Today’s consumer is accustomed to the advantages of leveraging both online and offline channels for an effortless, economical shopping experience. It’s a well-known fact that customers shopping across multiple channels will have a 30% higher lifetime value.
Therefore, the advent of Converged Commerce represents a dramatic change in the way organisations will have to operate. Converged Commerce provides them with unified, user-friendly customer experiences online, in-store, and everywhere in between—all encompassed in one modern tool.
In this article, we’ll dive into the meaning of Converged Commerce, its benefits and how your business should consider implementing it to complement your customer engagement strategy.
What is Converged Commerce?
Converged Commerce is a powerful tool that gives you a unified view of your customers, as all their interactions with your brand are centralised on one single platform. By connecting multichannel data, you get rich insight that enables you to deliver memorable, personalised and consistent customer experiences. In turn, this will forge and maintain deep and meaningful relationships with your clients and ultimately drive loyalty and increased sales.
What does Converged Commerce mean for your business?
Most businesses don’t do a stellar job defining the value they provide to their customers in the digital world. A recent study by McKinsey found that only 25% of companies provide meaningful value for digital transformations in the marketplace — meaning that most businesses don’t give customers what they want.
When businesses create value for their customers, two things usually happen: firstly, companies look at what their customers like and what makes them engage. Secondly, they make thoughtful decisions based on their audience data and understand the long-term customers’ behaviour and wants.
This often leads companies into focusing on customer behaviour and data, together with ways to use that collected data to influence the behaviour of their customers. For example, many airlines will offer loyalty rewards and use their customers’ habits and data to incentivise them to buy more air miles.
However, by looking at their customer’s journey in detail, businesses can understand how data needs to be joined together – this insight can spot problems or gaps in their existing customer journey and offer an opportunity to rectify them.
To create a converged experience, businesses should use a single view of the gathered client data from the entire customer journey across all touchpoints. Only then can opportunities for improvement and automation be spotted, leading to cost transparency and higher profitability.
Optimising customer communication is also essential – this will drive a more satisfying and straightforward customer experience in all the stages of the purchasing journey.
Three key benefits of a Converged Commerce tool
1. Recording Interactions with your customers and your departments
Customers interact with your business across multiple channels, both online and offline, but not necessarily in a sequential way, making their behaviour hard to predict. That’s why it’s essential to systematically record each of these interactions (as well as interactions between your departments) to deliver excellent customer experiences. And to keep things simple, you can use a single point of access to this data.
2. Harmoniously integrated systems and processes
Customers can switch channels as desired and still enjoy a seamless shopping experience. This is possible because each channel provides a wholesome customer experience – the purchase journey is not disrupted if a customer chooses to switch between multiple channels.
3. Consistent (product) information across channels
Accurate and consistent information is a vital cog within the purchase journey. It helps complete sales and keeps your strategies synchronised across all channels. Data can be shared easily as and when required to enrich the customer experience.
Here are some examples of Converged Commerce:
Implementing Payment-linked loyalty
One solution is to connect your loyalty program to your customer’s payment card. And because the Trust Payments platform is built to manage every payment from start to finish, data is captured and held in one place. This makes it easier to track customer behaviour and assign loyalty points, whether buying online in Paris or in-store in Atlanta. We do this with tokenisation, a process that attributes a unique shopper reference number to the payment card. This is captured during an initial purchase and used to connect subsequent purchases to the same customer.
Connected data to drive growth
If your payments are centralised, it is much easier to expand to another sales channel. For example, you can send a secure payment link to customers via emails to make sure you don’t lose sales. And, of course, you gather all your payments data in one place.
Our payments platform covers all channels making it easy to offer ultimate flexibility to your customers. In turn, this will help build an in-depth understanding of their preference, all while remaining agile.
How to get started?
While omnichannel is supposed to take care of a customer experience, Converged Commerce is a medium through which the experience can be delivered more efficiently. The endgame is to unify customer-facing processes successfully while dramatically improving customer experiences on all touchpoints.
Teaming up with technology partners that work quietly behind the scenes to create magical moments for your customers will keep you one step ahead. A payments platform that spans all channels and regions will help you achieve Converged Commerce while providing unparalleled flexibility to your customers.
