What is Omnichannel?

What does it take for a business to succeed? Regardless of your industry, lowering the cost of customer acquisition, increasing sales and customer retention are probably among your primary business goals. In a perfect scenario, your business interactions seamlessly acquire new customers, retaining current clients while upselling.

However, in today’s fast-paced world, the customer journey has become shorter. Recent research showed that visitors invited to chat are 6.3 times more likely to convert into clients than those who don’t talk, and 61% of the customers supported by chat convert within the first chat. Being able to provide an engaging experience since the first interaction is one of the most potent efforts to improve your customer experience. In fact, with many companies offering similar things, why would customers want to wait for your answer? They simply won’t. They’ll bounce back to Google and check the next ranking company.

If you struggle to handle leads and clients in a multi-channel environment, you are losing valuable potential sales. That’s where Omnichannel comes into the picture.

Companies that leverage an omnichannel strategy achieve 91% greater year-over-year customer retention rates compared to businesses without Omnichannel programs, as found by Aberdeen’s research. Whether you don't know what Omnichannel communication is or not, you’d like to find out why it matters. Or how you can benefit from it. Either way, you’ve come to the right place.

Here's what you can find in this article:

What is Omnichannel?
Examples of companies succeeding with Omnichannel
How Businesses Benefit From Omnichannel?
Why is Omnichannel So Crucial For Businesses?
Critical Steps To Create a Seamless Omnichannel Experience

Let's dive in.

What is Omnichannel?

Omnichannel is a communication strategy essential to acquire and retain customers. It’s designed to create an exceptional customer experience across the company's brands, building a better relationship with their audience. It gives consumers a choice to engage with companies on their favorite channels: SMS, Email, WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, Facebook, Messenger, Live Chat, and so on.

Find out how the 3d largest bank in Latin America is doing Omnichannel.

Omnichannel is about removing friction for your customers, and doing business wherever your customer prefers to do business. Building a practical omnichannel experience requires alignment among your customer service strategies, sales and marketing strategies. For some inspiration, take a look at real examples of companies successfully doing omnichannel.

Examples of Companies Succeeding with Omnichannel

Bank of America

Industry: Financial Services

Bank of Americais not only one of the major players in its industry, but also a precursor when it comes to customer service management. Their dynamic omnichannel experience enables clients to do everything from check depositing to appointment scheduling to receiving support through the company's mobile and desktop apps.

Gluu

Industry: Security

Gluu has been helping different organizations to centralize digital authentication since 2009. Working with enterprise customers that have economies of scale in IT, a great customer experience was vital for the company. By adopting an Omnichannel strategy, they centralized their entire support with Rocket.Chat Omnichannel, which gave them a competitive advantage to increase their customer retention rates.

Deutsche Bahn

Industry: Railway transport, Logistics

Considered Germany’s economy’s backbone, Deutsche Bahn leveraged Rocket.chat Omnichannel features such as LiveChat to create Assistify. Assistify is a platform that facilitates customer support and project teams’ communication. Serving 4,000 employees and customers daily, the platform helped numerous industries to increase productivity and supported millions of queries by integrating world-class translation services, ChatOps, and DevOps features.

How Businesses Benefit From Omnichannel?

Strengthen the customer experience: Omnichannel allows companies to follow the customer's journey in detail through internal and external systems, which helps understand the path to purchase of your (new) online customers. Ultimately, it allows companies to create delightful end-to-end customer experiences across devices.

Less friction within the customer journey: Omnichannel enables your customer to engage with you when and wherever they want to, placing the customer in the center of the experience. By doing so, you end up removing all friction during their interaction with your brand. Increase Customer

Retention: A research from Google showed that Omnichannel buyers have a 30% higher lifetime value than those who shop using only one channel. Indeed, the right Omnichannel platform can help you seize the opportunity to quickly engage your client while prioritizing the leads based on their needs and level of importance to your business.

Scale Customer Service: Omnichannel allows you to prepare your operation for an increasing consumer flow through automated customer interactions and AI/ML recommendations within and across channels. Integrations with AI and ML tools and chatbots are examples of how to scale your business competitively to support more clients.

Why is Omnichannel So Crucial For Businesses?

In the pandemic age, commerce’s rise outside of the standard set up of a brand’s website/ own e-commerce presence will be inevitable. The customer experience is being reinvented and will be even more customer-centric

Gone are the days of a customer journey divided into digital and a physical scenarios. The customer journey must have multiple touchpoints, and companies will need to integrate their communication efforts as they use data to personalize, quantify, and influence customer experience.

More often than not, your customer service and your back office will need to support you to convert clients through diversified channels. That’s the beauty of Omnichannel: allowing you to move leads down the sales funnel through social media channels, ads, and media platforms, with a frictionless experience. With these concepts about Omnichannel in your head, let’s find out the main steps to create a fluid customer experience across all touchpoints.

Renato Becker, Omnichannel leader at Rocket.Chat

5 Critical Steps To Create a Seamless Omnichannel Experience

Get to know your customer: reaching your audience requires having a clear picture of who they are, what they like, and most importantly: where they are. Which channels is your audience using daily? Through which social media would they probably get in touch with you? Those are crucial questions to be assertive in your Omnichannel campaigns.

Choose the right channels: Imagine that your audience’s favorite social media channel is Twitter. Would it make sense to structure your Omnichannel campaigns around email as its primary touchpoint? Remember: the perfect channels are your customer’s favorite channels.

Define a clear goal for each channel: There is no right or wrong goal: it may be brand awareness, lead generation, customer service, etc. With that in mind, set goals for each channel. At Rocket.Chat, we are fans of the SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely goals). Sproutsocial explained how to nail them here.

Connect channels efficiently: Once you’ve gotten your big-picture goals figured out, it’s time to connect channels and provide organized data to your teams. Adopting the right toolset to centralize and store data with security and privacy is highly recommended in this stage.

Don’t forget to be active in your channels: Let’s say that clients message you on Facebook, but your support agents are mostly active on live chat. Great chances that your clients’ questions go unanswered and they’ll get frustrated, consider looking elsewhere. To avoid that, take advantage of automation tools such as chatbots and social media automation tools to achieve consistency in their social media efforts.