What is omnichannel customer experience?

Unlike multichannel approaches, which simply offer multiple independent ways for customers to engage, omnichannel approaches help ensure that the channels are interconnected. Whether a customer is using email or social media on a website or going into a brick-and-mortar store, an omnichannel customer experience helps ensure that communication is unified and smooth and that each channel reflects the same tone, branding and messaging to maintain a cohesive user experience. 

Implementing a robust omnichannel experience throughout the entire customer journey can be a critical factor for a business’s success, whether its customers are individual consumers or other businesses. According to a recent report from McKinsey, there is a significant and direct link between value and whether an already-satisfied consumer is “delighted” by their experience with a brand.¹ While omnichannel marketing and gaining new customers are critical for a brand to grow, it’s more profitable to retain existing customers than attract new ones. This means that to optimize revenue and remain sustainable, many organizations prioritize fostering customer loyalty over whichever channel a consumer prefers.

Typically, an omnichannel customer experience also involves some level of data synchronization so customer preferences are shared across platforms. For example, if a customer abandons a shopping cart on their desktop, they might receive a reminder or discount offer over email or in their mobile app. This data is used for advanced personalization to provide tailored recommendations and interactions across channels, a practice that is in line with customer expectations, as 80% demand this customer-centric approach.²

While both omnichannel and multichannel strategies involve using multiple platforms and digital channels to engage customers, they’re distinct in how channels are integrated and how they enhance the customer journey. In a multichannel experience, businesses offer customers a series of independent channels through which they interact with their brand, though those channels are often siloed and operate independently. However, omnichannel strategies integrate these channels to create a seamless and unified experience for customers across platforms.

Some examples of an omnichannel customer experience include: 

• A customer shopping online for an item that they’ll pick up in-store. If there’s an issue with the order, the customer contacts customer support over the phone or through a chatbot, where agents have access to the customer’s entire purchase history. 

• A member of a bank starts a loan application on the company’s website and then completes it using a mobile app on their smartphone. The system tracks progress and personal details across platforms to help ensure a smooth process.

• A healthcare consumer books an appointment online, receives reminders over SMS and accesses their medical history through a dedicated app or web portal.

• A company purchases a software solution from another company, starting the process through a self-service portal. An agent follows up through email to offer personalized training sessions, and the client uses live chat for immediate troubleshooting during setup.

While customer experience (CX) includes every direct and indirect experience a consumer has with a brand, from support chats to third-party online reviews, customer service and support are narrower in scope. Typically, customer service refers to the holistic perception a consumer has based on a company’s various direct touchpoints, from prepurchase research to postpurchase follow-up. As a subset of customer service, customer support focuses on reactive assistance when customers face issues. This includes troubleshooting, answering queries or handling complaints. Critically, where omnichannel customer service focuses on the channels that are directly controlled by a company, omnichannel customer experience means that even the customer’s indirect experiences are integrated and seamless.

A truly omnichannel customer experience provides a series of cohesive end-to-end interactions across multiple touchpoints, focusing on the entire customer journey. While these strategies originated with the ecommerce industry and omnichannel retail environments, they’re being increasingly adopted by businesses from insurance firms to B2B software vendors. This is because, regardless of sector, some of the benefits of a frictionless omnichannel strategy include: 

Omnichannel experiences allow customers to engage with an organization through their preferred channels without disruption. This leads to quicker response times, reduced friction and higher overall satisfaction. This satisfaction drives business growth. In both its 2020 and 2024 consumer surveys, the IBM Institute for Business Value found that two-thirds of customers said trust was of the utmost importance when choosing a brand. 

Omnichannel systems provide comprehensive data across all customer touchpoints. This ability to track and analyze metrics across multiple channels creates a clearer picture of the customer journey, facilitating more nuanced and accurate insights. By analyzing interactions between channels, businesses can gain actionable information into customer behavior, preferences and pain points.

A seamless omnichannel experience fosters loyalty by creating consistent and positive interactions with a brand, whether a customer is making an order or troubleshooting a problem. Also, an omnichannel strategy allows an organization to proactively address customer concerns, offer personalized experiences and create deeper relationships. These efforts can contribute directly to higher retention rates and turn 1-time buyers into lifelong advocates.

By fostering long-term positive customer interactions and providing consumers with seamless experiences, businesses can increase conversion rates and boost sales. According to recent research from IBM and Adobe, organizations that prioritize customer experience see three times as much revenue growth as their peers. Omnichannel strategies often lead to improved cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Also, as customers seamlessly transition between online and offline channels, businesses often see greater opportunities for sales across a wider range of platforms, further driving revenue.

Centralizing customer data and processes reduces redundancy and operational costs, improving service quality. It also provides customer experience specialists with the tools to create more imaginative and meaningful relationships with customers. 

Omnichannel customer experience solutions provide businesses with real-time visibility into their operations and customer interactions, allowing organizations to unify data streams. This visibility allows for quicker identification of issues, more effective resource allocation and the continuous optimization of customer experience. This visibility can have tangible and immediate effects on consumers: 67% of customers surveyed by the consultancy McKinsey say they become frustrated when their interactions with a business aren’t tailored to their needs.³

Map out customers' current interactions across all channels to identify gaps and pain points. This often includes creating customer personas, or segmented examples of different kinds of consumers. Many organizations create a customer journey map, which systematically maps customer interactions across the business’s ecosystem. 

Use a unified database or customer relationship management (CRM) system to store and access customer information in real time. This step might include investing in cloud-based servers to increase computing power or implementing advanced security systems, particularly in sectors such as healthcare and finance where data is more heavily regulated. 

Implement technologies such as AI, marketing automation platforms and analytics tools to streamline processes. Some organizations build these tools themselves, while others rely on trusted third parties to operationalize customer data. 

Develop guidelines with key stakeholders to help ensure consistency in tone, visuals and messaging across all platforms, customer personas and interactions. Define the voice and intention for marketing campaigns, contact center calls, social media interactions and other communication channels. 

Ensure smooth handoffs between channels, such as carrying over customer context from social media to phone support or in-person interactions in a physical store. This might involve the use of multiple technologies and platforms such as customer relationship management systems and workflow automation. 

Regularly test the customer journey, gather feedback and adapt to evolving expectations. This might involve measuring standard metrics such as net promoter score (NPS) or customer retention rate. 

CRMs centralize customer data, providing a unified view of interactions across channels. This helps businesses track customer journeys and deliver personalized experiences.

These platforms automate customer engagement through email campaigns, SMS, push notifications and other channels. They ensure consistent messaging tailored to customer behaviors and allow for the rapid deployment of customer communications. 

AI-powered tools using generative and conversational AI enable instant customer support and service through live chat, messaging apps and voice assistants. AI assistants can hand over interactions to human customer service agents in critical moments to balance efficiency with relationship-building. 

These tools provide insights into customer behavior across touchpoints, helping identify trends and optimize the omnichannel strategy.

Some companies provide integrated voice, email, chat and social media support, ensuring agents have context for customer interactions across channels.

Increasingly, AI and automation play a pivotal role in enhancing and streamlining the omnichannel customer experience. According to a survey of business leaders released by the IBM Institute for Business Value, 67 have already begun integrating these technologies into their customer service streams. Using these tools organizations can provide more intelligent and personalized interactions across channels, enabling businesses to anticipate customer needs, resolve issues more efficiently and scale operations without sacrificing quality. These technologies have been useful as customer experience professionals collect large amounts of data gleaned from customer interactions, often so much data that it would be impossible for a human to effectively interpret. 

In one of the most widespread applications for AI in customer experience, AI analyzes customer data to offer tailored recommendations and content. In the omnichannel customer experience context, this might include a B2B client receiving personalized product suggestions based on their purchase history and industry trends, or a customer receiving specific feedback on a troubleshooting issue based on prior engagements. Often, AI is also used to intelligently segment audiences and customize messaging.

Where simple chatbots were once the most popular tools to facilitate customer experiences, AI assistants and agents have become increasingly powerful and useful. Where AI agents are typically task-oriented systems automating routine tasks such as ordering or ticket resolution, AI assistants foster deeper relationships with consumers, providing personalized recommendations and interactions in conversational language. Both tools can be critical in an omnichannel strategy, unifying customer interactions as they move across channels and continuously refining their customer experience strategies as they gain more data. 

AI-powered chatbots can handle inquiries at any time zone and any hour of day, providing instant responses across channels such as websites, apps and messaging platforms. For example, a customer might start a conversation on a mobile app and seamlessly transition to a human agent for complex queries, with all context retained.

Using predictive analytics, AI can identify patterns in customer behavior to predict needs and recommend proactive solutions. This might mean analyzing customer churn based on how often clients are using a particular platform or website, identifying weak spots in the customer service pipeline or identifying which features of a piece of software consumers spend the most time with in order to develop future offerings. 

Using sentiment analysis, AI can analyze customer interactions such as social media posts, emails or chats to gauge their level of satisfaction with their experience and discover new trends among clients. This feature is often deployed in contact centers to glean real-time insights and identify areas for improvement. 

AI is often used to streamline the back-end process in the customer experience by automating repetitive tasks. This might involve automatically categorizing issues raised across channels (for example, social media complaints or online reviews) and routing them to the correct department. Using workflow automation, an issue reported by a customer might be automatically assigned to a support team and prioritized based on urgency. Integrated with conversational and generative AI, these tools can also immediately respond to issues requiring immediate attention—for example, responding to a negative review and offering a discount on future services. 

These strains of AI improve voice and text interactions by understanding natural language and context. For example, a customer might use a voice assistant to check an order status and be guided through extra text-based resources without switching devices. 

Every company approaches customer experience differently, but areas such as data collection and integration remain key for the smooth deployment of omnichannel experiences. Some best practices include: 

Effective data management is the foundation of a seamless omnichannel experience, and trustworthy data is critical for organizations deploying advanced analytics and AI. Data governance and hygiene practices such as regular updates and deduplication help ensure accuracy, while robust data privacy measures build customer trust. Also, organizations using data to train AI-powered tools generally endeavor toward good data governance practices, meaning that the technology and data they draw on are as explainable and transparent as possible. 

To create meaningful omnichannel experiences, businesses must deeply understand their customers. This typically involves a systematic process of understanding consumers, including customer journey mapping, customer profiling and touchpoint visualization. A successful organization will develop detailed customer personas by analyzing demographics, preferences and behaviors from multiple channels. Regularly revisiting and refining personas based on trends or feedback helps ensure ongoing relevance. 

Maintaining an excellent omnichannel strategy requires ongoing performance tracking and responsiveness to customer feedback. A solid customer experience strategy deploys key performance indicators (KPIs) such as customer satisfaction score (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS), and conversion rates to gauge success. Also, an organization should actively solicit feedback through surveys, reviews and social media interactions. 

Technology is a critical enabler of omnichannel excellence and organizations that refuse to use the data at their disposal risk falling behind. Strategic investment in tools such as CRM systems, AI-driven chatbots, marketing automation platforms and advanced analytics streamline processes and enhance customer interactions. 

A successful omnichannel strategy extends beyond the point of sale to the postpurchase phase. Focusing on the postpurchase experience might involve ensuring customers receive consistent support through email, chat or self-service portals. For some companies, it might mean proactively managing returns, exchanges and warranty claims. Providing a positive and continuously iterating postpurchase experience strengthens relationships and drives long-term success.