What is Omnichannel?

Have you ever been the victim of a frustratingly disjointed shopping experience? For example, explaining an issue to a service rep, only to have to re-explain yourself when your call or chat gets passed along to someone else. Or adding items to your cart on mobile only to have them disappear when you view the same cart on desktop. The solution to these subpar experiences is an omni-channel strategy.

Customers expect every interaction with your company to be part of a singular, cohesive experience — not a siloed, repetitive one. In fact, disconnected experiences are consumers’ top frustration. When a business successfully implements omni-channel commerce, the customer feels like every interaction is in sync with the larger experience. So, how do you create engaging omni-channel experiences that attract customers, increase sales, and build brand love? Here’s everything you need to know about omni-channel strategies and the ecommerce software you need.

• What is omni-channel?
• Omni-channel vs. multichannel: what’s the difference?
• What are the benefits of omni-channel?
• Key elements of an omni-channel strategy
• What makes omni-channel possible?
• Omni-channel success: examples of seamless shopping experiences
• How to measure omni-channel success
• Omni-channel FAQ

Omni-channel is an ecommerce approach that includes all the tools, technology, and strategies used to create a seamless, cohesive shopping experience for your customers. Shoppers transact and interact on a lot of different channels: your ecommerce website, mobile apps, social media, and more. The challenge? Every new channel you implement adds complexity to your ecommerce model. For example, you need to keep track of inventory and orders across every touchpoint, update messaging, and build a cohesive experience no matter where your shoppers want to browse or purchase. An omni-channel strategy is what makes this all possible.

While many use the terms “omni-channel” and “multichannel” interchangeably, there’s a notable distinction between the two. Omni-channel focuses on providing a unified, seamless customer journey. It ensures that every shopper experiences a consistent, uninterrupted flow of communication, regardless of their chosen channel. For instance, a customer can seamlessly transition from a live chat conversation on a website to a phone call and then continue the same discussion via email. Throughout this process, they don’t have to repeat information or re-explain their concerns.

On the other hand, multichannel simply involves maintaining a presence across different channels. Businesses with a multichannel strategy may not prioritize integrating these different channels or creating a cohesive experience for customers as they transition between them.

The inherent advantage of an omni-channel approach is that it’s customer-centric. By putting the customer at the heart of your strategy, you can build truly meaningful experiences that meet the ever-important expectations for consistency, cohesion, and convenience.

It’s hard to overstate how important an omni-channel strategy is for your business. Your ability to acquire customers, keep them engaged, and sell to them on various channels is directly correlated to revenue growth. Consider these statistics:

• On average, companies with omni-channel customer engagement strategies retain 89% of their customers
• A large majority of customers (71%) prefer different channels depending on context
• 83% of shoppers are more loyal to companies that deliver consistent interactions across departments

Here are a few key benefits of omni-channel experiences:

The more channels you’re on, the easier it is for shoppers to find you. The easier it is to move between your channels, the more likely shoppers are to enjoy the experience — and keep coming back.

Consistency is key. Whether shoppers interact with you through social commerce, in your retail app, or on your ecommerce website, they want the experience to feel the same. With an omni-channel strategy, you can meet and exceed customer expectations.

Convenience, personalization, and accessibility are the heart of omni-channel experiences. And they also happen to be driving factors of customer loyalty. With omni-channel strategies, you can anticipate and fulfill customer needs more effectively and foster deeper connections with your shoppers.

More channels, more sales. An omni-channel strategy makes it possible to engage with customers at various touchpoints and cater to their unique preferences for browsing, purchasing, and fulfillment. You can also leverage data and insights from multiple channels to personalize marketing efforts, optimize pricing strategies, and enhance cross-selling and upselling opportunities. The result? Better retention, higher customer satisfaction, and increased revenue. Cha-ching!

Many companies already have a handle on multichannel presence. But if you want to build customer experiences that grow loyalty and truly differentiate your brand, it will require deep integration between channels. Here are a few things to consider as you develop your omni-channel strategy.

Remember that the purpose of an omni-channel approach is to build more meaningful relationships with your customers. With that in mind, use data to uncover insights about which parts of the customer journey you can optimize or what types of experiences your customers value most.

Commerce experiences include every aspect of shopping online: finding products on a search engine, browsing items on a digital storefront, scrolling through a brand’s social media accounts, and making purchases. Omni-channel commerce is what allows you to keep these experiences cohesive no matter where a shopper interacts with your business. It also enables you to collect data — like shopper behavior and trends — across all touchpoints.

The ability to reach shoppers with the right messages at the right time on the right channels is invaluable. Consider this scenario: A high-value customer walks into one of your brick-and-mortar stores. In-store shopping may not be a digital channel, but with an omni-channel approach, you can blend the digital with the physical. If a customer has your retail app and consents to share location data, you can send a tailored promotion to use at checkout via a push notification straight to their mobile device. That’s the power of omni-channel marketing.

When customers feel understood and valued, they are more likely to develop a deep connection with your brand. Personalized interactions transform customers into brand advocates.

Seventy-four percent of shoppers say it takes no more than three bad experiences for them to abandon a brand. As you implement new channels, it’s crucial to get the customer service element right on each one. Customers expect timely and efficient assistance when they seek support — whether they reach out to you through a direct message on social media, a chatbot on your website, or a phone call. Businesses that prioritize rapid and effective responses demonstrate their dedication to customer satisfaction, strengthening the customer-brand relationship and fostering brand loyalty.

The successful implementation of an omni-channel strategy hinges on the right tools and technology. This is what allows you to integrate customer data, personalize interactions at scale, and streamline communication. By harnessing the power of technology, you can orchestrate cohesive, consistent customer experiences that delight customers and increase brand loyalty.

The right technology is essential for creating a seamless omni-channel experience. With the right tools, businesses can ensure their customers have a consistent and positive experience across all channels, whether they’re shopping online, in-store, or through social media.

Understanding your customers’ behavioral patterns and preferences is where it all starts. But that’s a tall order when you’re selling on so many different channels. Fragmented data and channel silos can make it difficult to build cohesive customer experiences. Enter: customer data platforms and customer relationship platforms. The foundation of an effective omni-channel approach begins with consolidating and harmonizing customer data from all your touchpoints into a single source of truth.

These tools are critical because they give you a comprehensive view of each customer’s interactions and preferences. This makes it easier, faster, and more cost-effective for your commerce, marketing, sales, and service teams to deliver personalized interactions that resonate with each shopper’s specific needs.

If you engage with customers and sell on multiple channels, a connected commerce platform is what makes it possible to manage all the different aspects and complexities. For example, a commerce platform connected to your inventory management system can aggregate all order data into a single dashboard, eliminating the need to manually check each channel for new orders.

Connected commerce also makes it easier to create cohesive payment experiences — no matter where or how a customer wants to make a purchase. Instead of managing separate payment gateways for each channel, a connected commerce platform integrates with multiple payment processors and consolidates them into a single interface.

With the right marketing automation tools, your teams can easily manage campaigns across multiple channels. Consider this scenario: A customer browses your website on their desktop and adds a few items to their cart, but they leave without making a purchase. Marketing automation makes it possible to target that same shopper on a different channel — say, social media — with ads featuring the same products in their cart. This is a cost-effective, efficient way to increase conversions and customer satisfaction.

Need some inspiration as you hit the ground running and develop your approach? Take a cue from a few brands that have found omni-channel success.

Shopping is no longer linear. The average customer uses nine different channels when they communicate with businesses. At Currys, a market-leading technology retailer in the U.K., its omni-channel shoppers are 27% more likely to shop again compared to those who only use one channel. Currys also knows that 80% of its customers start their journey online; as a result, Currys started its omni-channel transformation with its websites.

This meant creating cohesion between 500 applications and complex digital journeys across multiple sites and brands. Another challenge? Finding the right balance between legacy technology and new investments.

Keeping simplicity and the customer experience at the heart of its transformation, Currys designed one digital experience and aligned multiple back-end systems under a Commerce Cloud shop front. In less than 12 months, the new website went live and Currys had its most successful peak period ever, handling millions of interactions and hundreds of thousands of orders without a hitch.

L’Oréal is the world’s number one beauty company, with 35 global brands selling 6 billion products per year. So how does the business create individualized omni-channel experiences for each and every customer? “It’s about making each consumer happy and satisfied with the products and services we deliver, each time they come into contact with L’Oréal,” says CEO Nicolas Hieronimus.

Truly personalized omni-channel experiences require connecting data from each touchpoint into a single source of truth about each consumer — all while respecting data privacy. L’Oréal uses Commerce Cloud to provide the foundation for connected online shopping across more than 200 of its D2C websites.

Once your omni-channel experiences are up and running, make sure they’re performing as planned. Data and analytics give you the ability to iterate and improve over time. A few vital metrics that will be useful to determine the success of your strategies are.

This is a high-level way to gauge the popularity and effectiveness of each sales channel when it comes to customer engagement and interaction. By analyzing channel traffic, you can allocate resources and marketing efforts more effectively, focusing on channels that generate the most traffic and adjusting strategies for underperforming channels.

This metric indicates how engaged and interested your customers are in a particular channel. Longer sessions typically suggest deeper engagement and interest in exploring your products and content. On the flip side, shorter visits may indicate a lack of engagement or difficult navigation. Monitoring session length can help you identify areas of improvement when it comes to user experience and content relevance.

How many visitors complete a desired action on each channel? This metric is a good indicator of how effective your sales and marketing initiatives are across different channels. It’s crucial to continually monitor conversion rates across channels so you can focus on the ones that deliver the best return on investment, and where to fine-tune.

How often do your customers return to a given channel over time? High revisit rates and frequency indicate strong brand loyalty, customer satisfaction, and engagement with the channel’s offerings. Give yourself a pat on the back when this metric is up — and use the same strategies to boost other channels that might not be performing as well.

The fastest, most cost-effective way to create omni-channel experiences is with a single, comprehensive solution that unifies all aspects of commerce. Commerce Cloud integrates the world’s #1 CRM with store innovations, distributed inventory management, cross-channel data integration, and a rich set of capabilities across mobile, social, and web.