How to build an omnichannel customer experience through brand marketing

Step one in this process is arguably the most important—you need to make sure that customers have a positive experience while they are in the store, if nothing else. Your store’s omnichannel customer experience depends on it. If it fails, the other two steps likely won’t save or may not even become relevant for saving that customer. In this sense, the in-store experience provides the foundation for the technology strategy to come.

At the register

At the end of the day, customers have expectations. They want to:

Enter your establishment
Easily find what they are looking for
Quickly pay and leave

A solid ordering system is paramount to the customer experience. Before businesses do anything else, they should make sure their ordering system is up to par. Traditional payment methods gave few options for customers in this regard; wait in line and pay at the register with cash, check or card. It’s perhaps no wonder that customers were so ready to flee to online retail giants like Amazon. This transition happened because they provided more options than customers had ever had before.

Luckily, modern POS systems offer a wide variety of options to simplify the process of ordering, in-store or online. These include:

Creating the ideal omnichannel customer experience means streamlining your payment system. By offering different payment methods, businesses make themselves more appealing to the discerning consumer. This ensures that they are more likely to give your establishment a visit and, hopefully, a return one.

In addition, it’s important that your POS be able to adapt to an ever-growing menu of payment options. The use of digital wallets (think Google Pay, Apple Pay, etc) is becoming increasingly popular, so your system should be ready to adapt at some point. Following this strategy means that you won’t be left behind as society continues to evolve.

The customer experience doesn’t stop when they leave the shop

At this point in the cycle, the customer has already come and gone through your store. Your POS features have helped them find what they need and they have paid using one of the provided options. Now comes the all-important question:

How do you get them to come back? 

This question has plagued businesses and, in some cases, has led to their eventual closing. Previously, this process was more of a “shotgun” approach—blast tons of money into creating random specials and hope that they bring in customers. Of course, this approach was very hit and miss, sometimes working but most times not.

Optimizing your omnichannel customer experience with data analytics programs transforms your advertising from “shotgun” to “surgical tool.” This includes: