OCX Observatory: Omnichannel Consumer Survey.

GMDE participated in the second Advisory Board meeting of the Omnichannel Customer Experience Observatory of the Polytechnic University of Milan.

Meeting whose objective was to identify the elements/drivers that characterize a memorable shopping experience from the consumer's point of view at all stages of the purchasing process: pre, during and post-purchase (service and brand relationship).
The Advisory Board's work was carried out in 3 phases:
 

1. Definition of the macro settings and key variables of the purchase journey (by the research team).
2. Discussion and validation of what was set out by the research group, in charge of the Advisory Board and Partners.
3. Consolidation changes to what was expounded by the research group and the definition of new variables that will be appropriately included in the consumer questionnaire developed with Doxa.

Step 1: How does this translate to the consumer?

According to the Observatory research team, communication with the consumer can be:

• Personal: receiving messages and content in line with the consumer's needs and expectations and feeling recognized as an individual.
• Simple: interact with the brand quickly through easy and intuitive tools such as apps, understanding in a simple way the differences between different channels.
• Emotional: feeling emotion from interacting with the brand and perceiving a unique experience compared to other brands.
• Integrated: to have a smooth and continuous experience along all consumer interactions with the brand by perceiving the same tone of voice of the company along all touchpoints.

Step 2: Advisory Board and Partners: discussion in working groups.

Advisory board participants were divided into four groups with a focus on three specific phases of consumer interaction: Pre-purchase, Purchase, Post-purchase.
 

The discussion aimed to further enrich the observatory model, and determine the list of main variables to be included in the questionnaire useful for identifying any sectoral peculiarities. 

Step 3: Conclusion.

From the working groups, some characteristics emerged that the omnichannel costumer experience should have to improve the company-consumer relationship:

• Speed up processes, and reduce time from need to purchase.
• Balance the quality and quantity of communication while avoiding ending up in excess.
• Understand and set the type of communication.
• Take customer feedback into account, with an eye to sustainability by producing customized catalogs based on consumer behavior.
• Create a sense of belonging, which will lead to the creation of a community.
• Identify relevance based on the consumer with realtime guidance for the buying phase.
• Generate excitement from the buying process.
• Reduce friction between online and offline.

Upcoming meetings.

This was the last Omnichannel Customer Experience meeting before the summer break, but the observatory's work continues.
 

Below are the other upcoming meetings 👇🏼

• Sept. 27 with the 3rd workshop "MarTechs for Creating a WOW-Experience"
• Nov. 24 for the FINAL CONFERENCE!