As a customer, you want your brand experiences to feel cohesive and uniform, whether you’re visiting a store, making a purchase online, or browsing a company’s website or Instagram page. As a business owner, creating a connected customer experience can help you deliver that same seamless interaction for your own customers.
Research suggests that 83% of customers are more loyal to brands that provide consistent customer experiences across departments, customer service channels, and platforms, and 78% of customers say they have used multiple channels to make a purchase. These numbers reveal clear purpose and opportunity to develop a connected customer experience strategy that builds meaningful interactions and customer loyalty.
What is connected customer experience?
Customer experience is the sum of all interactions a customer has with your brand, from the moment of discovery to after-sales customer support. A connected customer experience means creating a connected experience between in-store and online shopping, as well as interactions with your company’s teams, services, branding, and marketing.
Understanding the customer journey is essential to building an effective and resonant experience for shoppers. Your customer experience improvements should be informed by every step a shopper takes when they engage with your business. The journey begins the first time they see your brand on their social media and continues through their initial purchase, potential engagement with your customer service representatives, and staying in touch after a sale.
7 key components of connected customer experience
- Customer journey mapping
- Integrated communications channels
- Personalized customer interactions
- Consistent branding
- Standardized customer service
- Customer data integration
- Inventory management
There are several key components needed to building connected customer experiences, including:
1. Customer journey mapping
A customer journey map is the blueprint for every potential interaction a customer will have with your business, including when a customer develops awareness of your brand, considers your product, purchases a product, engages with customer service, and, ideally, establishes brand loyalty. It connects real customer data to buyer personas that help you understand who your customers are and what they want.
Customer journey maps can also help you identify customer pain points. For online businesses, you can’t see your customers in action. “You can’t see what somebody looks like behind the screen,” direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing expert Nik Sharma says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “But you can understand the type of person you’re going after and then build a pathway for them.”
2. Integrated communication channels
A connected customer experience requires integrated communication channels with cohesive messaging. Customers expect the same seamless, consistent experience, whether they’re reaching out via live chat customer service or a direct message on social media. Customer service channels should work in concert across all elements of the business, including customer data integration and inventory management, to ensure the most accurate, up-to-date information is being shared.
3. Personalized customer interactions
Personalizing your interactions with customers across every touchpoint can help them feel like you’re their friend. For example, ensure all emails include a personalized greeting and your website showcases product recommendations based on their past purchases.
Intimate apparel company ThirdLove, for example, uses information provided by customers through a bra-fitting assessment on its website to suggest products and offer discounts in personalized marketing emails.
4. Consistent branding
Guru, one of North America’s bestselling energy drinks, leaned into consistent branding as a core strategy. Carl Goyette, Guru’s president and CEO, and Shingly Lee, vice president of marketing, tell the Shopify Masters podcast that consistent Guru branding—including everything from its logo to marketing and messaging—was central to cultivating a clear voice and brand identity in a saturated market.
“In the world of marketing, focus makes you bigger, not smaller,” Shingly says. “Brands that try to be everything to everyone often end up being nothing to no one.”
5. Standardized customer service
Today’s shoppers can access customer service through contact forms on a company website, email, chat, call centers, or direct messages on social media platforms. Standardized interactions and communications across these channels create a familiar and seamless experience for customers.
This means ensuring all customer service employees follow the same script or language guidelines, not to mention policies. For Nick Pandolfi, co-founder of the ceramic company Jono Pandolfi Designs, this involved setting up the right infrastructure to support standardized practices.
“We had to get really clear on our policies and … set up a customer service ticketing system that allowed us to manage all of that,” Nick says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast.
6. Customer data integration
Personalized interactions and streamlined customer service may require collecting centralized customer data, also known as customer data integration (CDI), and keeping it up to date in real time. CDI gathers disparate bits of customer information across platforms and purchases to create a profile that can help guide customer service agents.
CDI empowers customer service agents to quickly access information about the shopper, such as what they buy and their shipping address, without the customer needing to repeat it. It also allows agents to access and share information across customer communication channels.
For example, if a customer calls an agent to inquire about the status of a missing package, even if it was initially handled by another rep, all the background information is tracked in real-time and easily accessible in a centralized location to allow the rep to efficiently assist the shopper.
7. Inventory management
Communicating the status of deliveries across the entire shipment cycle—through emails, texts, or app push notifications—helps keep customers informed and connected. Sustainable fashion brand ANIÁN, for example, uses Shopify to track 10,000 SKUs across its supply chain for accurate, up-to-date monitoring of its products, so its customers can know where their packages are.
“Our supply chain is quite complex, but once everything hits our warehouse, it is logged by Shopify,” ANIÁN president Paul Long says. “Having all of the product details in the platform and up to date is super helpful, because when you ship a product across the border, you sometimes need to pull up all of that information. They need to trace that good all the way back to exactly where we made it. Shopify allows us to do all of that.”
Connected customer experience FAQ
What are the 5 stages of a customer journey?
The five stages of a customer journey are awareness, consideration, acquisition, service, and loyalty.
What is an example of personalized customer experience?
A local barista at a coffee chain knows a regular customer’s order and greets them by name upon arrival. This welcoming process can also be replicated on the company’s digital app. An occasional morning push notification that reminds them of how they like to start their day creates an equally personalized and effective customer experience.
What does “connected experience” mean?
Connected experience means your customers have a consistent experience interacting with your brand across all touchpoints, including employees and service agents, both in person and online. It prevents shoppers from having disjointed experiences across the customer journey, making them more likely to become loyal customers.
How do you keep branding consistent?
Start by ensuring your brand logo is always the same and shown consistently across product packaging, marketing assets, social media platforms, and your website. Consistent branding also means your branded communications remain cohesive across all platforms and touchpoints.