Omnichannel - a key factor for the growth of companies

Finding the best way to communicate with customers is a first-priority challenge for all companies. Being up-to-date with innovations within the sector is important, but the real challenge is to develop these advances within a large, fully-grown organisation.

1. What is Omnichannel?

Omnichannel means interaction with the customer in both the online and offline worlds. It is a multi-channel approach to sales with the intention of providing customers with a seamless experience regardless of which channel they interact with. In the current environment of online and offline worlds, it is getting harder to define ‘one-size-fits-all’ scenarios and sequences of contacts and interactions. Furthermore, if a customer is the same as most people, they will appreciate consistency and continuity of experience between and across all channels.

At conferences or presentations in this area, plenty of buzzwords or buzz phrases are used. ‘Content is king’ or ‘Everything gets digital’, ‘Always-on consumers’, ‘Connected world’ — they are all worn out and tell us nothing new. On the other hand, recent research says that young generations are not focused only on the digital world. About two-thirds of them say that they actually appreciate real-life offline experiences, not just virtual and online ones. They are fluent users of smartphones, computers and smart TVs but also love going to movies, concerts, cafes, time spent outdoors and visiting brick-and-mortar stores.

This is where plenty of marketers get stuck or carried away. The push for ultra-fast digitisation of companies in recent years has caused a dangerous silo-ing of structures. Digital operations were seen as so different from ‘traditional’ ones that many companies went two separate ways and now have two arms — online and offline — which are widely stretched apart. Then there is the realisation that when these branches talk to the same customer they often tell different stories.

In earlier times, orchestrating marketing communication and sales was simpler. Some were guided by golden rules, saying that marketers should build reach first via wide-reach media and only turn to other media when the potential of the primary one was fully exploited. Then multi-channel (a.k.a. ‘integrated’) campaigns came along. Early in the process integration was understood as coherence; a single message, the same voice, sound, vision, tonality and feeling. It was supposed to preserve ‘brand integrity’ across channels.

Later on, some campaigns used multi-channel synergy, providing messages in one medium and complementing them in others while taking into account to their specific potential and target audience. Then, due to the fragmentation of audience and individualisation of media behaviour, it became more difficult to predict what would be the sequence in which messages would be picked up by any one individual.

The way to build organised interaction with customers is even more complex, as there are more ‘walled gardens’ in the current media world. TV campaigns are measured by a telemetric research panel, while online consumer behaviour gets tracked separately by Facebook or Google systems, or by cookies, which are sometimes difficult to match to a single user across different devices or browsers.

Within such complexity on the other hand, there is a customer who is keen on living seamlessly in two worlds: online and offline. If they want to buy a jacket, they may get a quote in the morning on their mobile, go to a brick-and-mortar showroom to check size and fabrics on their lunch break, come back home to compare prices and consult the purchase with their loved one and only then buy it and pick it up at the nearest store via the ‘click and collect’ option.

Omnichannel is about interacting with consumers in a seamless way — whether online or offline, whether in e-commerce or a brick-and-mortar shop, the customer is the same. This concerns not only retail businesses, but also services like banking. It used to happen that a bank would offer an unwanted loan to a client through their branch and subsequently target the same customer with the same offer while they were carrying out their online banking.

Omnichannel experiences should not happen accidentally, they should be engineered. One should really understand the customer’s journey and base any actions on smart and predictive data analytics. This is the way to win the hearts, minds and wallets of customers.

2. Overwhelming data - how can companies manage it?

In the current world, technological opportunities have exceeded the human ability to use them. With plenty of users living in a connected world where they may be identified by their names, hobbies, etc. it would seem that such customers are attracted to a brand or product and that they can be loyal customers, if the company intends to have an offering for them. However, plenty of companies get drowned in the current technological opportunities.

Companies say that there is a lot of data at hand, but they suffer from not being able to draw valuable conclusions from it. Customer Intelligence covers analytics and drawing conclusions from it, constructing new ways to analyse behaviour, as well as predicting it. In this area, startups often come with fresh ideas and methodologies intended not for one specific company but applicable to a variety of corporations, customer segments and product categories.

As we analyse whom to reach and in what way, actions and interactions with those prospective or existing customers come into play. It does not mean that we intend to leave the marketing sales to machines only; machines and automated processes are only as good as their design is. All the algorithms, all the interactions need to be designed and planned by humans, and then programmed into machines. The machine is then able to perform its task — it needs specific instructions, concrete and tangible. Again, these instructions are programmed by software designers, but they need specific briefing as well. So far, marketing and sales automation businesses are often working on a trial-and-error basis. This is evolutionary, not revolutionary. True breakthroughs come from new methods of operation, not from just doing the same things at lower costs. Here is where startups fit brilliantly.

Human behaviour and decision-making still remains a key focus in the digital world and humans still crave ‘traditional’ places. This is why digital giants such as Amazon open physical stores. This is why Apple has been so successful with their brick-and-mortar stores, usually full of customers. It is also important to educate the salespeople in such places so that they can make use of technology while understanding human psychology. Without this, no effort will be successful.

3. What influence does this topic have upon the wider business context?

Omnichannel is actually a key factor for the growth of companies in the current business environment. No business can grow or even sustain its position without customers and they are increasingly overwhelmed by messages, things to do and options for spending their time and money. Both in business-to-business and business-to-consumer areas, attracting customers and retaining their loyalty is becoming more and more problematic. Moreover, if a company specialises in something, e.g. providing petrol, then most likely its area of expertise does not include marketing. This is why they need good partners specialised in providing analytical marketing communication and sales solutions as well as companies which can help them design their points of contact with customers, both in a physical and virtual sense. This is the way to win a sustainable competitive edge. In the current world, with its fragmentation, the words ‘Differentiate or Die’ gain even stronger meaning. Yet, not only differentiation is needed. Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration and it is the same when attempting to win clients. It is a laborious process and, as a sales coach said, “People hate it when you sell something to them — but they love to buy”. There is always a customer who is ready to buy. It is a matter of identifying them, reaching out to them in the best possible way and making use of that contact in such a way that the brand or product can be experienced and/or purchased. This is actually a subject for each and every business on our planet.