As businesses and consumers adapt to an evolving digital landscape, it has become clearer which shifts in behavior were temporary trends and which have led to lasting transformations, such as the dominance of e-commerce, hybrid work models, and the growing reliance on AI-driven experiences. The rapid acceleration of online growth in recent years has reshaped the digital economy, with global e-commerce sales projected to reach $6.09 trillion in 2024, reflecting an 8.4% increase from the previous year. This momentum continues to drive significant change, as businesses across both B2B and B2C sectors adapt to evolving consumer expectations, digital-first strategies, and the expanding role of AI and automation in commerce.
For many organizations, there is still clearly a role for a diverse channel mix both offline and online but now with added complexities as customer behavior and expectations change and online environments blur with the rise of in-store technology, further reinforced by restrictions imposed by the pandemic in some countries.
UNDERSTAND YOUR TARGET CUSTOMERS
The rapid growth online is not specific to any one customer segment, we have seen that typically offline customers have been forced to adopt new channels making it difficult and more competitive to retain previously loyal customers. Customers don’t only shift channels, but use a mix of them, starting their journey in one, for example online to inform themselves, before shifting to a different channel such as retail so they can get more details and maybe physically experience the product/service and finally concluding in yet another channel such as online of telesales again.
Organizations that have invested in understanding and pro-actively managing their customers’ omnichannel have seen substantial impact on both the top line revenues and bottom-line cost savings. A recent Deloitte study found that customers who have high-quality experiences are 3.6x more likely to buy additional products and services from a brand creating significantly more cross and upsell opportunities. On the contrary, a better customer experience decreases the cost to serve meaning organizations can focus their efforts on high value customer groups who bring in more than 1.6x higher life-time value.
These shifts in customer behavior and evolving expectations demand the need for organizations to adopt an omnichannel approach to their technology, processes and people, a transformation journey that is not without challenges as it often requires breaking long-standing silos, building different, incremental capabilities and re- and upskilling employees and ensuring the right behaviors are incentivized regardless of channel, but across the customer journeys.
BALANCE STRATEGIC AND OPERATIONAL OBJECTIVES
A target experience is your customers desired and preferred path to conversion or action throughout both sales and service channels. To define a target experience, you need to create visibility of the revenue and cost implications of each touchpoint. For multichannel companies, this becomes complex as customer service costs are often high and can easily be avoided through other touchpoints but need to be weighted based on customer expectations. Depending on the request, not all needs can be addressed through enabling technology. This is often where companies fall short focusing on cost reductions through digital technology at the expense of human experiences.
To successfully steer throughout your defined target experiences, you need to have visibility over the revenue generated by the persona and the cost implications of each touchpoint throughout the customer journey. By understanding these components, you can then design the desired target experience which is ultimately developed based on known client needs and geared towards your organisational objectives whether it be revenue generation, cost reduction or an increase in customer experience. This will enable teams to collectively steer customers based on organisational objectives and guide customers throughout their lifecycle in the channel that they prefer, providing them with the most optimal customer experience. Measures of success are defined on 3 levels, cost, revenue, and experience. Striking a balance between all 3 remains the challenge but when identified and communicated correctly business units can then optimise throughout the journey to achieve KPIs on all 3 levels.
Once there is clarity on the strategic objectives across those three levers you must break down the KPIS into the journey, the journey stage and touchpoint KPIs. Those KPIs will be either revenue, cost, volume, or customer experience KPIs. While this conceptually sounds simple, there are many challenges organisations face in achieving this. Having the right data available and accessible is crucial so that you can develop a holistic view across the organisation. With data often residing in different areas of the organisation, this presents a raft of new challenges beyond typical complications of being a siloed business. As a result, data is often missing, unavailable or inconsistently defined making it difficult to build the foundation of your target experience.
Once you have defined the data points you require and the overarching metrics you wish to measure, considering each of the sales and service channels, you then need to develop a channel economics model which acts as the foundation of your client target experience, factually guiding the channel teams based on insights and data.
SHAPE YOUR TARGET EXPERIENCE
The idea of providing an omnichannel experience across all touchpoints isn’t something new, this idea has been around for years, with only a few companies truly excelling. Not only are customers becoming more fluid in their channel interactions, the orchestration and internal synchronization of business units often plays a significant role. To excel in the omnichannel world, organisations need to design Target Experiences for their priority personas and customer journeys along the customer lifecycle. Those Target Experiences are the personas’ desired pathways across their journeys and preferred channels.
Target experiences are a great ideal state, preferred and demanded by your customers. They might however not be (economically) viable and you will want to shape and steer those target experiences according to your organisation’s strategic objectives and the reality of the market(s) you are in. To be successful you need to have a clear view on how to balance your strategic objectives of growing revenue and customers, improving customer experience and of course managing your costs. And translate these into objectives for your priority personas’ target experiences.
Effective channel and target experience steering can only be achieved once an organisation has established a holistic view across all marketing, sales, and service channels. Simply speaking, you can only steer based on what you understand and know about your customers and what you can effectively measure.
START REFINING YOUR TARGET CAPABILITIES
For organisations to truly excel, they need to balance omnichannel efforts across four dimensions ranging from strategy and operations, governance and mindset, customer insights and technology as these all play a fundamental role in delivering your desired target experiences.
Organisations internally are simply not set up in this way, while this is one of the main reasons’ organisations fail to deliver a truly seamless and personalized experience for their customers, conflicting objectives and targets also play a large role as varying business units optimise in isolation throughout the customer journey.
Creating transparency and understanding simply isn’t enough, by evaluating these dimensions organisations can preciously target areas of improvements to shift from a channel-driven business towards a journey driven organisation. Traditional and more established organisations with diversified offerings have a bigger task on their hands as legacy systems and business owners often prevent or slow down this transformation. Without buy-in and commitment from the executive team it’s unrealistic to expect any significant results.
START STEERING - 5 TIPS TO REACH YOUR PEAK
Truly embracing and embedding omnichannel Excellence in the organisation is not easy. It is a transformation journey that will take time and will require changing the minds and hearts of the organisation. Our cross-industry experience tells us there are 5 lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid making the journey smoother.
Contributors:
This article was written by Nicholas Pinfold and Wouter Slotemaker who are part of the Customer consulting practice in The Netherlands.
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Nicholas Pinfold
Nicholas is a Digital Strategy Consultant within the Customer practice in The Netherlands. He is an experienced consultant and has a deep understanding of omnichannel, loyalty and marketing. Nicholas has extensive experience within the retail and consumer products industry, helping clients on a range of topics such as channel strategy, market roll-out, customer experience and operating model. Nicholas is passionate about supporting clients such as Nike on customer-driven transformation initiatives specifically focused on driving growth from within the organisation. Nicholas has a passion for sport, innovation, and all things digital. Originally from New Zealand, Nicholas now lives in Amsterdam.
Stephen Ward
Stephen is responsible for Deloitte Digital (www.deloittedigital.com) and TMT business of Deloitte Consulting. He has over 16 years practical consulting experience within the telecom, high-tech and consumer industries in the Netherlands, Asia and UK. Stephen is passionate about advising clients on large complex business transformations with digital transformation at the core. Stephen authors research on mobile and digital trends and is co-founder and lecturer at the Nyenrode Telecom Academy