Key Points
- Omnichannel customer experience (CX) drives retention and satisfaction. Businesses with integrated omnichannel strategies retain significantly more customers by delivering consistent, seamless experiences across all channels.
- Data and integration are essential. Connecting platforms and centralizing customer data enables personalized, efficient interactions that improve support, streamline journeys, and empower smarter decision-making.
- AI enhances personalization and efficiency. Technologies like AI and machine learning help brands deliver tailored, context-aware experiences while boosting operational efficiency and driving long-term customer loyalty.
Businesses that adopt omnichannel strategies retain 89% of their customers. Those that don’t? Just 33%.
The message is clear: omnichannel isn’t an option. Brands need to integrate omnichannel capabilities to remain competitive. That means creating a seamless, unified experience across all channels, including physical branches, online, and mobile.
While there are a number of features of an omnichannel experience, as an example this must include:
- Customers never needing to repeat any details of their query (including challenge, progress, or personal details) no matter how many touchpoints they access during the process.
- A fully personalized experience regardless of channel used or level of automation adopted on each channel (such as chatbots in a live web chat).
- The ability to interact with a brand based on what is most convenient for the customer, and not based on perceived effectiveness or accessibility of certain channels.
The question is: how can brands ensure a truly omnichannel experience? Especially for today’s customers, who are digital-first, discerning, and rate customer experience as a critical part of their decision-making process.
What Today’s Customers Expect
Many consumers now say that customer experience is more important to their product preference and purchase decision than price. In fact, 86% are willing to pay more for it. As an extension of this, they expect to be able to shape and control their own purchase and customer journey – with almost all (90%) of consumers expecting seamless interactions across the board.
Ultimately, consumers are looking for effective outcomes, not just pathways of access. Brands need to facilitate that journey, creating a cohesive, frictionless experience where it’s easy for customers to move between touchpoints without losing context.
In practical terms, this means offering functionality that makes it possible for a customer to research and start a purchase online, for example, but then complete it in-store through a sales agent equipped with their browsing history.
Another instance of a successful digital experience could be a customer starting a web chat to troubleshoot an issue, then escalating to a phone call for live technical support with a customer service agent who already has access to the previous chat history.
Moving Beyond Multichannel CX
Omnichannel customer experience is what allows a customer to move effortlessly, and seamlessly, across different channels. With each interaction, support representatives have a complete and holistic view of the customer, including all past engagements.
It’s this capability that takes omnichannel customer experience beyond multichannel CX. Because while a company with multichannel CX provides a customer the ability to interact through multiple channels (both online and offline), those various channels are typically siloed, with very little workflow and data interaction between them.
Omnichannel CX addresses this. Omnichannel CX is increasingly becoming a key part of a successful digital customer experience, using advanced technologies like AI, machine learning, and intelligent automation to streamline digital interactions. Unsurprisingly, digital CX has become a core pillar of digital transformation for brands looking to elevate the experience they provide their customers to better meet their needs and contribute to measurable business outcomes.
Benefits of Omnichannel Experiences
To provide experiences that truly meet customers’ needs and drive bottom-line impact, brands need a unified 360-degree customer view.
Omnichannel experiences provide the in-depth insights that turn customer experience into a strategic advantage. This leads to a raft of benefits, including:
Improved Customer Satisfaction
The root of customer satisfaction is relevant and dynamic experiences that do more than just meet customer needs. They address challenges or issues, while delighting customers at the same time.
Advanced analytics increasingly help brands analyze patterns and anomalies in data to predict future behaviors. They can then use these insights to make product or service recommendations, create exclusive offers, and personalize experiences based on preferences and past interactions. It’s been found that targeted engagement and solutions boost customer satisfaction significantly.
Higher Customer Retention and Lifetime Value
Satisfied customers are loyal customers – they are more likely to support a brand that proactively and rapidly solved an issue or provided a memorable experience.
Brands are exponentially better equipped to provide that kind of support or experience if they have omnichannel capabilities in place. In the retail industry, for instance, 88% of shoppers have said they’re more likely to return to businesses that offer a connected omnichannel experience. That experience is powered by data.
Data-Driven Decision Making
Effective and successful omnichannel customer experiences are impossible without data. And harnessing data-driven insights that power informed decision-making depends on bringing together quality customer data from various sources into a single, unified platform.
With a centralized data repository that brings together insights from every customer interaction across channels, businesses can make smarter, faster decisions that:
- Hyper-personalize interactions
- Streamline journeys and optimize channel performance
- Proactively address issues and deliver more relevant, timely support
How to Improve Omnichannel Customer Experience
This is where AI comes in. Businesses that have adopted the technology and embedded it into CX operations have shown categorically that AI drives a better customer experience and delivers tangible business outcomes.
That’s because it enhances omnichannel capabilities and makes it easier to tap into the data-driven insights that enable better support and experiences.
Generative AI (Gen AI) takes it a step further. From automating content creation in media, to advancing drug discovery in healthcare and streamlining design in manufacturing, Gen AI is redefining industries and creating new ways to reshape CX at the same time.
The top ways enterprises can focus on harnessing these technologies to improve omnichannel CX include:
Map Customer Journeys
Brands need to deeply understand the customer’s experience and perspective. That means knowing how and when they interact with the business: in-branch, online, or through social media or other channels, as well as which stage of the journey they’re in.
The easiest and quickest way to do this is mapping the end-to-end customer journey. It identifies and manages problems and reduces friction points while also ensuring organizations can prioritize customer service and support across the journey to improve the overall experience.
Integrate Platforms and Data
Operational and data silos continue to hold most businesses back. Valuable data sits in one department or function and, without access to this data, organizations can’t deliver consistent, cohesive customer experiences.
Improving the omnichannel experience starts with integrating platforms and unifying customer data so that it’s complete, accurate, valid, consistent and structured.
When systems like CRM, marketing automation, and support tools are connected and underpinned by a robust data governance framework, businesses gain a complete, real-time view of each customer’s journey.
This integration enables seamless handoffs between channels, more personalized interactions based on insights into their behavior and preferences, and faster issue resolution.
Deliver Personalized Experiences
Using a combination of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and real-time data and analytics allows brands to create highly tailored, bespoke, and context-aware experiences for individual customers based on their unique behavior and preferences.
A unified view of browsing behaviors, past actions, location, time, and other data points from CRM, support, and marketing – and advanced analytics – allow brands to customize their marketing, products, services, and more for a customer-of-one.
Personalized experiences designed to meet customer needs will drive loyalty.
Let’s Build a Better Omnichannel Strategy Together
The need for seamless omnichannel customer experiences is becoming more pressing. Businesses with the right customer experience tools to make CX a differentiator will gain the edge. And having a strategic partner with the expertise and market-leading solutions at hand can help accelerate adoption of the right platforms.
Sutherland Connect
Connecting every channel for richer engagement, Sutherland Connect is a cloud-based platform that uses AI-powered digital assistants to deliver intelligent, interactive responses.
SmartLeap® HelpTree
Harnessing AI-powered knowledge management, SmartLeap® HelpTree provides associates with interactive, reliable, and easily consumable content during live interactions for better experiences and faster resolution.
