As a business owner for the digital channel, how much do you know about the mobile channel’s data and goals? How much do you know about the mobile customer’s preferences? Don’t fall into the trap of only worrying about your own metrics. Today’s customers want a seamless experience, and a unified digital omnichannel strategy is the solution. Today’s post will provide some practical advice to help you navigate the tricky waters of securing support and data to break down siloes within your organization, thus enabling you to provide your customers with the omnichannel experience they deserve.

Part 1: Why you want to get your hands on the data you need to make omnichannel decisions – ‘The Three E’s’
The value of having all your data in one place is that it:

• Establishes team alignment built on the foundation of joint investment in a seamless omnichannel experience.
  • If your teams are all working towards the same goals, they are invested in the work, leading to a more impactful outcome.
• Enables data-driven decision making.
  • Having a connected view of customer touchpoints across channels is key to driving long term customer loyalty and building positive interactions.
• Empowers diversity in thought, bringing different perspectives to more creatively solve customer problems.
  • The majority of customers interact in more than one channel; why make your decisions from the perspective of one channel alone?

Part 2: Your Plan of Action
Help your manager understand your goals and ambitions for the project past the point of getting your hands on the data. This will ensure they understand how getting the data will impact the broader goals of the organization and make a strong impact to the business, beginning with breaking down existing siloes. The best way to help your manager understand what you will do is outline a plan of action.

1. Define your omnichannel strategy. Most companies today have many digital touchpoints for the customer including web, mobile, text, and chat. Multiple product teams need to share a clear omnichannel strategy, based off analysis and facts.
2. Set up working groups with product teams to ensure alignment. You need to identify key projects and what data points are necessary to drive business decisions.
3. Establish joint goals for omnichannel outcomes. During the working sessions, be sure to set ambitious yet achievable customer experience goals that engage and empower all involved. What does the ideal experience look like and how can we all benefit if we work together?
4. Create a project charter. You’ll want to assign roles and responsibilities. It’s important to ensure the appropriate time is allocated to achieve goals agreed upon from the workshops.

Part 3: Alignment in Practice – A Success Story
For a large client in the finance industry, we created an onsite experience using design thinking methodologies to help product teams learn about each other’s goals, roadmaps, and unique perspectives to problems they were facing. We used affinity clustering to brainstorm, group similar ideas, and then vote on top priority items. The outcome looked like this:

Our activity helped the diverse group understand key priorities that were more alike than different. We aligned our work around the ideas generated in our workshops. Our collaboration resulted in an omnichannel project measuring a new customer experience that started in the interactive voice response (IVR) channel, connected through SMS (text), and ultimately ended on the web. The addition of the SMS channel for the customer offers an entry point to the digital experience by providing direct access to links used within the web.

The joint creation of omnichannel metrics provided the team a point of measurement for the overall customer experience. This would not have been possible without the connection of the three unique data sources and alignment across the three product teams. A monumental finding of the analysis showcased that roughly 50% of customers created a new online profile through this omnichannel experience. Creating this digital presence is the start of digital transformation for the customer. Now that is the case for getting your hands on the data!