Businesses looking for customer experience software often find terms like “omnichannel” and “multichannel” being used interchangeably. But what if they represent fundamentally different approaches?
Spoiler alert: They do.
While both involve interacting with customers across different channels, the way they do so creates vastly different experiences.
Our guide to omnichannel vs. multichannel marketing explains the similarities and differences between the terms so you can understand which strategy best suits your business needs and — more importantly — helps you deliver an exceptional unified customer experience.
What Is Multichannel?
Multichannel marketing is a strategy that utilizes various online and offline channels — like phone, social media, email, website, and text — to reach and boost customer engagement. Each channel operates independently, offering customers a choice of how they interact with the brand.
How multichannel works
Think of multichannel like a department store with different areas for clothes, housewares, games, and electronics. Customers can visit each section independently to find what they need. Customers can engage with your brand through their preferred channel without navigating all the others.
What Is Omnichannel?
Omnichannel is a customer-centric strategy that provides a seamless and unified experience across all channels. This includes online channels (like websites, mobile apps, email, or social media) or offline channels (such as in-store or phone support).
How omnichannel works
Let’s use the department store analogy from earlier. Imagine browsing the online store’s website, seeing a targeted ad on social media based on your interests, and then walking into the physical store where the staff can access your purchase history to offer personalized recommendations.
Omnichannel integrates these channels to deliver consistent promotions and share customer data across all touchpoints, delivering a personalized and seamless customer experience regardless of where they interact with the brand.
Key Differences Between Omnichannel and Multichannel
While omnichannel and multichannel marketing strategies allow businesses and customers to connect through various channels, their approaches differ slightly. Here are the key differences between these two strategies.
Focus
Omnichannel marketing strategies prioritize the customer’s journey, focusing on delivering a seamless, personalized customer experience across all channels. By prioritizing the customer’s journey and leveraging data for hyper-personalization, omnichannel marketing builds strong relationships and ensures consistency in customer interactions. This approach is ideal for businesses committed to superior customer experiences and service excellence.
Multichannel marketing focuses on utilizing various channels to maximize reach and engagement. This strategy prioritizes volume over personalization, making it a cost-effective way to attract a wide audience and increase brand awareness.
Channels
Omnichannel integrates all relevant channels, creating a cohesive and seamless user experience as they switch between them. This includes fully integrated systems across phone, email, chat, SMS, social media, and other platforms, often supported by cloud architecture to quickly integrate new channels.
Multichannel utilizes several channels independently, without necessarily syncing them for a seamless customer journey. It typically focuses on traditional channels, resulting in silos between different modes of communication, and lacks the integrated approach of omnichannel systems.
Experience
Omnichannel creates a smooth and personalized experience by combining all channels, customer history, and data into a consistent, seamless journey. Customers can transition effortlessly between channels, enjoying a cohesive experience.
Multichannel can deliver a disjointed customer experience. This is often because different channels are managed by separate teams — and because the data is siloed, the customer history isn’t updated automatically when switching channels. Interactions happening independently on each channel make it harder for teams to provide consistent customer experiences.
Data
Omnichannel emphasizes collecting and unifying customer data across all channels for a holistic view of the customer journey. This approach provides complete customer history and 360-degree relationship metrics, enabling businesses to predict customer needs and engage proactively across all touchpoints.
Multichannel gathers data separately for each channel, often creating data silos. Metrics are channel-specific, and agents have access only to the customer history within the channel they are handling, which narrows their focus and limits the ability to provide a comprehensive customer experience.
Technology
Omnichannel requires integrated technology to ensure seamless data flow between channels and provide real-time personalization. This setup often involves cloud-based communication, CRM integration, APIs to connect various platforms, and analytics tools to track customer behavior across channels. The focus is on user-friendly technology for customers and employees, enabling teams to manage and share customer data, interactions, and context in a centralized location.
Multichannel operates with less complex technology, often using separate platforms for each communication channel, such as customer experience software, email marketing software, or social media management tools. Integration between these channels is limited, making the overall technological setup simpler but less cohesive.
Cost
Omnichannel generally involves higher initial costs due to the investment in integrated technology, cloud-based platforms, CRM software, marketing automation tools, and — if needed — integration specialists. However, these upfront expenses can lead to long-term savings and faster ROI by boosting customer satisfaction, loyalty, and conversion rates.
Multichannel has a faster and simpler initial setup, which can result in lower initial costs. This approach typically requires less technology, relying on separate platforms for the website, email marketing, and social media, making it more budget-friendly in the short term.
Multichannel vs. Omnichannel Examples
Check out these examples of multichannel vs. omnichannel in action.
Retail omnichannel vs. multichannel
In a nutshell:
- Omnichannel retail creates a seamless, customer-centric shopping journey, integrating all channels for a unified experience.
- Multichannel retail is product-centric, using various channels independently to maximize sales and reach.
For example, omnichannel offers unified inventory and customer data, enabling real-time stock checks and personalized promotions. Multichannel often has siloed data and inventory, leading to a less cohesive experience. Ultimately, omnichannel strategies enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty, while multichannel approaches are easier to implement and broaden brand awareness.
| 🎂 Nothing Bundt Cakes implemented Nextiva’s VoIP solution across all locations, improving call quality and ensuring consistent customer service experiences. The user-friendly interface and centralized management of Nextiva’s platform provided the opportunity to add website click-to-call functionality and SMS marketing tools, enhancing their omnichannel capabilities for a more streamlined customer journey. |
Omnichannel vs. multichannel marketing and sales
Omnichannel emphasizes a unified sales journey and collecting and unifying customer data across all channels. This allows for a holistic view of customer preferences and buying behavior, enabling data-driven marketing and sales strategies. Multichannel uses various channels to broaden and maximize reach and engagement to promote products or services to a wider target audience.
| 🏀 The San Antonio Spurs use Nextiva’s cloud-based platform to offer fans omnichannel support, ensuring staff can manage calls and social media interactions from any location. This flexibility and scalability enable the Spurs to handle peak call volumes during events while potentially integrating with their ticketing system for personalized customer communications and seamless transitions between service channels. |
Omnichannel vs. multichannel in customer support
Customers expect to connect with brands through multiple channels for quick issue resolution. Omnichannel support enhances customer service by providing a seamless experience across integrated channels, allowing customers to switch between messaging, chat, phone, social media, and email without repeating information.
Cloud-based contact centers with CRM integrations enable agents to access customer data and offer personalized support across various channels. This approach results in an improved customer experience, faster issue resolution, and more personalized support that can help you meet customer service expectations.
| 💄 Tricoci, a luxury salon, spa, and cosmetics company, leverages Nextiva for enhanced omnichannel experiences by integrating appointment scheduling across online, phone, and social media platforms into a centralized system. |
Omnichannel vs. Multichannel: Which One Should You Pick?
Choosing the omnichannel or multichannel depends on several factors, including business size, budget and resources, and customer journey touchpoints.
- Business size: Large businesses with a substantial customer base often find omnichannel strategies advantageous for creating personalized experiences and leveraging data insights to enhance customer relationships. In contrast, small businesses might prefer starting with multichannel marketing as it enables broader audience reach with a focused approach and lower initial investment.
- Budget and resources: Omnichannel strategies necessitate significant resources for technology integration, data management, and possibly hiring customer-centric personnel, whereas multichannel approaches typically require less initial investment, making them more accessible to resource-constrained businesses.
- Customer journey touchpoints: Omnichannel strategies create a seamless experience for complex customer journeys involving multiple touchpoints, while a multichannel approach using effective channel choices may adequately serve simpler journeys.
The key is understanding your customer journey and prioritizing creating a positive and consistent experience across all touchpoints. As your business grows and resources allow, you can always evolve towards a more omnichannel approach.
Nextiva: Omnichannel Experiences Made Easy
Choosing between omnichannel and multichannel contact centers is easier than you think. Look at your business and consider what you need to deliver top-notch experiences throughout the customer journey.
Nextiva’s customer conversations suite provides an omnichannel experience across voice, video, SMS, live chat, and more, all in one place. And, with a robust integration marketplace, you can customize your platform to meet your business needs. Get started today.
Omnichannel vs. Multichannel FAQs
Still have questions? Check out these omnichannel vs. multichannel FAQs to get the information you need.
Choosing between multichannel vs. omnichannel marketing depends on several factors. Omnichannel is ideal if you have an established customer base with complex journey paths across multiple touchpoints and can invest in technology and personnel.
Multichannel may be better for small businesses with simpler customer journeys and limited resources, aiming for a fast, low-cost setup. Both approaches aim to improve customer experience and can adapt as your business grows.
Omnichannel marketing entails higher initial costs due to technology integration and hiring customer-centric data analysis experts. In contrast, multichannel strategies typically involve lower upfront costs to implement channels and basic analytics tools — although training may be necessary for existing teams.
Despite higher initial costs, the long-term benefits of implementing an omnichannel contact center include improved customer satisfaction, loyalty, and sales, resulting in enhanced overall ROI.
Here’s a roadmap for creating both multichannel and omnichannel strategies:
Define your goals and target audience: Clarify your objectives, like brand awareness, lead generation, sales, or customer support, and identify your target demographics and online behaviors.
Choose your channels: For multichannel, pick effective channels like websites and social media, and with omnichannel, consider all touchpoints, both digital and physical.
Tailor your strategies: Customize your content and messaging for each channel in multichannel. For omnichannel, ensure consistency and seamless transitions between channels.
Implement and analyze: Track individual channel performance in multichannel and integrate data for a unified view in your omnichannel customer service software to analyze and enhance personalized customer experiences.
