What is omnichannel?

Long gone are the days when customers only had one or two options for interacting with a company. Today’s customers move freely through digital and analogue channels, using telephones, web chat and social media etc. to make purchases, find solutions, initiate returns and more. To address this fundamental shift in the customer journey, many businesses have adopted a multichannel approach to customer service, supporting a range of channels and meeting customers where they prefer to do business. Unfortunately, this multichannel approach does little to ensure an integrated customer experience; a customer that reaches out on social media, for example, and then later reaches out via telephone about the same issue, may find themselves back at square one, having to repeat their concerns and start the service process over from the beginning. Omnichannel offers a better solution.

The purpose of omnichannel is to create an interconnected experience, providing customers with seamless service, regardless of whether they are using email, social media, telephone or even in-person channels. Omnichannel integrates available customer service channels to provide continuity and connectivity across communication channels. This allows customers to move freely between channels without experiencing interruptions or having to repeat context from interactions on previous channels. In short, it provides a single, consistent customer journey, no matter how the customer chooses to make contact.

One of the keys to successful customer experience is reducing customer effort. At the heart of every successful customer experience is comfort; as they interact with your business, your customers want to be able to do so using their own preferred communication channels and devices. Forcing customers to conform to predetermined support and communication channels pulls them out of their comfort zones, creating anxiety, frustration and a poor overall experience. And, because a customer’s preferred channels may shift depending on time, location and degree of urgency, focusing on the right channels for the right customers can become extremely difficult.

Omnichannel customer service effectively eliminates these issues. By integrating across all possible touchpoints, you make it possible for your customers to enjoy a seamless, optimised, comfortable experience, no matter how they prefer to communicate. And because all relevant customer history and product information is maintained in a single location, customers can work with and transition between multiple support agents without having to constantly re-explain their situation.

Fulfilling requests without demanding high customer effort—this is the primary business challenge addressed by an omnichannel approach to customer service.

The transition from single channel strategy and multichannel strategy to omnichannel can take a lot of time and resources. But, the end result is worth it.

There are a few recommended steps:

• Understand the customer: Take time to research the target audience, including their interests, behaviour and needs. Gather customer feedback and use social media to gauge more specific needs.
  
• Choose the right channels: Identify where customers spend most of their time and what they’re doing there.
• Outline the purpose of channels: One channel could be for communication, one could be for updates, another could be for information etc.
  
• Connect the channels: This step needs to carefully implemented while utilising the right technology. Follow customers through every step of their journey and each touchpoint—do journey mapping to understand how customers move through the relevant purchase or support journeys.
• Maintain each channel: Omnichannel strategies require constant efforts—test and improve the strategy along each channel and always ensure that customers are having a good experience each step of the way.

Automated customer service is in the future of omnichannel, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that customer service agents are no longer needed. AI can record and gather initial customer information through an initial touchpoint that can be forwarded to an agent. This allows agents to move forward with a solution without the need to gather initial information or requiring customers to repeat information through each touchpoint.

At the same time, organisations are looking at the best channels to support to get there—not all channels, but what their customers frequent. They have found that adding every possible channel makes it difficult to manage a true, well-implemented omnichannel experience. The result is that, as we move forward and omnichannel becomes the rule rather than the exception, some channels might be shut down.