Omnichannel Customer Experience: The Complete Guide

Your customers are making purchases from anywhere. If you can’t follow them across different channels and keep the conversation going from where it left off, they are missing out on a full omnichannel customer experience (CX).

An omnichannel experience bridges customer touchpoints across all communication channels for a cohesive feel. Customer touchpoints today extend far beyond traditional channels like phone calls.

As businesses evolve to embrace omnichannel, they should understand and optimize their customer experience strategy accordingly. In this guide, we’ll explore the benefits of omnichannel CX, touch on how to improve yours, and look at successful examples of omnichannel businesses.

Let’s dig in.

What Is an Omnichannel Customer Experience?

An omnichannel customer experience is an approach to customer experience where businesses create seamless customer journeys by integrating communications across all their channels. Unlike traditional approaches that operate in silos, the omnichannel experience ensures that all channels are interconnected and consistent.

The goal is to provide customers with a consistent experience across multiple platforms like online chatbots, mobile apps, text messaging, social media, and more. You can measure customer experience in an omnichannel environment encompassing multiple touchpoints in one centralized dashboard.

In an omnichannel CX strategy, the emphasis is on breaking down barriers between different channels for a consistent customer experience. This allows customers to transition between their preferred channels without losing momentum in their journey. Therefore, your support team doesn’t need to conduct extra behind-the-scenes research to keep up with an inquiry.

For instance, if your customer originally contacts you to ask about pricing via phone call but needs to leave or gets disconnected, they can contact you again via email or chat to resume their support conversation. This creates a cohesive support experience and reduces customer effort, a key customer service metric that affects customer satisfaction.

Benefits of Omnichannel Customer Experience

When it comes to customer communication, it’s better to be more connected. An intelligent customer experience with omnichannel puts your customers first and allows them to connect with you however is easiest for them.

Increase customer loyalty

An omnichannel approach can foster stronger connections with your loyal customers. When businesses consistently meet customer expectations and customer service goals while limiting pain points across channels, it builds trust and ensures customer retention.

Reduce churn by being helpful at the moment of need — from live chat, social media, text messaging, or simply an easily found toll-free phone number.

Boost sales and revenue

We established that better case handling results in higher trust and customer retention, but there’s a bigger plus. Just a 5% boost in retention can send your profits soaring by up to 95%.

A smoother transition between channels means you can capture more sales opportunities. Customers who engage with a brand through multiple channels will likely spend more. An omni channel strategy maximizes the chances of conversion as you can entice customers across several touchpoints.

Collect valuable insights

Omnichannel integration provides a holistic view of customer interactions. These interactions create a wealth of customer data you can gather, analyze, and use for reporting and forecasting.

A data-driven approach enables a better understanding of customer behavior, preferences, and trends. These can help inform your strategic decision-making to support customer satisfaction.

What Is the Difference Between Omnichannel vs. Multichannel Customer Experience?

The difference between omnichannel and multichannel CX is that omnichannel CX integrates communication seamlessly across channels, both digital and in-person. 

The multichannel experience, on the other hand, segments channels and the customer information within them. Omnichannel and multichannel contact centers differ in their integration with other organizational teams.

This means that business communication channels in an omnichannel environment offer customers a more continuous and connected user experience. All channels share data access so the customer journey moves forward without retracing any steps.

Multichannel call centers engage with customers across several different channels. Those channels function in isolation and cater to specific aspects of the customer journey, like a chatbot that offers more information when a customer visits a product page.

The challenge with the multi channel experience is that it doesn’t ensure consistency across different channels. Customer data gets compartmentalized, and transitioning between channels might not be seamless.

Think of it this way: You engage a lead via email, and they click a link to demo your product. Afterward, they visit your website for details and connect with a chatbot, which passes them to a sales support agent. After completing the purchase, the customer calls technical support for help setting up.

Independently, this multichannel setup offers fragmented, brand-focused communication. But when integrated, these channels become a unified omnichannel environment that centers the customer. Omnichannel helps agents provide more personalized recommendations thanks to data gathered from different interactions.

How to Create an Omnichannel Customer Experience

You may already have an omnichannel strategy or want to know how to set it up successfully. Here’s how to get up and running at full speed.

1. Map the comprehensive customer journey

To map your customer journey, start by documenting every touchpoint and interaction your customers have with your business across all channels, from initial awareness to post-purchase interactions. 

Use automations from customer experience technology to collect customer data on interactions, feedback, and preferences to give you behavioral insights at different stages of their journey.

Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including marketing, sales, customer service, and product development, to gather perspectives that help further shape CX. These teams all interpret customer data differently, so diverse expertise is beneficial to comprehensively understand your customer journey map.

2. Use integrated customer data management

By consolidating customer information from different touch points into a centralized system, individual customer journeys become easier for businesses to understand. A unified communications as a service (UCaaS) platform bridges these gaps so agents have the information they need at their fingertips.

For instance, when a customer engages with a brand through various social media platforms, makes online purchases, and seeks customer support via a mobile app, integrated data management ensures that relevant information is seamlessly shared across these digital channels. This empowers businesses to better personalize offerings and recommendations and enables efficient issue resolution as support teams have access to the customer’s full history and context.

Moreover, integrated customer data management facilitates real-time insights, enabling businesses to respond promptly to customer needs. For example, this might be a customer who receives targeted social media ads after browsing products on a website. This centralized data also allows brands to personalize communications to individual customer preferences.

3. Train and empower your agents to collaborate

With training, agents can better understand the entire customer journey, even with touchpoints outside their specific roles. This enables agents in an omnichannel contact center to offer more informed and holistic support, addressing customer inquiries with context about previous interactions in different channels.

Empowering agents to collaborate also fosters connection within your organization, enabling information to flow seamlessly across departments. For instance, a customer service agent who identifies a recurring issue can collaborate with the product development team to address the root cause, preventing future occurrences and improving overall CX.

5 Ways to Improve the Omnichannel Customer Experience

Once you’ve established a solid omnichannel customer experience, the next step is to continuously refine it. Here are five key strategies to help you improve the customer journey across all channels.

Improve data integration

To enhance the omnichannel experience, you need to make sure that customer data is consistently collected from every interaction and integrated into a unified system. This centralized data should be easily accessible across multiple channels, which will allow for more personalized and seamless customer interactions regardless of the touchpoint. Regularly audit and update your data integration processes to ensure accuracy and relevance.

Tweak the mobile experience

Given the increasing reliance on mobile devices, it’s critical that your mobile channel is not only user-friendly, but also well-integrated with other channels. This includes having a responsive design, fast load times, and intuitive navigation. Your customers should be able to effortlessly transition between mobile and other channels, such as starting a purchase on a mobile app and completing it on a desktop without losing any data or context.

Implement real-time support

Customers expect instant support, and offering real-time assistance through live chat, chatbots, or social media can significantly enhance their experience. Make sure these support options are integrated with your CRM, so customer service agents have full visibility of previous interactions on every communication channel. As with the mobile tip above, make it easy for customers to switch from a live chat on your website to a phone call or email without having to repeat information.

Collect customer feedback

Feedback is key for understanding how customers perceive their experience across different channels with your brand. This means you should be gathering feedback at key touchpoints, whether it’s through surveys, reviews, or direct feedback on your website and social media. Analyze this feedback to identify pain points or patterns, take actionable steps to address them, and then let your customers know of these changes in order to close the feedback loop.

Refine cross-channel analytics

Advanced analytics tools can help you track customer behavior across different channels and provide key insights into the omni channel customer experience. For instance, if analytics show a significant drop-off between browsing on mobile and purchasing on desktop, you can investigate and resolve the issue, allowing for a more seamless customer journey.

By regularly monitoring and optimizing your omnichannel customer experience strategy, you’ll never miss the opportunity to provide a better, more personalized experience than your competitors.

Related: How to Improve Your Ecommerce Customer Experience

Examples of Omnichannel Customer Experience

Consider these use cases showing a seamless experience as customers move through their omnichannel journeys:

• Learning about products: An e-commerce customer browses products in a brick and mortar store, uses their smartphone to scan a QR code for more information, adds items to an online cart, and completes the purchases on their mobile device or computer.
• Getting help on any channel: A customer initiates a support chat on a company’s website, continues the conversation via a mobile app, and later receives follow-up assistance through email. At the same time, CRM tracks the conversation history and context.
• Inquiring about a social media post: A customer interacts with a brand’s social media post, inquires about a product, and later receives personalized recommendations through direct messages, eventually purchasing on the company’s website.
• Marketing based on past choices: A customer receives targeted promotions via email based on their previous online purchases. The same promotions show in-app and on the company’s website, ensuring a consistent and personalized omnichannel marketing approach.
• Following up for customer feedback: A customer does some online shopping but opts to pick up their purchase at a physical store. One day later, they receive a follow-up via SMS asking for their opinion on the customer service during their experience.

Omnichannel isn’t just for the big dogs. Small business solutions that are effective and affordable help smaller brands compete with larger ones.

Canopy Technology is a financial tech company that offers students safe lending experiences. To better serve its busy customers, it required a contact center solution that could open new communication pathways. Canopy needed help triaging, documenting, and progressing complex customer cases.

“This tool allows us to create our own outreach and servicing strategies where we can meet our clients in their channel of choice, exactly the aspiration of most legacy loan servicers and banks.”

~ Tom Greco, Head of client success and accounts at Canopy

Omnichannel call center technology helped Canopy expand its customer service capabilities and challenge the CX of much larger financial institutions, all without breaking the bank.

An effective omnichannel strategy helps customers seamlessly transition from channel to channel without losing the context of their interaction. While some customers will likely stay within one or two channels, omnichannel customer experience offers a chance to capture additional business from customers who are more on the go.

What Is Omnichannel Marketing?

Omnichannel marketing is simply a specific marketing strategy in which you create a cohesive and unified customer experience across all channels and touchpoints. It involves delivering a seamless and integrated experience to customers, as we discussed earlier in this article.

Key aspects of an omnichannel marketing strategy include:

• Integration of Channels: All marketing channels – such as email, social media, websites, and the physical store – are interconnected, allowing customers to move smoothly between them without any disruption, i.e. enjoying a seamless omnichannel experience.
• Consistent Brand Messaging: The brand’s message, tone, and visual identity are consistent across all platforms, so that that customers receive the same brand experience no matter where or how they engage with it.
• Personalized Customer Experiences: By leveraging customer data from various touchpoints, omnichannel marketing allows for highly personalized interactions, such as tailored offers, recommendations, and content that resonates with individual customer preferences and behaviors.
• Customer-Centric Focus: The customer is at the heart of the strategy, with marketing efforts designed to meet their needs and preferences, and efficient omnichannel support no matter which platforms they’ve visited.

Omnichannel marketing aims to enhance the customer’s satisfaction, increase engagement, and drive better business outcomes – something that only happens when all channels work together to provide a seamless, integrated experience.

How Nextiva Can Help Create an Omnichannel Customer Experience for Your Business

With omnichannel, businesses are better able to manage a seamless customer experience through valuable customer insights. An omnichannel experience gives you a unified view of the customer interaction so you can deliver more personalized, relevant, and timely experiences.

Adopting an omnichannel approach can easily enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, and overall engagement while improving your overall customer experience.

Related: Omnichannel Customer Journey: The Key to Exceptional CX