According to a report by Aberdeen Group, companies with omni-channel customer care strategies have 91% better year-over-year (YOY) customer retention rates than others. An omni-channel customer experience management approach doesn’t only result in higher retention rates. There is also a better YOY percent change in essential customer and business value metrics such as the average profit margin per customer and of the customer lifecycle value.
Omni-channel customer service thus clearly contributes to the bottom-line of your organization, especially as, from a holistic perspective, there are other clear benefits we’ll tackle later and that can have a direct, indirect and often even hidden impact on customer and business metrics.
Note that Aberdeen uses the terms omni-channel customer care and omni-channel customer experience management interchangeably in the report and they, I quote, “define strategic customer care initiatives designed to deliver seamless customer experiences across multiple channels and devices”. As mentioned in other articles, there is a difference between customer care, customer service and customer experience management and optimization but there often is a thin line indeed (as there is between multi-channel as being able to provide support across multiple channels and omni-channel in the strict sense).
There are many elements to succeed in omni-channel customer experience management and omni-channel customer care, which we’ll cover in later posts.
Knowing the impact of omni-channel CEM on the bottom-line, however, is essential.
The reason, as mentioned many times before: customer service and customer care are still very disconnected, far from omni-channel and not built around the end-to-end customer experience. A sign that keeps proving it: the view of contact centers and customer service departments as cost rather than profit centers.
Aberdeen’s report isn’t the only one that focuses on the business impact of omni-channel customer experience management. And that’s good. What better tools to convince the C-suite than more and more data, even if the real proof of the pudding is in the action and not in research?
Furthermore, referring to sometimes hidden or harder to map benefits (think about the impact on brand reputation and perception, which is often not even measured, for instance), one might even wonder what the cost of NOT providing omni-channel or, at least, superior end-to-end customer experience is…
You can find more data (best-in-class and others) regarding omnichannel CEM, key building blocks and ways to do better and measure in Aberdeen’s report.
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