The ultimate guide to omnichannel customer service

Not long ago, customer experience meant keeping your store open, smelling good and stocked. It was okay even if a customer didn’t find what they were looking for. You were the only local store, so the customer would return. 

Today’s customer expects products to be available at a click and delivered to their doorstep. They want to visit your store for a feel of your product and continue shopping when they return home. They want you to be quick, available, and accessible where and when they want. Numerous other businesses compete for their attention, so the tables have turned.

Brands need to enhance the overarching experience they offer across offline and digital channels—an omnichannel experience. This page details everything there is to know about omnichannel in 2023.

What is omnichannel?

Omnichannel combines “omni,” meaning all, and “channel,” meaning the several ways shoppers communicate with a business. These channels include social media, email, website, phone call, brick-and-mortar store, online marketplaces such as Amazon and Shopify, mobile apps, smartphone chat and push notifications, and catalogs and direct-mail touchpoints.

Omnichannel is an approach to customer acquisition, lead nurturing, and user engagement where brands offer their products, service, offers, and support on all platforms and devices.

Omnichannel commerce aims to deliver a uniform, connected, and seamless experience to customers across touchpoints.

A customer may browse a product on their smartphone from the comfort of their home but prefer to see it in a physical store before making a purchase. An omnichannel experience would bridge the gap between their online and offline context and enable them to shop hiccup-free.

How does omnichannel work?

Think of omnichannel as a well-oiled car engine. It has many integrated moving parts with individual purposes serving the bigger purpose of setting a car in motion. Every touchpoint in omnichannel lends a distinct experience to customers as part of their overall connected experience. Omnichannel takes many factors into account: the customer’s previous purchases, behaviors, and preferences.

Let’s say you want to purchase a pair of running shoes. You look up your favorite brand online and browse shoes on their website. You find a couple of pairs you like but want to try them on for fit and comfort before purchasing. You add them to your wishlist.

A few days later, you pass by the brand’s store and pay a visit after double-checking that the shoes are still available. Inside the store, you finalize a pair and use a QR code to transfer them from your online cart to the store’s point-of-sale system. You make the purchase and are fully satisfied with it.

This is how omnichannel works. You didn’t have to look for shoes again. The website and store’s backend system saved your context and allowed you to continue your shopping experience.

What are the benefits of omnichannel support?

Switching to omnichannel can completely change your customer experience for the better and yield a win-win for you and your customers.

Benefits of omnichannel for B2B/B2C companies

1. Streamline customer service/support: Integrating various support channels in the back end allows your teams to view a single source of truth for each customer. This strengthens customer relationships. When service tickets are relayed between channels, omnichannel saves time by keeping the context intact and allowing teams to minimize turnaround times.

2. Personalize every interaction: Teams can personalize customer interactions using customer data. For instance, a customer lodges a complaint about the omnichannel support software they purchased from you. If you can see their service history (they lodged a similar complaint before) and their preferred channel (email), you can personalize the interaction by sending them a series of steps to address the issue over email. 

3. Discover upsell and cross-sell opportunities: When teams have a complete picture of a customer’s journey, they can spot upsell and cross-sell opportunities to increase the customer’s total lifetime value—a sign of a healthy bottom line. For instance, a customer purchased a smartwatch from your brand. Their purchase pattern shows they use their device for a year before upgrading. You can time your marketing campaigns and service outreach at the one-year mark to see if they want to upgrade to a superior device model.

4. Plan product updates and revamps: Gaining a complete understanding of your customers is key to planning updates and changes to your product. A business that sells laptop bags can draw from customer feedback over several channels, discover the need for an anti-theft model, and create the same.

5. Maintain a moving inventory: Omnichannel shares inventory data across channels and minimizes the possibility of static and unsold stock. Cross-channel inventory management aids sales teams and saves money for the business.

Benefits of omnichannel for customers

1. Buy anywhere: Customers expect their preferred brands to deliver an omnichannel experience for ease of shopping. Customers can buy anywhere without having to start over. And they can pick and choose their preferred channels of interacting with a brand, enjoying a sense of control and authority.

2. Get a personalized experience: Customers today are happy to pay a premium if they get a superior experience. So, they love it when your brand is ready with personalized information, content, offers, and products for them. It’s like you’re reading their mind!

3. Peace of mind: Having the option to ask for support and service on a preferred platform, delivered in their chosen way also brings customers peace of mind. They aren’t being forced to talk over a phone call if their preferred method is self-service, which makes a huge difference to the customer experience.

Defining an omnichannel strategy

An omnichannel strategy eliminates expensive guesswork and haphazard execution by centering omnichannel on customer needs and business outcomes. 

Businesses can often get caught up in the buzz surrounding new trends. Or, a B2B or B2C business can start execution without a clear understanding of why and where they need to implement a change.

An omnichannel strategy puts the value proposition into perspective and saves you much hassle and costs. There are three core omnichannel strategies on a continuum, as per McKinsey.

1. Commerce: Omnichannel commerce strategy focuses on products and offers, enhances the convenience and reliability of shopping, and engages customers to return for more.

2. Personalization: Omnichannel personalization strategy focuses on making the product’s marketing, content, and delivery personalized to the buyer; provides an integrated shopping experience between channels; and engages buyers outside the shopping experience to build customer loyalty, such as from loyalty programs.

3. Ecosystem: Omnichannel ecosystem strategy tailors content and marketing efforts dynamically to the buyer’s current mood and interests, focuses on the buyer experience, and engages customers in a community experience that takes a life of its own. 

Important elements of omnichannel strategies

While businesses can choose to execute any kind of omnichannel strategy, it typically comprises three elements: data, technology, and people.

Data is how an omnichannel customer experience works. In order to provide a customer with a frictionless shopping experience, the backend of a platform needs to know the saved state of their buying journey; a snapshot of the user’s interests, behaviors, and preferences; and their intent so that the saved data can be used to create the same context elsewhere to make the brand experience omnichannel.

Technology is how the data is captured, relayed across systems, filtered, and acted upon digitally and physically. It’s common for stores in the real world to be supplemented with digital devices to bridge the gap between the two realities and create an immersive, continuous experience.

People create the final component needed for omnichannel success. A dedicated team needs to plan and orchestrate an omnichannel approach, coordinate it across channels, measure its performance, and tweak it to keep it relevant and efficient.

Why should you create an omnichannel marketing strategy?

One of the primary drivers of businesses embarking on their omnichannel strategy is changing customer behavior after the COVID-19 pandemic. Gartner’s 2020 Marketing Agenda Poll remarked that marketers’ top priorities for the next 6-11 months would be to accelerate sales conversations, differentiate the value proposition, derive value from customer personas and journey mapping, and tailor messaging across online and offline channels. Omnichannel can help marketers make progress on all fronts.

You may choose to create your B2B/B2C omnichannel strategy for any of the following reasons:

• Expand your reach: An omnichannel retail strategy puts you in touch with customers where they are. This way, you stand a chance to appeal to a diverse customer base, some of whom prefer email while others are more comfortable shopping on social media.

• Nurture warm prospects: When prospects enter a buying journey, omnichannel allows you to serve them with personalized marketing content, offers, and services until they are ready to buy—so you don’t lose them to competitors retargeting them.

• Re-engage cold prospects: Even if a lead pauses their buying journey, omnichannel maintains their context across touchpoints to re-engage the customer later. When customers return, they can pick up where they left off on any channel without starting from scratch.

• Secure recurring revenue: When you surface with your target audience on their preferred touchpoints, they’re more likely to engage repeatedly. Securing new customers is more expensive than customer retention.

• Empower customer-facing teams: Omnichannel creates a well-rounded profile of each customer enriched with contextual information about where they are in their buying journey. Customer-centric marketing, support, and service teams can use this data to operate efficiently. 

• Boost customer satisfaction: When customers have multiple avenues to engage with your business, it boosts satisfaction. They can get support or customer service any time of the day on their choice of platform.

• Reduce turnaround time: Unified, dynamic customer profiles shared across the organization help service teams swiftly deliver personalized customer service. Customers don’t have to repeat their requests, and service personnel have all the information they need to address issues quickly.

Personalize your omnichannel strategy

When an omnichannel strategy personalizes the experience for each customer, it’s called omnichannel personalization. 

Organizations already need to maintain a large volume of data generated by each customer interaction across all channels. When they leverage this data to create personalized experiences based on every buyer’s unique behavior, interest, preference, and demographic, it creates omnichannel personalization, a powerful strategy.

Omnichannel personalization builds on an already outstanding omnichannel strategy to tailor the experience for the customer across digital and offline channels. Businesses can unlock sales opportunities and boost conversion rates with omnichannel personalization.

Omnichannel customer journey

It’s easy to envision an omnichannel strategy for your business that makes you omnipresent. However, before jumping into functional requirements, it’s best to outline the customer journey. This ensures your vision aligns with what your prospects need.

An omnichannel customer journey starts with the consumer’s first interaction with your business and ends when they stop engaging. In between, the customer journey may evolve across various channels. A customer might go through the following stages in their buying cycle depending on the nature of your business:

• Research: The customer looks up a product, service, or brand. At this stage, they compare competitors and gain more awareness of their needs.

• Customer engagement: Customers engage with a brand by adding a product to their cart, clicking on an ad, downloading a content asset, or visiting their website.

• Shop: The customer purchases their preferred platform.

• Pickup/delivery: The customer receives the product through delivery or picks it up at the store.

• Service and support: The customer opts for support and after-purchase service through any available channel.

Omnichannel vs. multichannel

So, what is the difference between omnichannel and multichannel? Omnichannel spans multiple channels by definition, while a multichannel approach may not necessarily be omnichannel.

Let’s look at an example. Say a fitness supplements brand has a physical store, a website, and a social media presence where customers can buy protein and other supplements. This fitness brand is already leveraging a multichannel marketing strategy by being present on more than one channel.

They need something more to qualify as an omnichannel business. Only when your customers can start their journey on one platform, continue it on another, and finish it on a third channel, this is truly an omnichannel marketing strategy. In a multichannel approach, customers must painstakingly restart their buying process if they abandon it on one platform.

Multichannel allows customer interaction through different channels: website, online marketplace, physical store, Facebook page, Messenger bot, etc. Omnichannel coordinates these channels and shares data to deliver an uninterrupted buying experience.

Is omnichannel the same thing as phygital?

Omnichannel refers to a business strategy to provide a seamlessly consistent experience traversing digital and physical. Phygital, a combination of the words “physical” and “digital,” refers to a state of the world we live in, where we interact with other people and businesses both online and offline.

So, phygital can point to the fact that a brand has a retail store as well as an online marketplace presence. Whereas omnichannel means a brand has interconnected, automated, and streamlined multiple platforms to deliver a personalized, contextual experience to its customers.

How to implement omnichannel in marketing

Every business will have a unique plan of action to implement omnichannel. However, there is a framework you can adapt to suit your needs. Let’s look at the steps to implement omnichannel for your business.

Know your customer really well

Omnichannel places customers front and center. Implementing omnichannel without fully knowing your customers misses the point. For a successful omnichannel implementation, collect and analyze accurate and timely customer data. Some of these data points for a customer could include their preferred device, the kind of messaging they engage with, the platforms they engage on, and the products/features they are most likely to spend on.

For instance, a customer clicks on your Messenger ad for beige cargo pants. This touchpoint interaction must be stored so that all other touchpoints can be aware that this customer is interested in beige cargo pants. All such previous interactions across channels constitute a customer’s profile. An omnichannel approach requires data-driven decision-making, which starts with tracking customer behavior and dynamically building their profile.

Identify your goals and objectives

Omnichannel can help your business achieve marketing, sales, and service objectives.

By gathering feedback and intel from respective departments, you will stay true to what your customers need and want. Once you identify your marketing, sales, and service goals and determine what your customers need, you will find parallels between the two with the same solution. 

For instance, if a service objective for you is to resolve complex tickets quickly, you will be able to reverse-engineer and discover what’s hindering you from achieving a faster resolution rate.

By the end of this activity, you should be able to answer the following:

• What goals are you trying to achieve with omnichannel?

• How do these goals look for marketing, sales, and service functions?

• How will omnichannel help you achieve these goals?

• Which channels can lead you to these objectives in the most inexpensive and effective manner?

For instance, a food delivery app can help a restaurant widen its reach (marketing goal), make food delivery seamless and accessible (sales), and improve customer satisfaction (service goal).

Get everyone on board

Once you understand your customer, identify the gaps in their experience, and determine key business objectives, it’s time to get buy-in. At this point, you can make a strong case for omnichannel to stakeholders; you know how omnichannel can help marketing, sales, and service objectives and fill gaps in customer experience.

Gather input from leaders before creating a plan of action. Omnichannel requires strategic buy-in for it to become a reality. Create a tiered approach to omnichannel so that you can see some early success with low-hanging fruit and slowly inch toward an omnichannel ecosystem strategy. Start with what you have and where you are.

Optimize the technology infrastructure

A siloed tech stack can only achieve so much. It hinders innovation and resists change. For omnichannel success, you need an integrated technology stack that consolidates data, gleans insights from it, and uses them for decision-making. Your technology infrastructure must allow backend data sharing.

Data sharing can take place through integrations, which can become tricky. This is why you’ll need to spend some time on this step. Data accessibility and data flow are critical to omnichannel. So you need technology that easily integrates into your existing infrastructure.

Look for tools that wouldn’t need extensive training for your omnichannel team. This way, you will set your omnichannel plan in motion with minimal resistance to change.

Zoom in and zoom out

While omnichannel requires all parts to work in tandem, it doesn’t discount each individual experience. So you’ll need to zoom into each channel and optimize it for the experience it offers, and you’ll need to zoom out to ensure the holistic experience is consistent and unbreakable across channels.

This balance is not easy to achieve. However, with some iterations and trials, you will reach a point where individual platforms function remarkably, but the whole is bigger than their sum. 

For instance, the UX content on each platform will depend on the nature of the interaction, the placement of the content, and where the buyer is in their journey. So the UX microcopy content on a Facebook ad will be different from the content on a long landing page. However, these messages will build on one another as the ad precedes the landing page.

1. If a company interacts with customers on multiple channels, it’s omnichannel.

A company does not become omnichannel by simply being present on many channels. To understand omnichannel, you’ll have to look through the lens of the customer. Are they getting a frictionless, continued, and contextual experience across all platforms? If a customer’s engagement history and context travel from one channel to another, a business is leveraging omnichannel.

2: Omnichannel is resource-intensive.

There may be costs to bring a business to omnichannel. For instance, if a company’s inventory exists in silos across channels, omnichannel will demand consolidating and unifying its inventory. This will require investment in technology infrastructure. However, if a business has taken some steps toward omnichannel already, its investment will be far less. For all businesses, omnichannel can unlock revenue and yield a high ROI, making the efforts worth it.

3: Omnichannel is for a certain kind of business. Omnichannel is not for me.

Big, small, B2B, and B2C businesses can all benefit from going omnichannel. Every omnichannel strategy will be different. So you will devise a plan based on your customers and business goals.

4: Omnichannel is beyond my understanding and too complex to implement.

It’s natural to feel intimidated by a new undertaking. However, with the right set of tools, automation, and support, you can achieve omnichannel status.

5: Omnichannel is a trend that will be lost in no time.

There’s no way to ensure what the future looks like for omnichannel. However, given the demands from customers for an integrated customer experience, it’s likely that omnichannel will become an expectation—a must-have instead of a nice-to-have in the future.