An omnichannel retention approach amplifies the reach of personalized retention offers by enabling every channel to present consistent offers to a particular customer irrespective of the channel. This significantly improves the profitability of the retention effort with surgical targeting.

It helps deliver a holistic customer experience by coordinating customer journeys across every touchpoint, such as customer care, direct mail, email, web, mobile app, chat and SMS.

Putting An Omnichannel Customer Retention Strategy Into Action

Below are the focus areas when kicking off an omnichannel retention approach:

Customer microsegments. By combining data from multiple touchpoints and leveraging machine learning algorithms and predictive modeling, you can develop predictive models that help identify at-risk customer microsegments. Using predictive insights about risk propensity and risk drivers can allow you to take proactive actions to mitigate churn risks and maximize customer lifetime value.

Real-time personalization. An omnichannel model grants access to a complete customer profile, opinions, pain points and preferences. It allows the creation of highly targeted and relevant interactions, and it delivers personalized retention offers across every channel. Thus, you can effectively engage, retain and nurture your customer base to drive long-term loyalty.

Offer optimization. You can iteratively choose retention offers that work the best for a specific customer microsegment. By extending optimized offers through an omnichannel approach, you increase the likelihood of customer acceptance, engagement and, ultimately, retention. It also maximizes your profitability by tailoring offers to the specific needs and preferences of each segment.

Prescriptive guidance. Analysis of the data collected through every touchpoint across the customer life cycle can empower care, field and marketing teams with prescriptive guidance. Using intelligence such as predictive scores, risk drivers and the next best actions/offers, they are better equipped to improve customer engagement and experience.

Scalable and profitable campaigns. Scalability is an essential component of a successful customer retention campaign. Omnichannel retention enables businesses to match customers with the right offers irrespective of the touchpoint they engage with. This significantly expands the scope of the retention effort by being able to target significantly more customers with consistent offers across channels.

Delivery. You can integrate this intelligence with channels using APIs. This helps create a unified customer view and ensures real-time synchronization, which further orchestrates seamless data exchange and enables intelligent decision-making across multiple channels.

Key Considerations To Drive Omnichannel Retention

To attain the maximum retention impact of an omnichannel approach, here are some important considerations to note:

• Before other channels, consider existing channels with higher interaction volume where your customers are already engaged, such as a call center.
• Start with proactive renewals and test customer acceptance through existing contacts through inbound calls to the contact center.
• Leverage email and outbound calls to drive additional value beyond upgrades with proactive contract renewals.
• Consider additional channels such as marketing and field service in the future for customers who are hard to reach through existing channels.

An omnichannel strategy can influence millions of customer interactions across multiple touchpoints with consistent and targeted offers to drive profitable retention impact. ​It can help businesses enhance customer loyalty, satisfaction and lifetime value as well as improve customer retention rates by consistently delivering exceptional experiences across all touchpoints.

At the same time, it is also important to maintain consistency across channels by ensuring that the messaging and offers conveyed during inbound calls align with what was communicated through other channels. This creates a cohesive customer experience and reinforces the benefits of renewing the relationship.

This article was originally published in Forbes