How to Improve Your Omnichannel Customer Experience

Consumers today can interact with businesses in more ways than ever before. That gives companies many options when reaching out to new and returning customers, but the savviest marketers don’t just choose one or two options. They capitalize on all of them through omnichannel customer experiences.

The rise of e-commerce has also made it easier to sell to a broader market. As a result, competition has grown fierce in many markets, so businesses have to do all they can to stand out. An effective omnichannel strategy is an excellent way to do just that.

What Is an Omnichannel Customer Experience?

An omnichannel marketing approach creates a consistent experience across all available channels. Whether people interact with a company on their phones, computers, TVs, or brick-and-mortar stores, they’ll get the same experience.

Some channels may be more effective than others — email marketing is still the best method for making sales — but not every user uses every channel. Some people may exclusively see a brand on social media, others will only interact through the official website and more may use a mix of everything. Making the experience the same across all platforms ensures everyone gets the same message and journey regardless of these differences.

Omnichannel provides more data to understand the market and helps businesses reach more customers, create a familiar and clear brand image, and boost customer loyalty. Companies today can’t afford to overlook those benefits.

How to Optimize Omnichannel

Of course, omnichannel marketing’s effectiveness depends on how well businesses can use it. Making a great omnichannel experience may be a little more complicated than other methods, but here’s how marketers can optimize theirs.

1. Know Your Customers

Knowing the target market is the first step in creating an omnichannel strategy. The whole point of omnichannel is to create a consistent brand image and experience, so if this image doesn’t gel with customers, the plan is doomed from the start.

If a business already has a customer base, it should poll them. Ask what they like about the brand, their experience, and where they think it could improve. Brands underestimate how often customers have bad experiences by an average of 38%, so this first-hand feedback is invaluable.

Looking at data outside of customer surveys is important, too. Companies should examine how much time their customers spend on different channels to learn which areas may yield the best results. Similarly, look at how users interact with various content types across channels.

2. Map Out the Customer Journey

As businesses look at their customers and how they act across different channels, they should outline the customer journey. Pay attention to where users are and what they do at key sales funnel stages. Knowing this will inform more effective content at each phase.

The journey may look different from user to user, but some overall trends should emerge. Brands can then adapt their marketing materials on each channel to fit the stage of the funnel customers typically are in when engaging with content on that channel.

Every stage of the customer journey needs attention, but experts agree first impressions matter the most in marketing. Mapping these journeys will reveal what channels and behaviors on those platforms typically coincide with these first impressions. Companies can then focus their efforts here to ensure success from the beginning.

3. Keep Content Consistent But Not Identical

Omnichannel experiences should be seamless across every step of the customer journey on any channel. Someone should be able to interact with the brand on social media on their phone, then pick up right where they left off in a physical store. However, there is such a thing as too much consistency.

Each channel has unique strengths and weaknesses, so marketing materials should lean into these. That means content can’t be identical across every channel in every instance. It should provide a consistent image and experience but vary slightly depending on what the specific platform enables.

Taking the brand’s TV ad and posting it on social media provides a consistent but unoptimized experience. A better strategy would take advantage of social media’s interactive nature. Instead, a company could use the same graphics and themes from the TV ad but try a live-streamed version or poll the audience to give them control over future content with the same characters.

4. Capitalize on Technology

Managing content across multiple channels is complicated — especially when adapting it to each channel’s unique features. However, businesses can work around that complication by embracing newer technologies.

Automation and AI are some of the most helpful, as they save time in many areas. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT can create personalized customer interactions or draft social media posts to let companies push this communication out faster. Email marketing tools can automatically reply to different interactions to keep potential customers engaged.

Chatbots are another helpful tool — especially chatbot platforms that can pull data from multiple channels. Feeding omnichannel data into chatbots will let them provide the same help to customers even when they talk to them on different platforms, boosting the omnichannel experience.

5. Keep Up With Changing Trends

It’s also crucial to remember an omnichannel experience should be dynamic. Businesses can’t set a strategy once and leave it alone. An effective omnichannel experience changes with its customers, adapting to new trends and old shortcomings.

The secret to doing this effectively lies within the omnichannel strategy itself. When brands interact with customers across multiple channels, they’ll have a much wider range of user data to pull from. The world generates more than 64 zettabytes of data a year, offering plenty of information to show what users do and prefer.

Businesses should routinely gather data from all channels and use this information to review their omnichannel strategy’s efficacy. Remember that what works well today may not work tomorrow. If a once-effective method starts declining, it’s okay to change it — evolving with the times will ensure a better customer experience. Just be sure to change consistently across all channels.

Businesses Today Need Omnichannel Experiences

People today rarely see and interact with companies on just one platform. Even if they did, everyone has unique habits, so only focusing on one channel means missing out on huge market segments elsewhere.

In today’s hyper-connected world, marketing strategies need to be similarly connected. Following these steps to create an effective omnichannel customer experience is crucial to staying competitive in modern markets.