggregates information from different enterprise integrations and channels to build a central data source. The information allows the business to analyze, monitor, and manage disparate customer interactions using dashboards and metrics.

Contact center as a service (CCaaS)

Customer service applications based on software as a service (SaaS) like TalkDesk enable management and integration between multiple customer interaction channels. This offers an opportunity for omnichannel contact.

Customer experience management (CXM) platform

This system gathers customer insights using surveys of different analytics tools. Information from CXM platforms allows businesses to identify and address inconsistencies in customer experience.

Unified customer experience ensures consumers recognize and interact with your company in the same way, even when using different channels to find you.

All business touchpoints, including your website, customer service channels, social media profiles, targeted ads, and email marketing, should convey similar messaging and emotions.

To put a unified customer experience into practice, an organization should follow several best practices. These include ensuring brand vision across all platforms, embracing rigorous internal communication, and investing in the right data collection tools.

A unified customer profile is a program or platform that accumulates real-time data across different consumer touchpoints and channels to offer a complete, unified view of the customer.

Any B2C company can benefit from a unified customer experience. Certain B2Bs also stand to gain similar benefits.

Whether yours is a small business that just began listing products on an ecommerce site or a large organization with thousands of employees, a unified customer experience provides insight into what customers want and how best to serve them.