Bouke Vlierhuis spotlight: 7 questions on omnichannel success

Today he works for an agency in the Netherlands but is an active advocate for going beyond the screen and preparing content to support users wherever they are and however they choose to connect.

• if it’s becoming urgent for brands to consider strategy in the context of omnichannel experience
• what tends to motivate actually motivate an organisation to go omnichannel?
• whether top-down or bottom-up implementations are the best for getting strategies off the ground, and
• much more.

Maintaining a consistent user experience across all channels, in all stages of the customer journey, requires that companies big and small, B2C and B2B, think about content, customer relations and value delivery in an integrated way. This holistic thinking should be based in timeless brand values and a deep understanding of the target audience and combined with processes and content creation that scale across channels and do not need to be upended every time a hip, new channel arrives.

This will be the winning strategy in the years to come.

For example, you might send out an email blast to loyal customers and see people responding through Facebook Messenger. The traditional multichannel response would be to ignore this, since ‘we do email and phone support and that should be enough for everyone’.

The omnichannel approach should be to listen to the data and set up an experiment where you try and answer these queries through the channel your customers chose. Set up an experiment, measure the outcomes and if it worked, integrate it. So, in the end, omnichannel starts – or should start, anyway – with the actual customer.

Growth in B2B e-commerce is huge and for consultants, lawyers, accountants, and other service providers, business models are also evolving. We will see more and more ‘packaged’, information-based products in these sectors and fulfillment will rapidly shift from person-to-person delivery/hourly billing to digital channels. There will be much more automation and self-service. With diminishing human intervention, user experience then becomes the discerning factor, as it has in retail and B2C, and solid omnichannel strategies will be indispensable and essential everywhere.

There is a lot of creative power being thrown at brand design and content creation, but the real secret behind successfully managing omnichannel is getting content, information, and data to where they are needed, in a form that is useful for the context.

Yes, getting your brand story straight is important, but without a good information architecture and proper workflow automation this is worthless and you will lose your mind trying to execute the high-level strategy.

There is a real challenge for agencies here, too. Despite adding competencies like data analysis, software development and digital campaign management, way too many marketing agencies are still, at their core, tribes of creatives. This focus on creation is hurting their clients, because it leaves processes in place that stem from times long gone.

You can’t sell ‘you brief me, I write a blog post and 5 tweets’ as ‘content marketing’ anymore. Agencies need to make an effort to align their execution processes with the emerging omnichannel strategies of their clients.

Sales and Service have large amounts of knowledge on existing customers that can really help Marketing. Marketing can, in turn, use this knowledge to make the lives of the sales and service teams easier. Once this approach starts showing results, enthusiasm will build. And where there are enthusiasm and results, funding seems to magically appear as well.

This way of organising things is the best (and probably the only) way to orchestrate truly seamless omnichannel customer experiences. When implementing omnichannel in a traditional, hierarchically-organized company, an organisational change is due, either before, or in parallel with, the move to omnichannel.

About Bouke Vlierhuis, boukevlierhuis.nl