Omnichannel Effectiveness: Advanced Practices to Enhance Next Best Action Performance

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Omnichannel Effectiveness: Advanced Practices to Enhance Next Best Action Performance

Axtria

@Axtria

September 20, 2023

Sales & Marketing Data Science & AI Community

211

In an omnichannel setup, finding the optimal returns of a next best action (NBA) suggestions program is complex, but critical to success. Demonstrating value to essential stakeholders, including sales and brand managers, operations analysts, IT professionals, and others, is imperative to align with their omnichannel objectives. At the same time, implementation teams need to ensure data availability and harmonized processes across multiple tools.

Omnichannel marketing continues to make impressive inroads across industries thanks to the growing need for personalization, dynamism, and delivery of relevant promotional messages. However, executing this promise involves multiple challenges across stakeholders, processes, and intent. As more marketing operations move in-house, setting up a structured program to manage the data-to-insights-to-outcomes journey is becoming prone to roadblocks.

Critical Challenges to Omnichannel NBA Execution

Before embarking on an internal or vendor-led omnichannel program, sales and marketing teams must understand common pitfalls that can derail their efforts and impact the return on investment (ROI).

Customer journey tracking: The primary challenge in executing omnichannel strategies is identifying and leveraging high-value touchpoints throughout a customer journey. While it is important to track each touchpoint, having a mechanism in place to map the right promotional channel and tactic is crucial for ROI.
Consolidating customer 360 data: Omnichannel marketing necessitates a comprehensive customer view, involving data aggregation from diverse sources to inform target customer selection and insights. Yet, many implementations lack essential demographic, behavioral, or interaction data, hindering precise persona development.
Managing integrated data pipelines: The next challenge is to optimize data management to attain flexible, reusable, and automated data integration pipelines and services. This reduces cycle time and gives commercial managers the ability to move from data to decisions swiftly.
Dynamic planning: Quarterly sales plans and marketing campaigns are rendered outdated without the ability to include new targets as soon as a lead exceeds a threshold score. However, the biggest challenge to implementing dynamic plans is the organization's readiness to oversee variable promotional capacities for each incoming lead.
Agile channel budgeting: With advanced tools supporting dynamic customer targeting, it is becoming difficult for traditional multichannel mix models to include the impact of promotional responses across changing segment populations. Optimizing spend and pacing for ongoing and new campaigns also becomes complicated.
Message and offer cadence: Integrated cross-channel message sequences are critical. Suppose a customer misses an interaction on a specific channel. In that case, the subsequent channel can relay the intended next best message or guide the customer back to another channel with the highest chances of offer conversion.
Manual trigger lag: Manually activating omnichannel triggers (from a trigger library) results in a delay, reducing the business impact of next best actions. The lag is removed when triggers are deployed in an automated manner through pre-built integrations.
Contextual intelligence: Models built with more artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) components are playing a larger role in decision-making. Using appropriate business and customer context to guide model deployment will be the key differentiator to implementing insight-driven operations.
Measuring campaign ROI: While overall campaign improvement is easy to measure, calculating how each NBA suggestion lifted the campaign for each customer is challenging. Measuring the impact of each NBA across a specific customer journey stage is critical for optimization.

Advanced Practices for Enhancing Omnichannel Marketing Performance

Omnichannel NBAs are changing the way sales and marketing teams drive higher value and agility across static sales campaigns. Here are the advanced practices to keep in mind while executing omnichannel programs to ensure promising outcomes:

Build your strategy around the customer journey: Brand goals in most organizations do not include the customer at their center. Developing omnichannel goals around the customer journey ensures your brand objectives will be aligned with customer touchpoints and stages, providing a seamless experience and better customer satisfaction.
Utilize modern data management techniques: Leverage best practices such as metadata-driven pipelines, data fabric, and API connectors across your omnichannel operations. Leveraging an industry-standard data management platform allows the pipeline to identify, report, and plug data quality gaps as they emerge across any stage of data operations.
Design an orchestration based on channel orientation: Channels differ in their orientation towards campaign implementation. They can vary across push versus pull channels and fast versus slow channels (emails versus events). In terms of control, some channels can have tight versus loose control (website versus personal). Recognize that each channel works differently as you build your orchestration approaches.
Deploy triggers with zero lag to a customer event: Responsiveness is a major factor in the customer experience. NBAs do not bite the bullet when customer events are not captured or triggers are not activated in time. Omnichannel works best when events are instantly scanned, gaps are assigned a value, and triggers are deployed automatically for highest customer impact.
Plan an ROI measurement specific to the program type: Build measurement into every large program. But at the same time, be realistic that some initiatives are too small to deliver statistically relevant outcomes or are too small to bother spending money on measurement. Leverage measurement techniques specific to each implementation type for relevance.
Scale your “Voice of the Customer” program: Many channels lack engagement metrics, and some engagement metrics (like email open rate) could be weak surrogates for customer engagement. Build a program to gather customer feedback and use that data to drive models and measure eventual performance.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are not the whole story: Gather routine qualitative feedback from omnichannel personnel operating across all channels—including sales representatives, digital marketers, and website owners—to obtain timely and in-depth insights for enhancing the program.
Evangelize the impact for organizational adoption: Consistently communicate the program's comprehensive impact to every team. Offering performance insights will foster a deeper appreciation of the program's value and facilitate greater acceptance of the concept.

Conclusion

Implementing these advanced practices will help companies improve omnichannel effectiveness within their existing programs. Careful realignment of teams and technology will ensure seamless data transfer, use-case prioritization, and AI-driven optimization. This, in turn, will help firms realize true omnichannel impact. However, it is imperative to acknowledge the significant human element in this transition, which is crucial for maintaining organizational clarity and keeping patience. By complementing technological advancements with human ingenuity and expertise, a company can propel itself toward resounding success on this challenging yet ultimately rewarding journey.

About the Author

Insights from Puneet Singh Bhatia, Senior Director, R&D, Axtria Inc.

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Axtria

Axtria is a global provider of award-winning cloud software and data analytics to the Life Sciences industry. Axtria’s solutions are used to digitally transform the entire product commercialization process, driving sales growth, and improving healthcare outcomes for patients. Our focus is on delivering solutions that help customers complete the journey from Data-to-Insights-to-Action and get superior returns from their sales and marketing investments. With a footprint in more than 75 countries, Axtria is proud to be a certified Great Place To Work(C). To learn more, visit https:/www.axtria.com/

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