As communication technologies continue to evolve, so, too, do the ways that people interact with one another. This trend applies to interactions with businesses as well, and customers have begun to show serious interest in multifaceted brand interactions, spanning multiple channels and lines of communication. Omnichannel customer experience analytics is a form of analytics that has risen to prominence in recent years to help companies derive deeper insights from customer data.

Understanding omnichannel customer experience analytics and how modern business practices practically demand its usage is essential to satisfying customers and maintaining a competitive edge these days. Read on to learn what this form of analytics is and how you can put it to use.

What is omnichannel customer experience analytics?

Omnichannel customer experience analytics collects and analyses data from multiple channels, such as social media, call centre interactions, e-mail and more. By analysing multiple data sources at the same time, companies gain valuable context that isn’t available when a single data source is analysed in a silo.

In other words, omnichannel customer experience analytics provides a more comprehensive view of customer data, making it possible to derive actionable insights and make data-driven business decisions to optimise performance, from providing better customer service to informing market expansion and new product development.

Benefits of omnichannel customer experience analytics

Keeping track of customer interactions across all of these channels has become a top priority for many companies, but that isn’t all they need to monitor across different sources — many other bits of business-critical information now permeate the ether in need of consolidation and careful assessment, all in real time. Enter omnichannel analytics — a relatively new development in analytics technology intended to bridge gaps and maximise value in an automated fashion.

From measuring customer satisfaction to forecasting weather conditions and estimating voting results, the use of analytics is practically ubiquitous in modern society. And the growing number of channels through which customers interact with brands — all touchpoints throughout the customer journey — demands an analytics solution that can bring multiple data sources together for cohesive, contextual analysis: omnichannel analytics.

Omnichannel customer experience analytics helps organisations understand their customers across all the different channels they interact with them on. This ties directly into marketing processes by demystifying customer engagement and shedding light on the actual results of a given marketing campaign. It can be used for any interaction between a business and its customers, including sales (both offline and online), contact centre interactions from phone interactions and live chat sessions, e-mail, and more. This is what makes this kind of analytics so valuable.

How omnichannel customer experience analytics works

Omnichannel customer experience analytics addresses the issue of information being siloed by consolidating it in such a way that it can be shared across channels as needed. This allows customer service reps and other customer-facing personnel to pick up wherever customers may have left off, saving them time, and encouraging customers to convert by minimising the amount of effort needed to complete a transaction.

With all of the data needed to help customers, monitor marketing efforts and close sales in a single place, your team can maximise productivity while maintaining lower operating costs across the board. Naturally, there are barriers to implementing a true omnichannel strategy in many organisations.

Data silos can be difficult to crack into, especially when a single company could be using multiple applications and tools to handle interactions on specific channels. Robust omnichannel analytics solutions, like CallMiner, simplify this part of the process through the inclusion of open APIs and integrations designed to bridge gaps between disparate tools and communication channels. These solutions should also be capable of cleaning your organisation’s data to make it more usable and eliminate potentially erroneous bits of information.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is often employed by top omnichannel analytics systems as a means of deriving more intuitive and useful insights from an organisation’s data. These insights span a wide gamut of interests, from sales predictions to engagement assessments and more. The uses for such information abound and can be leveraged in almost any industry.

How you can use omnichannel customer experience analytics

A great many facets of your organisation’s operations can benefit from the use of omnichannel customer experience analytics. Here are a few examples to consider:

Optimising marketing processes: First, customer journeys are traced across the channels they have chosen to interact with your brand on. Then, the effect each channel has on the customer is assessed. Finally, marketing strategies are more closely aligned with the customer’s interests and marketing materials are further tailored to suit individual customers.
Solving supply chain issues: By assessing sales data over your company’s history, omnichannel analytics tools can generate highly accurate inventory forecasts. Everything from supply-side risks to logistics concerns can be analysed and optimised through the use of omnichannel analytics solutions.
Improving security and compliance: Whether your organisation is bound by laws and industry regulations or in need of comprehensive data security measures, omnichannel analytics can play a pivotal role. Omnichannel analytics tools combine data from a wealth of sources and assess it all at once to detect compliance issues or potential threats to your operations.

Omnichannel is the future

Given the rapid shift in consumer purchasing habits witnessed around the world in recent years, organisation will need to explore new ways of doing business to remain relevant. Accommodating the growing flexibility in purchasing made possible by the Internet and the proliferation of smartphones is only conceivable at scale with the help of omnichannel solutions.

Marketers leveraging multiple channels in their campaigns are already reporting 287% higher purchase rates than those confined to a single channel. Customers are clearly calling for more digital innovation from the brands they interact with. Robust, AI-powered omnichannel analytics solutions like CallMiner help businesses analyse multiple data sources in context to inform decision making, drive performance optimisation and empower their vision for the future.

Learn more by downloading CallMiner’s white paper on Understanding Omnichannel Customer Experience: Analysing Every Touchpoint.