Operationalising your omnichannel strategy – w Chris Avore & Matt Grocki

About this episode

Operationalising your omnichannel strategy

Many companies say they are an omnichannel organization, but it’s difficult, confusing, and expensive to realize the benefits of an omnichannel strategy without the correct teams, tactical outputs, and operations in place.

Design thought-leader and lecturer at Rutgers University Chris Avore and globally recognised Content Strategy specialist Matt Grocki discuss what it means to operationalise your omnichannel efforts.

In this session, we look at questions like:

• How do you best research the diverse sets of stakeholders involved in omnichannel? Are brainstorming and workshops still the best way?
• Does omnichannel strategy implementation need to turn your whole organisation upside down?
• What role do executives and leadership play in improving omnichannel customer experience?
• How technical does an omnichannel content or design practitioner need to be?
• And, many more.

Does omnichannel strategy implementation need to turn your whole organisation upside down?

Omnichannel is not about being on every channel, or “disrupting” all parts of your business for the sake of universal change. Matt Grocki tells us that in his large enterprise omnichannel strategy roll-outs, sometimes high-performing areas can be allowed to continue performing well, while groups that are struggling are brought up to the same level.

In omnichannel experience, the system is as strong as the weakeest link, so establishing a consistent level across groups is a good first step to achieving consistency for end users. That said, in each environment, you need to optimise for what works and what is implementable.

What role do executives and leadership play in improving omnichannel customer experience?

Leadership is still in a culture of silos. Even execs and leadership feel threatened by the collaboration, sharing, and sense of exposure that omnichannel can imply.

With his experience teaching at Rutgers University, Chris Avore shares how we have to return to certain fundamental truths about sharing, awareness, and human nature to tackle these issues. They challenge relates more to human-to-human interaction than any sort of technical or business issue.

How technical does an omnichannel content or design practitioner need to be?

Does omnichannel always have to be a techie play? Do you have to involve the data scientists and AI every time? When are ordinary analytics and some good ol’ code good enough?

And very personally, do you need to be a unicorn?

Often, we try to do it all. Rather than try to be a one-person implementation machine, we often need to back up and make sure that we’ve got the right relationships and resources in place to make sure the team can move forward together.

One of the most crucial things is to make sure that everyone involved – even if they’re not a direct implementer – understands the mission and fundamentals enough to make great conversations happen.