OMNI-CHANNEL PART 2: A Frictionless Customer Experience

By Kaylyn Bredon, Sr Mgr, Interactive Creative/UX

In Part 1 of this series, we focused on how the marketing realm has evolved and the importance of creating a seamless customer experience. Continuing this discussion, we’ll now focus on how consumers expect retailers to provide more contextually relevant, personalized information that is carefully tuned to a frequency that suits each individual's liking.

Amazing opportunities present themselves when retailers thoroughly align consumer data with an approach that has context, personalization and a manageable frequency. In doing so, they can provide customers with solutions that make everyday tasks easier while making the shopping experience more enjoyable.

Multiple tactics and some example technologies are listed below serving as areas of opportunity. In no way is it a one-size-fits-all prescription — retailers should identify consumer needs and implement accordingly.

OMNI-CHANNEL PART 1: Considering the Customer Experience

  

By Kaylyn Bredon, Sr Mgr, Interactive Creative/UX

One consistent theme throughout every session I attended at SXSW 2013 was the need to create and maintain an “omni-channel” experience. This is a new challenge being introduced to many retailers- often times leaving them with unclear direction on just where to start due to the siloed structure that many businesses and marketing teams have grown to be.

As an interactive designer/ux specialist at a full-service advertising agency, the idea of overcoming the obstacles of working with siloed teams is not foreign to me. After all, that’s why many companies hire agencies like SBC Advertising to help them. We have the advantage of being separated from their business, often avoiding the internal and political bureaucracies, while at the same time having direct access to the decision makers that have the ability to make decisions and get the job done.

In the past, working in silos has allowed us to react quickly and create standalone efforts that were supported by isolated databases and provided separate analytics (i.e. microsites). However, these standalone workarounds no longer serve as viable options.

Today, it is imperative that all channels work together, and in return they provide valuable insight into the numbers, showing what’s working and what’s not. With that being said, data is, and will continue to be, at the very base of creating a successful omni-channel experience, making the relationship between Marketing and IT more important than ever.

Mobile as the Status Quo and Responsive Web Design

By Jerrold Smith, Senior Front End Developer

Imagine you’re waiting for a bus and you remember a website that interested you from a recent radio ad. Taking advantage of your temporary free time, you pull out your trusty smartphone and diligently enter the web address into your favorite mobile browser and...disappointment. The website isn’t optimized for mobile and is difficult to navigate via the constant zooming and panning necessary to find the content you’re looking for.

The situation above can be repeated by changing a few elements but always arriving at an all too familiar outcome. Maybe you are watching TV while casually using your smartphone, as 86% of us do, say stats. A commercial directs you to a mobile website that helpfully states “This content is not available on our mobile site. Please visit the desktop website on your computer.” Or maybe the website was built solely in Adobe Flash, which isn’t available on mobile devices, or inexplicably the website simply does not load at all, leaving the mobile consumer with a seemingly empty page. Is this what you want your brand experience to be on mobile?