Question: Where is your (prospective) customer? Answer: Everywhere (unless you manufacture ice blocks for igloos, for instance). Naturally, not every customer is everywhere. Some customers like to receive e-mail newsletters; others prefer a printed newsletter. One reads blogs; another has neither the time nor interest to do this. For some, social media is the absolute top and for others social media is a complete fad. I think you get the picture.

It does not matter whether the customer is “wrong” or “right” in the channels he uses because there is no wrong or right and he decides, period. What matters however, are the channels and points of interaction he prefers. And obviously the customer experience.

As a company, it is your job to obtain as complete a picture as possible of the channels and media your (prospective) customers are using in order to improve that experience and make it more relevant for both your needs and those of your customers. But it is not just about channels. It is especially about what those channels makes possible: interactions that could further evolve into transactions.

Those interactions are only efficient if they take place in function of the life cycle of the customer, his needs, the channels which he uses, etc. In short: Interactions are only effective if they take place as much as possible in a personalized, customer-centric and one-to-one way.

The era of integrated data is here, now and tomorrow

What do you need as a company to achieve this, apart from content, e-mail marketing programs, social media tools and much more? Data! Or better: Data on all contact moments, needs, actions, preferences, demographic, characteristics etc. regarding all your customers. You can get plenty of data in dozens of ways by using dozens of channels and a central element linking them and providing insights that lead to actions. You need those to get all your marketing activities to cooperate optimally depending on conversion, pertinence and thus customer.

It may sound simple but for many companies it is not and this has a lot to do with the lack of a client-oriented, omni-channel and data-driven culture where the CRM-activities allow a single view of the customer. CRM is more and more marketing and the link with campaign systems, web analytics, social media monitoring tools and everything offering insights on the customers and interactions with them is crucial in times where the customer is increasingly ‘digital’.

Whether we call it multi-channel, integrated, cross-channel or omni-channel: the customer uses all the media together and at the same time in different ways, sequences and steps and he couldn’t care less what medium he uses where and why. He just does. So it is logical that the marketing strategy is integrated, multi, cross etc.

The single view on the customer: tough but a must

The holy grail here is the ‘single view’ on the customer, as Econsultancy calls it. And that is also what can be concluded from the ‘Multichannel Customer Experience Report’, that got published just recently by the company (in collaboration with Foviance and mainly focusing on UK respondents).

It appears from that report that only 4% of the respondents, who participated in the survey, claimed that they have integrated all their systems and processes in a cross-channel method to enable them to effectively acquire the ‘single view’.

Good news for the vendors of solutions in this domain, less for the companies themselves, and naturally their customers. Yet efforts are made to work on these integrations and they do rank high on the priority lists of most participating companies (90% to be precise), which is promising for the future.

The main hurdles to do it? A mix of several factors including data unification issues, organisational challenges and of course the ever increasing number of channels, contact moments, resources and interaction possibilities (see below). Need I say, among others, social media? The time to go and be active where your customers are is now and so is the time to get multichannel and integrated, on all levels.

The price for not doing it is high: a drop of conversion rates, leads, customer satisfaction scores and a loss of relevance and engagement. Not to mention a loss of business to the competitor that gets its integrated and holistic customer-centric act together.

More when I have read the full report.