Omnichannel

Omnichannel is defined as “seamless and effortless, high-quality customer experiences that occur within and between contact channels” according to Frost & Sullivan.

Sounds pretty impressive.

Is omnichannel a myth or a real thing?

Imagine a world where customers engage with your business across a website, Facebook, Twitter and the telephone.

I know crazy right.

It’s a scenario that happens today for a lot of businesses and it typically works something like this;

We’ve got our call centre that handles the phone calls, our Social Media team handle Twitter and Facebook and our website is managed by our Digital Team or marketing.

Three very discrete teams.

For the customer though, they are only dealing with one entity – your business.

How omnichannel works

Customers expect that you will be across all their interactions with your business regardless of which channel they use.

And that’s exactly what omnichannel technology delivers.

It makes no difference what channel or how the customer engages with your business.

All the customer information, previous conversations with your business etc. are all connected so the conversation can easily move between channels.

Even during the same interaction.

What’s the difference between Omnichannel and multichannel?

In a multichannel environment, channels aren’t integrated.

So in the earlier example, the email and phone teams are separate and run off different systems altogether.

So if a customer had to ring the call centre after receiving an email, it’s likely the call centre agent won’t have access to the email.

Not a great customer experience.

Next Steps

• If you’d like to read about some real-world examples on omnichannel this article on Hubspot has a few good ones.
• If you’d like to find suppliers of Omnichannel technology you can find them in our Business Directory.
• Want to learn some more about technology? Search all our articles on technology.

 

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