Why Decisioning is Essential in Achieving Omni-Channel

It’s the age of the customer in a digital world. As customers, we are better informed, better connected and more digitally savvy than ever before. We are more critical, we have greater expectations, we want more and we want better.

We want our brands to consistently deliver great customer experiences whenever and however we interact with them. Most importantly, it must be a great customer experience across all channels, all the time!

We want our brands to know us. We want our brands to be more personalized and relevant to us. We expect to be listened to and we expect to be valued. We have the power of choice and we know we have the power to change providers when we are no longer satisfied. We are not alone in thinking this.

Like you, I’m a customer of several large brands that provide various products and services ranging from telecommunications, media and banking to hotels and airlines. Each of these brands is a billion-dollar business with millions of customers, a broad range of products & services and frequently interacts with their customer through multiple channels. Each of these brands and industries is being commoditized in some way. These brands have mountains of our customer data including years and years of interaction history, product and service usage, profile data and campaign history.  Each of these brands know so much about us. Yet, I feel that they barely know me at all.

Companies have access to all of this valuable customer data but are not effectively leveraging it to be more relevant and more engaging with their customers. These brands are failing to make each of my interactions personalized and relevant to me. I don’t feel that important to them. They don’t understand the context of my interactions or the customer journeys I am on. They don’t seem to know my value to their organization or treat me accordingly. They don’t appear to know my needs, my wants, my intent or my preferences. Despite all the data they have about me, they continue to push poorly targeted products, services and offers that are irrelevant and have nothing to do with me.

It isn’t good enough. I want a seamless, connected and more relevant experience with my brands across all channels. I expect brands to more consistently meet my needs, deliver better value and be more relevant to me. I am not alone in those expectations.

I want to be loyal to most of my Brands, but the experience is often so lacking that I am merely just retained. If things don’t significantly improve soon, then I will take my business to other Brands who genuinely care more about their customers and deliver a better and more consistent and engaging experience across all of the customer touchpoints.

Consider your organization, what it is really like to be a customer of your brand? How seamless and joined up is the customer experience across each of your owned and paid channels? How relevant and personalized is it? How engaged and genuinely loyal are your customers? How many of your most valuable customers are considering leaving you? Do you have a new ‘customer first’ strategy and a plan for the path forward to fix it?

This is where Real-Time Customer Decisioning comes in. This is why Decisioning is essential. Decisioning connects the dots and enables a seamless customer orchestration layer across all customer touchpoints.

Decisioning enables the necessary orchestration across all of the fragmented complexities of the channels, CRM, digital, marketing and advertising capabilities and makes them smarter. Decisioning harnesses the value of all your customer data enabling you to influence every customer interaction to be more relevant and specific to that customer in that moment. It orchestrates the interaction experience making the customer journeys feel better connected and less fragmented. Most importantly, Decisioning and Next Best Action capabilities enables you to execute a customer first strategy across every customer touchpoint and moment of truth, putting your customers at the heart of your business and effectively engaging them, every time!

Real-Time Customer Decisioning is essential to orchestrate a more relevant, personalized 1 to 1 omni-channel customer experience. Because you can’t deliver that without Real-Time Decisioning.

Decisioning enables brands to genuinely become more customer centric, execute a customer first strategy and keep their most valuable customers like you and me.

Reach out to start a conversation today; we will help you get started and accelerate your Decisioning journey!

About the Author:
Pete Avery is a thought leader in the Customer Decisioning space. Pete has spent the last 15 years delivering Real-Time Decisioning Programs at leading brands to increase customer lifetime value, improve customer retention, generate significant revenue growth and improve customer experience.