customer journey omnichannel

How to capture what the customer wants

Customers now have an unprecedented number of ways to engage with companies, from traditional channels to an ever-growing array of digital modes. Many organizations have responded by investing in digital channels, frequently in an effort to replace traditional modes of engagement. The thinking is that as customers become more technologically savvy, they favor digital channels, significantly reducing the need for live agents and thus saving significant costs. Many companies have expected to save more than 40 percent through reducing live contacts. Yet companies that take this approach often see their customer interactions increase rather than decline, despite significant efforts and resources.

Stay current on your favorite topics

To understand what such companies got wrong in their omnichannel strategies, one needs look no further than digital leaders. Amazon, for example, has also built self-service and e-care capabilities, but with a key difference. Because self-service has thus far largely proven inadequate—that is, customers still often seek out a live agent on the phone—Amazon steers customers to the channels that are best suited to their preferences while also offering digital live interactions and company-initiated contact. So despite being a digital leader, Amazon has designed an omnichannel customer-care strategy in which live agents still figure prominently to handle complex requests, demonstrate empathy, and resolve issues quickly.

Companies seeking to keep pace with industry leaders must embark on an omnichannel transformation—one that views touchpoints not in isolation but as part of a seamless customer journey. And since customer journeys aren’t simple and linear but a series of handoffs between traditional and digital channels that can vary significantly by customer type, an effective strategy requires an in-depth understanding of what customers truly want. To design an omnichannel experience, companies should follow a sequential process composed of four essential components:

• Setting the design principles based on an overarching omnichannel strategy.
• Designing service journeys, ensuring that the end-to-end digital and live-contact journeys address identified customer needs and preferences and have clearly defined digital migration points.
• Identifying foundational enablers to support the journeys, featuring multiskilled agents and best-practice contact-center operations to engage with customers live.
• Defining the IT architecture with next-generation enabling technology to support a seamless omnichannel experience.

An omnichannel transformation is the only way for a company to address rising complexity, provide an excellent customer experience, and manage operations costs.

Critical insights to build successful omnichannel strategies

Our research on the future of customer care in 2017 reinforced the importance of omnichannel and digital and the key role that live channels play in creating an excellent experience. 1 For more on the future of customer care, see Jeff Berg and Julian Raabe, “ New technology means new value from contact centers ,” June 6, 2018. Many of the trends we highlighted, particularly the growing number of digital channels, have made the journey to omnichannel more arduous. Three trends in particular are reshaping successful approaches to customer care.

Digital channels have completely changed the ways that customers prefer to interact. Beyond the expectation that information and service will be accessible with a few keystrokes, customers have also become accustomed to engaging with companies through multiple channels. Many customers, for instance, use different channels to gather information on products and to make a purchase. Social media and chat are also rapidly gaining channel share. Companies that believed digital channels would reduce the volume of engagement and the number of touchpoints have been disappointed to find both often continue to increase.

Quality customer care is highly dependent on digital performance. Many companies have subpar digital capabilities that actually increase customer demand for engagement. Indeed, organizations that attempt to migrate customers to digital channels before they are fully ready can trigger the “boomerang effect,” in which customers can keep coming back to a company multiple times in an effort to resolve a problem. In our experience, trying to implement digital care channels prematurely can significantly increase both the number of transactions and the cost per transaction (Exhibit 1).

Individual touchpoints must be seen through the lens of the end-to-end customer journey. While companies can be tempted to focus on optimizing individual touchpoints, believing that the whole will automatically be greater than the sum of its parts, such targeted intervention can magnify variations in service and inconsistencies in other interactions. Moreover, no matter how successful specific tools are (for example, online self-service), companies that lack visibility into where customers are choosing to interact from touchpoint to touchpoint can still experience service breakdowns.

Customers still favor live agents for complex requests. In a British Telecommunications survey, 52 percent of respondents indicated they want to speak to a live agent when they are facing a crisis and need a solution to a problem with a product or service. Even 24 percent of customers looking to complete a routine task, such as paying a bill, sought out a live agent. 2 Nicola J. Millard, “Serving the digital customer 2017,” British Telecommunications, 2017. Companies with strategies that seek to minimize access to live agents at all costs often see lower customer satisfaction without reducing their overall customer-care expenses.

Would you like to learn more about our Operations Practice ?

These trends all conspire to make omnichannel customer care that much more complex. Live agents clearly are not going away; in fact, they are more important than ever for certain kinds of interactions. Digital channels can be invaluable when well executed and integrated, but they can also create issues and increase demand for live agents when poorly managed. Therefore, companies embarking on an omnichannel transformation must ensure that each channel, as well as handoffs across channels, are optimized for each customer interaction. To do that, they must seek to understand what customers truly care about on a granular level.

What really matters to customers

Conventional wisdom can be an insidious obstacle to improving customer care. Companies frequently assume they know what their customers care about. The result is that customer care often settles on standard approaches to resolving issues that aren’t based on actual customer needs and preferences. In general, customer expectations in service journeys fall into three categories:

• Speed and flexibility, defined as minimum processing time, responsiveness, and needs-based service.
• Reliability and transparency, including proactive outreach and communication.
• Interaction and care, consisting of comprehensive competence, personal attention, empathy, and simplicity and clarity.

That said, not all customer expectations fall into predictable categories. Organizations should gather direct, up-to-date feedback from customers to understand what matters most to them. Additionally, not all of the above factors contribute equally to overall experience, so homing in on the most important factors or combination of factors is critical. One company, for example, made speed of issue resolution a top priority because customers were consistently complaining that its service was too slow. In response, customer care redesigned processes and made significant investments to enable agents to move more quickly. It was only when these moves didn’t translate to improved customer satisfaction that the executives realized they needed to get greater visibility into their customers to understand what combination of factors was at play.

An in-depth analysis of data and surveys uncovered some interesting insights (Exhibit 2): customers were dissatisfied when they received fast responses but little information on an issue. The real revelation was that customers were content with longer wait times—provided that they received regular updates and felt fully aware of why issues were taking longer to resolve.

Four steps to a successful omnichannel transformation

The sheer range of variables that customer-care functions must account for—not just on the customer side but also internally—can quickly become overwhelming. But by first establishing some parameters on what good looks like and setting priorities by customer segment, companies can gain clarity on where to direct resources.

1. Define strategy and design principles

Companies must develop a customer-service strategy, or set of principles, that encompasses not only a vision for how to deliver an excellent experience but also how these interactions should feel for their customers. These principles help companies design service journeys that strike the right balance of speed, transparency, and interaction within each channel and that achieve a successful interplay of digital and live channels. Such an approach can ensure that companies apply an omnichannel lens to each service journey rather than focusing on optimizing individual touchpoints (such as interactive voice response, chat, voice, and digital).

To apply an omnichannel lens to the service journey, companies must understand customers by their digital behavior and offer the right channels that best align with the interests of each segment. Not all customers are the same, and it’s how they differ in their behavior and preferences—particularly on digital—that should have an outsize influence on how service journeys are designed. Our research into digital customer experience identified four different personas, and each is receptive to different ways of being engaged.

Digital by lifestyle (23 percent). For these consumers, digital is fully integrated into their lives. They don’t perceive a separation between the digital and traditional worlds—that is, they use social media every day and tend not to watch traditional TV or read newspapers.

Digital by choice (35 percent). Individuals who enjoy the advantages that digital brings, such as Netflix, Skype, YouTube, online check-in for travel, and online banking transactions, have options for how they engage but opt primarily for digital channels.

Digital by need (25 percent). Digital is beyond the comfort zone of these consumers, who engage with digital channels only when necessary.

Offline society (17 percent). Individuals who live in the nondigital world and prefer personal contacts make up nearly one-fifth of all customers. They use bank branches, shop in brick-and-mortar stores, and typically do not use the internet.

Focusing on the right set of customers will help companies prioritize efforts and identify key attributes and characteristics that would motivate each group. Best practice is to design primary service for each segment, using contact volume distribution and persona profiles that differentiate by digital behavior to determine engagement strategies and the necessary investments in each channel (Exhibit 3). For customers who are more tech savvy, the goal might be to promote online self-service and automated tools for basic tasks such as payments and installation updates. Only a small percentage of contacts—around 10 percent—require a highly skilled live agent. These contacts include cancellation requests and complaints, interactions for which the right engagement can turn a potential issue into an opportunity to strengthen customer relationships.

2. Map service journeys

Once companies have gained greater visibility into customer personas, they can design end-to-end service journeys across digital and live channels. These journeys should take into account the migration of a customer across channels to ensure seamless handoffs. It’s also critical to note that customer preferences aren’t static; they will continue to evolve, sometimes in surprising ways, based on the channels at their disposal, demographic shifts, and other factors (such as the influence of digital leaders in raising customer expectations). Companies can use the principles to construct a vision of how the customer journeys would look three years from now in a fully omnichannel world and then develop ambitious solutions that can keep pace with this change.

Understanding the end state of the most important service journeys can help companies set goals accordingly. To start, companies must determine which service journeys are most important in terms of the cost of the journey to the organization, the complexity involved in improving the journey, and how important the journey is to the customer. Companies must also overcome entrenched thinking and assumptions; senior managers, for example, often believe that customer care should seek to resolve issues in one session. However, this perspective can overlook opportunities to strengthen customer relationships. Take the claims process in insurance: if a customer has a car accident, he might feel guilty and could look to agents for emotional support. If an insurer is too focused on first-call resolution and speed, the customer might come away with a negative view of the encounter—and, by extension, the insurer.

Companies should apply a “test fast and learn” methodology. Tactics such as design thinking and ideation sessions with customers can structure these interactions; industry best practices show that “customer-experience labs,” which are built like innovation centers with customers and employees jointly designing journeys, can support the quick implementation and live-testing of prototypes with customers. This rapid, iterative approach can be summed up as, “Test, fail, adapt.”

In addition, quantitative research (including customer surveys) and qualitative efforts (ethnographic research) can offer a comprehensive view of customer groups and segments and open executives’ eyes to customer needs. By conducting this process for the most important journeys, companies can piece the omnichannel experience together—including additional touchpoints, detailed personas, a deep understanding of pain points and delight moments, preferences, and trade-offs about channels.

A look at a typical e-commerce journey reinforces the importance of taking an omnichannel view (Exhibit 4).

A customer might begin online by researching products but then reach out to a live agent to get more information and inquire about inventory. After comparing prices online and through a mobile app, he or she purchases the product online. A call to a live agent to check on the order status confirms the package’s delivery time. When the customer decides to return the product, it sets off an additional round of contact with a live agent to manage the process. Since movement between channels has become a common occurrence, managing this movement seamlessly and providing a consistent experience are paramount to customer satisfaction.

This in-depth consideration of service journeys can enable companies to determine what capabilities they need across technology, people, and the organization.

3. Invest in foundational enablers

To design and implement an effective omnichannel strategy, companies must embrace a culture of customer orientation across all employers and managers. This commitment helps to guide the development of three foundational enablers. First, agile process redesign empowers customer-care managers and agents to move more nimbly, improve transparency, and ensure frontline processes and actions are aligned with overarching business objectives. 3 For more, see “ Bringing agile to customer care .” Agile methodologies create ownership for care groups, deepen their resolution skills, and establish appropriate incentives—all to accelerate progress on a customer-first, omnichannel experience. Companies should establish and test interaction models to confirm that they are providing a seamless experience across channels.

Second, the workforce must have the right service skill sets. An omnichannel transformation also requires a shift in mind-set, from one focused on execution to continuous improvement and problem solving. To support this shift, employees must also build new skills. Care agents who possess the range of skills to resolve the most complex issues are a critical component of the omnichannel model.

Last, these efforts all need to be supported by well-designed and efficient foundational capabilities, from automated measurement that enables a meaningful performance management to routing based on personal attributes, harnessing customer data using advanced analytics. 4 For more, see “ How advanced analytics can help contact centers put the customer first .”

Customer First: Personalizing the Customer-Care Journey

Measurement and accountability are also critical to gauge the progress of these efforts. For example, lots of companies measure Net Promoter Score and customer satisfaction, among other metrics, at a company level, but this approach doesn’t highlight issues in specific parts of the customer journey. Therefore, measurement must be sufficiently frequent to identify patterns in customer engagement and granular to get an accurate picture of how customer care is performing at crucial interactions in each journey.

Accountability often requires companies to build a cross-functional team. Most companies are still organized by function, so improving a customer journey could involve operations, product development, the back office, legal, and compliance. These functions, when left to their own devices, typically focus on optimizing their area of the process rather than thinking about overall customer satisfaction. Providing an excellent customer experience across multiple touchpoints requires functions to coordinate their efforts more closely. Companies should set up a cross-functional team of senior managers that is responsible for improving the customer journey. They can then convene on a biweekly basis to determine how they can collaborate to reach the business’s goals instead of just focusing on their own function’s.

4. Build out IT architecture

The principles, service journeys, and functional enablers must be supported by an integrated IT architecture that can help to deliver a seamless experience. This architecture consists of the following elements:

Omnichannel desktop. Each agent’s command center integrates chat, cobrowsing, and email via applications. Routing and analyses efficiently direct complex requests to skilled agents, and chat and callback are offered via digital channels using javascript applications.

Omnichannel platform. This platform coordinates all channels used by representatives and routes and manages all incoming requests. An integration platform brings together a customer’s entire contact history and coordinates with the back end. Through a 360-degree customer perspective in the omnichannel desktop, representatives gain access to a self-service portal and can steer the process for customers.

Back-end interfaces. A self-service portal uses back-end interfaces to handle all requests. Data from these interactions are saved in data storage where they are quickly accessible. The portal also interfaces with the back end for synchronized communication.

Advanced analytics and new technologies, such as predicting issues before the customer explains the reason for the call, allow first movers to create “wow moments.” Similarly, algorithms based on natural language processing allow companies to promote behaviors to their agents that could affect customer satisfaction. For example, a system could coach an agent to talk slower or to use more energy in the conversation. New technologies and applications are seemingly arising each day; in the near future, they will enable companies to implement an IT backbone for their omnichannel experience that we cannot even imagine today.

The push to omnichannel is not confined to specific industries. Instead, it emanates from the evolution of customer preferences and behaviors as more channels emerge. And though customers are becoming more tech savvy, their comfort with digital channels only serves to elevate the importance of live agent interactions. Companies that understand this apparent contradiction, truly commit to understanding customer journeys, and build the capabilities to provide seamless omnichannel service will be well positioned to delight customers for years to come.

Jorge Amar is a partner in McKinsey’s Stamford office, and Julian Raabe and Stefan Roggenhofer are partners in the Munich office.

Explore a career with us

Related articles.

The role of customer care in a customer experience transformation

The CEO guide to customer experience

From touchpoints to journeys: Seeing the world as customers do

Advisory boards aren’t only for executives. Join the LogRocket Content Advisory Board today →

• Product Management
• Solve User-Reported Issues
• Find Issues Faster
• Optimize Conversion and Adoption

Mastering the omnichannel journey: Definition and strategies

Our lives are growing ever more intertwined with an increasing number of devices, such as smartphones, computers, smartwatches, smart home devices, etc. This constant interaction and ever-expanding abundance of content has shaped our purchasing behavior irreversibly.

Consumers have grown adept at making informed decisions by seeking out and evaluating trustworthy content from multiple sources. Additionally, external stimuli constantly prompt us to make buying choices.

In many cases, even substantial purchasing decisions are made through a handful of emails or phone conversations, bypassing the need for physical meetings. In the post-pandemic era, video calls serve as effective substitutes for face-to-face meetings.

This environment of vast possibilities has allowed businesses to flourish. However, it has also complicated the customer journey, resulting in the emergence of omnichannel journeys.

Omnichannel definition

An omnichannel journey represents a customer’s interactions with a product across multiple touchpoints during the buying process, the sales process, and post-sales customer support, extending throughout the customer’s lifecycle.

Omnichannel journeys allows customers to interact with a company in the way that is most convenient for them, creating a more personalized and engaging experience.

Omnichannel vs. multichannel

Understanding the difference between omnichannel and multichannel strategies is crucial in today’s dynamic business environment. The choice between omnichannel vs. multichannel is more than a debate about buzzwords; it reflects fundamental differences in how businesses engage with their customers.

What is multichannel?

What is omnichannel, key differences between omnichannel and multichannel.

Multichannel refers to the approach of interacting with customers through various channels, both direct and indirect. These channels may include a company’s website, retail stores, mail order catalogs, email marketing, and social media.

The goal of a multichannel strategy is to enable customers to interact with a brand in the channel of their choice.

The omnichannel approach, while involving multiple channels like the multichannel approach, focuses on delivering a consistent, unified, and seamless customer experience across all channels.

Over 200k developers and product managers use LogRocket to create better digital experiences

An omnichannel strategy recognizes that customers engage with brands on various platforms and touchpoints and endeavors to provide an integrated customer experience that’s both consistent and complementary across these touchpoints.

The key difference between omnichannel and multichannel lies in the customer experience.

Multichannel strategies can result in disjointed and potentially inconsistent customer experiences, as each channel may function in a silo. In contrast, an omnichannel strategy ensures that customers have a unified and consistent experience across all channels, enhancing customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Additionally, an omnichannel approach leverages data from various touchpoints to provide a more personalized and responsive customer experience.

The table below summarizes the advantages of adopting an omnichannel approach over a multichannel approach:

In summary, while multichannel strategies offer multiple avenues for customer interaction, they can result in disjointed customer experiences due to the potential lack of integration among channels. In contrast, an omnichannel strategy ensures that customers have a unified and consistent experience across all channels, enhancing customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Types of omnichannel journey

Depending on the product or services, customer interactions can vary based on the user’s needs and preferences. For instance, some customers may favor a completely digital experience when shopping for clothes, while others prefer shopping in a physical store.

Regardless of their preference, customers will still interact with the brand through multiple touchpoints, creating various omnichannel journeys. Therefore, even if your business involves selling clothes, it’s important to understand your positioning, customer preference, and presence to craft a positive customer experience and retain customers over time .

Fully digital (multiple digital touchpoints; no human interaction)

This type of journey occurs when a potential customer becomes aware of a brand’s offerings via a target medium, navigates to the website, and completes a sale without personal interaction. The customer relationship continues post-sale, maintained through interactions on the app or website.

An example includes buying clothes online, managing returns or complaints digitally, and leveraging loyalty points for future purchases to sustain a relationship with the brand.

Combination of digital and physical

This journey involves multiple interactions with the brand, both digitally and in person, creating a composite omnichannel experience.

Buying a car is a typical example of this type of journey. The customer researches the vehicle online, proceeds with the purchase via a physical or digital medium, and requires a blend of after-sales services.

Combination of digital and virtual assistant

This type of omnichannel journey proliferated in the post-pandemic era when customers began seeking assistance via a helpline, video call, or phone call to make purchasing decisions.

For example, when applying for a loan from a bank, a customer might call to negotiate terms, sign paperwork digitally, provide all necessary information online, and finalize the loan via a virtual call. In this journey, the customer interacts with the company virtually and completes tasks online rather than in person.

Omnichannel journey example

Let’s illustrate the concept of the omnichannel journey with an example that we will expand upon throughout the article to provide context. We’ll create a persona and a scenario, and follow that persona through their omnichannel journey.

Ana, a 34-year-old working mother living in a major city with her husband and daughter, decides to buy a car to streamline her commute to her daughter’s school and her own workplace. She represents a growing segment of consumers who are comfortable with online research and shopping, yet still appreciate human interaction and physical touchpoints in the buying process.

Let’s follow her journey:

Research phase

Ana begins her journey by conducting online research about the best family cars within her budget. She visits various car manufacturer websites, reads blogs and reviews, and checks out user ratings on independent websites. She also watches video reviews on YouTube and participates in online forums for additional insights.

Each of these digital touchpoints plays a significant role in Ana’s decision-making process.

Selection phase

After her extensive research, Ana shortlists a few car models that fit her requirements. She signs up for newsletters from the manufacturers of these cars to get updates on discounts or promotional offers. She also engages with the brands on social media to get a sense of their community and customer service responsiveness.

Furthermore, Ana uses an augmented reality app provided by one of the car companies to see how the car would look in her garage. These digital touchpoints contribute to her final decision.

Purchase phase

Ana decides to visit a dealership to test-drive the car model she has chosen. She appreciates the tangible experience of touching and driving the car before making a purchase.

The sales representative at the dealership provides her with additional information about financing options, warranty, and after-sales service. This physical touchpoint solidifies her decision to purchase the car.

Post-purchase phase

After purchasing the car, Ana receives follow-up emails from the dealership thanking her for the purchase and providing her with useful information about car maintenance. She also receives a survey asking about her buying experience. A few weeks later, she gets a phone call from the dealership asking about her satisfaction with the car and offering assistance if needed.

The importance of multiple touchpoints

Having multiple and varied digital and human touchpoints helps ensure a good customer relationship post-purchase.

In the previous example, Ana had several touchpoints with the bank before deciding to make a purchase. These touchpoints included:

• Ads on third-party websites
• Google searches for reviews
• The bank’s website for additional information
• Virtual interactions with bank employees for clarification
• Using the bank’s app for after-sales services and for virtual exchanges when preferred

For Ana, these touchpoints were part of a seamless customer journey because she interacted with the bank through multiple channels. However, for the bank, creating such an omnichannel experience required a consistent presence across all channels, real-time updates across all platforms, maintaining the same brand tone in all messaging, and ensuring knowledge is shared across the organization.

According to Forbes, customers typically interact with an average of six touchpoints at the start of their journey with a brand, and continue to engage with about four throughout their lifecycle. As a result, brands are expected to provide a seamless experience across all channels. With 98 percent of users switching between devices during these interactions, a brand’s failure to offer a seamless experience can drive customers to the competition.

While establishing an omnichannel presence can be challenging, it has proven more effective in achieving higher conversion rates and customer lifetime value . Customers who encounter a brand’s presence on multiple channels are 50 percent more likely to convert than if they only saw the brand on one channel.

How to create a seamless omnichannel journey

The first step in creating a seamless omnichannel journey is to identify where customers interact with your brand. This involves pinpointing the points of convenience, sale, and post-sale interactions for the customer.

In a market with varying customer preferences — some favor the convenience and speed of the internet, while others prefer physical interactions — ensuring a seamless customer experience requires brands to maintain a presence across all relevant channels. It is crucial to provide a consistent experience across these channels and empower customers to choose their preferred touchpoints.

If you choose to exclude certain touchpoints, you should guide customers through this process to prevent any confusion or disappointment that may arise from a lack of presence on specific channels.

Let’s dive deeper into some of the most important factors that contribute to a seamless omnichannel journey:

Presence across all channels

Synergy across all channels, real-time updates, data and analytics, knowledge spread across the organization.

New platforms are constantly emerging. Recognizing these new channels and establishing your brand’s presence across all relevant platforms where your customers are found is the first step in creating an omnichannel journey.

In our previous example, the bank maintains a digital presence with a comprehensive website and a useful app, and also offers virtual and physical touchpoints.

By identifying your customer’s preferences and establishing a presence across all pertinent channels, you can build trust and loyalty with your customers.

When you consistently present your company’s messaging, look, and feel across all platforms, it is easier for customers to recognize and connect with the brand.

For instance, if a customer sees an ad on social media and clicks on it but struggles to find the same campaign on the company’s website, their trust in the brand may diminish. While the customer may initially have the intent to purchase the company’s service, a lack of synergy across channels could push them toward the competition.

It’s crucial to maintain consistency across all touchpoints before launching any marketing campaign.

Customers often switch between devices and platforms when interacting with a product. If they encounter inconsistencies or outdated information across various channels, this can quickly breed mistrust in the brand, potentially pushing customers towards competitors. Thus, having an infrastructure that supports real-time updates is crucial for a successful omnichannel journey.

Analyzing customer behavior and preferences across multiple channels allows you to gain valuable insights into the customer journey that you can use to tailor your approach, thereby improving the overall customer experience and boosting satisfaction. Data and analytics can also help you identify gaps in your omnichannel strategy and make any necessary adjustments.

By leveraging these insights, businesses can make informed decisions and enhance their omnichannel journey to better meet their customers’ needs.

In large organizations, there can be gaps in information dissemination. For instance, when a marketing team initiates a campaign, front office staff should be informed. If a post-sales representative needs data or information about a service agreement made by a pre-sales executive, it should be readily available.

To achieve a seamless omnichannel experience, strategies and systems must be in place to facilitate the flow of information, minimizing the risk of gaps due to human error.

In today’s world, where consumers interact with brands through a multitude of channels, creating a seamless omnichannel journey has become vital for businesses. It involves not only maintaining a presence across all channels but also ensuring synergy, providing real-time updates, leveraging data for insights, and spreading knowledge about the customer journey across the organization. By doing so, brands can provide an integrated and cohesive customer experience, leading to higher customer satisfaction and retention.

Featured image source: IconScout

LogRocket generates product insights that lead to meaningful action

Get your teams on the same page — try LogRocket today.

Share this:

• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• #customer experience
• #product strategy

Stop guessing about your digital experience with LogRocket

Recent posts:.

Leader Spotlight: Evoking the right feelings in-store and online, with Payton White

Payton White talks about how to create a consistent experience by maintaining the feeling that the brand wants to evoke in the customer.

What is a product specialist? Role and responsibilities

A product specialist (PS) is a person with extensive knowledge about a specific product or product management-related responsibility.

Leader Spotlight: How first principles tie into ruthless prioritization, with Ben Hackett

Ben Hackett discusses the balance of revenue and core cultural values and how ruthless prioritization comes from first-principles thinking.

An overview of project baselines

A project baseline acts as a reference point so you can compare project progress against your intended plan.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Sprinklr Service

Sprinklr Social

Works Best With

Sprinklr Insights

Sprinklr Marketing

Marketing Teams

Customer Service Teams

• Unified-CXM
• Customers Customer Stories Sprinklr Champions
• Company Our Story Leadership Newsroom Partners Careers Culture & Talent Investor Relations Security & Data Privacy Sustainability
• Resources Learn Services Support CX-WISE Podcast Analyst Reports Product Demo Days eBooks & Reports Events & Webinars Blog Unified-CXM Guide Our Services Training For Agencies Help Center Release Notes Contact Us
• Platform & Technology
• Customer Service
• Marketing & Advertising
• Research & Insights
• Social Media Management
• Customer Stories
• Announcements
• Culture & Talent

How to Map Omnichannel Customer Journey [Steps + Best Practices]

March 18, 2024   •   7 min read

Share this Article

Sounds challenging, right? 

Start with building an omnichannel customer journey map. It is the starting point to interpret customers’ digital behaviors and embrace a journey-centric design approach. 

In this blog, you will learn a four-step process to craft omnichannel customer journeys with actionable insights and potential risks. Let’s dive in.  

What is an omnichannel customer journey?

Omnichannel customer journey vs. single channel customer journey , key components of omnichannel customer journeys , how should you build an omnichannel customer journey map , step 1: internal investigation , step 2: assumption formulation, step 3: external research and validation , step 4: narrative visualization , craft memorable omnichannel customer journey with sprinklr .

An omnichannel customer journey refers to a seamless and integrated experience where customers interact with a company across multiple channels (e.g., website, mobile app, social media, in-store) to complete a task. It also implies maintaining consistency and continuity in interactions and data across all customer-brand interactions. 

Defining customer journeys this way is more accurate because: 

The landscape of devices and technologies has changed. Modern devices/technologies present brands with new opportunities to engage customers.  

The sheer volume of interaction possibilities is endless. Customers can use one device to interact with brands in a myriad of ways, increasing the chances of failure. 

Customer expectations have evolved. With expanding interaction possibilities, customers have the means to support enjoyable and cohesive customer journeys that are no longer confined to predetermined channels.  

The goal is to ensure that no matter where your customers go to “meet” your business, you meet them right there, without introducing any friction or lag, with your agents being alerted automatically every time a customer switches channels, ensuring a great experience at every step of the way. It's like having a trapeze artist catching your customers mid-air.   Micah Solomon   CX Expert & Thought Leader 

A customer journey map is the visualization of the process a customer undertakes to accomplish a task. An omnichannel customer journey map spans the process across all the interaction channels the customer uses to complete their task.  

Interaction channels and touchpoints are integral to the concept of omnichannel customer journeys an its key components. Often used interchangeably, these two differ widely. Let’s see how. 

An interaction channel is a medium where customers and brands interact, and they can be unidirectional or bidirectional. 

Bidirectional interaction channels support instant two-way communication between customers and brands on traditional lines (such as physical stores and phone calls) and digital lines (email, website/app, live chat, texting apps, social media, etc.)  

Unidirectional interaction channels are one-way initiated by customers or brands, including postal mail, TV advertisements, and print media. These channels are not real-time. 

Interesting Article: Customer Service Channels – How to Pick the Right Ones for Your Business  

Different industries patronize different channels in their omnichannel ecosystem. For instance, brick-and-mortar retailers give weightage to physical stores, while internet services may not own any physical channels at all. Companies can innovate channels to cater to their unique use cases. Amazon’s dash buttons are a prime example. These WiFi-enabled physical devices allow customers to reorder products with one long press and are a rare unidirectional channel that is channel-initiated.  

Some channels are device-specific, while some are channel-neutral. Smartphone apps and mobile websites fall in the first category, while live chat and email belong to the second category. However, the interface of these channels may render differently on different devices.   

Investment in channel integration yields growth in operating profitability . Channel integration is also a salient difference between multichannel and omnichannel ecosystems. Learn more .

Customer touchpoints are interaction instances. In a customer journey, a customer might interact multiple times with a business using different channels. Each interaction instance is termed a “customer touchpoint.” It includes three components: 

The device used for interaction. 

The interaction channel used for interaction. 

The task being completed during interaction. 

A customer journey is a series of customer touchpoints, each depicting details of that specific interaction (Refer to the figure below). 

An omnichannel customer journey map is not a wishful depiction of what a customer journey should ideally look like. Rather, it is a truthful account of pain points that drive customers to your business and friction points that drive them away.  By analyzing your journey maps, you should be able to pinpoint behavior patterns in specific customer segments and eventually predict their next move. This way, maps render a strong competitive advantage and boost customer retention and profitability.  

Start with looking at relevant data within your organization. There is often existing (though disparate) information about the journey buried throughout various past internal efforts. This data - qualitative (e.g., data from past focus groups, customer-support call logs etc.) and quantitative (analytics, customer-satisfaction scores etc.) - can give you clues about how to focus the content of your research efforts.  

Throughout a journey-mapping endeavor, you must bring stakeholders along. Without a doubt, journey mapping will reveal gaps and opportunities within the customer experience that, organizationally, are beyond the authority of the CX professional driving the mapping project. You must have buy-in and engagement from a cross-disciplinary team so that, when those issues and opportunities surface, stakeholders with decision-making authority are already convinced of the soundness of your method and able to understand the importance of resolving the problems it finds.  

Establish a network of allies who are stakeholders from relevant departments (marketing, R&D, business analytics, etc.) who play a role in the customer journey and are impacted by it or can provide vital inputs for mapping. 

Put your core team of allies to work. Together, generate a list of questions that you would like to answer, then send your allies back to their respective teams or departments to search for any available documentation or data that can help begin to answer those questions. Good places to start include: 

Market-research surveys 

Brand audits 

Call center or customer support logs 

Site surveys or VOC (voice of customer) feedback 

Outputs from client advisory board (CAB) meetings 

Customer journey analytics  

By now, you will most likely have gathered enough insight to formulate a tentative hypothesis about how certain pieces of the customer journey look and what pain points exist. Start laying out that hypothesis in a draft framework called an assumption map or a hypothesis map . 

Share the insights gained from internal research with all the concerned stakeholders and map the findings on a tentative journey map, which will be validated against external research in the next step. 

You may be tempted to use existing stakeholder data as the basis for your journey map, but beware. While this data can give you a high-level understanding of customers’ general attitudes and levels of satisfaction for specific interactions, it does not help with understanding emotions, mindsets and motivations at the level required for effectively depicting the entire journey. 

Then what? 

Conduct external research on real customers using methods like: 

⛔ Pitfall Alert: Basing Your Map on Assumptions

Research can be expensive and time-consuming, so what’s wrong with creating and using an “assumption map” based on stakeholder input and cutting out the research phase? While stakeholders do hold valuable knowledge about different areas of the customer journey, most of them do not have a broad enough perspective of the customer journey, nor a deep enough perspective of user needs at each stage, to be able to piece together a realistic, comprehensive view.  

An assumption map carries two major risks : 

It carries less weight and is more likely to be written off as “anecdotal” than seen as a compelling tool to drive change. 

Decisions stemming from such inaccurate maps are faulty, altering the experience irreparably and leading to lost conversion opportunities. 

Your takeaway? Base your maps on historical user data and primary research via interviews and customer surveys . Take a tour of Sprinklr’s omnichannel survey platform , or try it for free for a full 30 days by hitting the button below:  

At this point, you need to create a visual narrative that will communicate the journey and all the critical moments, pain points, and high points within it. A good method is to have another workshop with your ally team. Having built context and common ground throughout your research process, bring them back together and evolve the hypothesis map based on your primary research findings. 

Editor’s Choice: Customer Journey Management: Your A-Z Guide for 2024   

The experience your customer has at individual customer touchpoints impacts their ongoing relationship with your brand. Take a look at your own omnichannel ecosystem.  

What channels do you support? Across which devices? Ask yourself if there are important gaps to be filled in your channel solutions.  

Sounds like a lot of work, right? 

With Sprinklr, it isn’t.  

Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform takes the grunge work out of omnichannel journey mapping by: 

Integrating data and insights across 30+ modern and traditional channels into one unified view. 

Four interwoven tool suites for insights, marketing, sales and support for complete stakeholder buy-in and leak-proof journeys. 

Granular journey analytics and reporting to highlight behavior trends and consumption patterns in real time. 

If you want to partner with a brand that simplifies customer journey mapping and eliminates point-solution chaos for McDonald’s, Nike and Microsoft, jump aboard to Sprinklr. Explore the platform at your pace with a 30-day trial on the house: 

Frequently Asked Questions

An omnichannel customer journey provides a seamless and integrated experience across multiple channels, ensuring consistency and continuity. In contrast, a multichannel approach involves utilizing various channels but may lack the same level of integration and cohesion. 

Traditional customer surveys can gauge customer satisfaction levels and brand perceptions. However, to avoid human error, bias and skewed results, it’s advisable to use an AI-powered journey analytics tool like Sprinklr Service that generates granular metrics for all the interactions and touchpoints in a journey.  

AI enhances the omnichannel customer journey by providing personalized recommendations, predictive analytics, chatbots for instant support, and data-driven insights, ensuring a seamless and efficient customer experience across channels. 

Related Topics

Article Author

Bhavna Gupta

Guest Contributor

Related Articles

Explore the top 9 AI tools for customer service to dramatically reduce response times, enhancing customer satisfaction with swift, accurate and relevant support.

The 11 Best Live Chat Tools for Customer Service in 2024

Compare 11 leading live chat platforms of 2024. Find key features, pricing information and customer ratings in one place.

Issac Thomas May 2, 2024   •   27 min read

An 8-Step Plan to Deliver Personalized Customer Service

Discover the importance of personalized customer service for your business and learn the steps, tools and tips for delivering it at scale in 2024.

Shubham Gupta , Jayadeep Subhashis April 25, 2024   •   6 min read

Create, publish and optimize pages with a drag&drop, pixel perfect and mobile-friendly builder

Speed up the creation process with 400+ customizable templates for landing pages, pop-ups and sections

Refine your messaging with AI-generated text, SEO and image edition. All in one app

Test and compare page variants for data-driven decisions and valuable insights on users interactions

Track microconversions in your Dashboard and analyze events and clicks with visual map

Integrate your pages with your favorite mar-tech apps and solutions to get the flow of your campaign going

Drive sales and conversions with irresistible product displays and seamless shopping experiences

Use a reliable and secure platform that smoothly handles millions of visits

Master digital marketing with the help from savvy professionals and increase your website’s conversions

Guides for beginners, set-up instructions and creation tips to get started and optimize your pages

A free online course for landing page creators! Learn the secrets of high-converting pages and become an expert

Get the answers you’re looking for – contact us

Schedule a one-on-one meeting with us and learn more about the benefits of our platform

• Portuguese (Brazil)

Omnichannel Customer Journey Mapping: The Ultimate Guide

Kate Parish

In today’s digital era, businesses need to ensure seamless customer experiences across all channels. Omnichannel customer journey mapping is a crucial tool for reaching this objective. Businesses may uncover pain areas, ensure better interactions, produce a consistent customer experience, decrease the abandoned shopping carts rate, and improve other KPIs by recognizing every touchpoint in the customer journey.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll discuss the significance of omnichannel customer journey mapping and offer a step-by-step process for making one. We’ll provide you with the knowledge and skills business owners and marketing specialists require to improve the customer experience and raise satisfaction.

Make your sections smartable and let go of mundane manual tasks with Smart Sections! An easy way to manage bulk changes.

Omnichannel customer journey maps explained.

An omnichannel customer journey map visually depicts a customer’s interactions with a brand across all touchpoints, channels, and devices. It presents a comprehensive picture of the customer journey, taking into account both online and offline encounters and emphasizing the possibilities, challenges, and crucial moments that might have an influence on customer satisfaction .

Understanding your potential lead or customer will help you drop the rate of  abandoned shopping carts and increase the number of valuable leads.

To create an efficient omnichannel customer journey map, businesses need to collect information on consumer interactions across all channels, including social media, websites, mobile applications, email, and in-store encounters. This data has to be thoroughly examined to identify recurring trends and patterns that can assist in extensive map creation.

The map should be done with the customer’s needs, preferences, and habits in mind. All the stages of the customer journey, from awareness to loyalty, should be considered, and important touchpoints that might affect the customer experience should be identified.

Once the map has been made, it may be utilized to pinpoint problem areas and establish plans for enhancing the client experience. Businesses may use the map, for instance, to identify the precise touchpoints where a client is having trouble making an online purchase and come up with ways to streamline the procedure.

Get  111 Landing Page Examples —The Ultimate Guide for FREE

Why should you adhere to a customer journey omnichannel model.

By offering a smooth and customized consumer experience across all channels, the omnichannel model may help companies stay competitive in today’s digital environment. Here are some further arguments in favor of using the omnichannel strategy.

• Improved customer experience: Businesses may offer a smooth customer experience across all channels, including social media, email, chat, phone, and in-store, by employing an omnichannel approach. This might raise loyalty and boost customer satisfaction.
• Better engagement: an omnichannel strategy allows organizations to interact with consumers at every touchpoint, resulting in increased possibilities for contact and the development of stronger relationships.
• Higher conversion rates: Companies may boost conversion rates and lower customer turnover by giving customers a unified, tailored experience across all channels.
• Better data insights: By using an omnichannel strategy, organizations may gather data from many sources and better understand the behavior, preferences, and pain points of their customers. This can enhance overall business performance and provide information for future marketing tactics.
• Enhanced operational effectiveness: By integrating data, procedures, and technology across all channels, an omnichannel strategy may assist companies in streamlining their operations and lowering costs.

Omnichannel Customer Journey Mapping Step-By-Step

Finding your major target customer categories and channels is generally the first step in the omnichannel customer journey mapping process. Determine the stages of the journey, which may include awareness, deliberation, purchase, post-purchase, and advocacy. Consider the exact areas you want to concentrate on and the precise results you wish to attain. This will keep you on task and help you maintain your attention. Other steps of the omnichannel journey mapping process are the following:

Identifying the Touchpoints and Micro-Conversions

Determine little actions that help website visitors achieve a bigger objective (like making a purchase). Micro-conversions are potent predictors of user engagement, purchase intent, and sales funnel performance, even if they often do not contribute to a website’s total conversion rate.

List all the touchpoints where customers may interact with your brand for each channel. Examples of touchpoints include a website visit, email opening, placing an order, getting a confirmation message, and other actions. Sort each touchpoint according to the phase of the customer journey it takes place in. For instance, a confirmation letter serves as a post-purchase touchpoint, whereas an email newsletter is an awareness touchpoint.

Then evaluate each touchpoint based on how well it satisfies the requirements and expectations of the consumer. Determine the shortcomings of the touchpoints and possibilities to enhance the customer experience.

Gathering Customer Data

Gather information on consumer behavior and input from all online and offline touchpoints, including social media, email, phone, in-store, and chatbots. After gathering information from each touchpoint, arrange it in a way it is simple to interpret and visualize. Spreadsheets and customer journey mapping software are tools you may use to do this. Analyze the obtained data to find patterns, gaps, and pain points throughout the customer journey.

Creating Personas

Based on the data analysis, create customer personas that depict the various client base groups. Analyze the patterns in the information you have gathered. Group your consumers according to any shared traits they may have.

Once you have determined the traits that each group shares, make up fake customer profiles to represent each one. Give each persona a name, age, occupation, list of hobbies, and other pertinent details. Make the identities as specific as you can.

Use your established personas to guide your product development and marketing efforts. Ask yourself questions like “How would this persona react to this product?” “What channels would this persona use to find information?” or “What drives this persona to make a purchase?”

Focus on the user  – before starting your campaign, ensure that the content reflects your potential clients’ needs.

Identifying Pain Points and Opportunities

Examine the customer journey map to find problems, obstacles, and areas that may be improved. Keep an eye out for points in the customer journey where your consumers are having trouble, running into roadblocks, or getting frustrated. The product characteristics, customer service, or delivery timeframes may be the source of these problems.

Look for opportunities to improve the customer experience. These possibilities can involve delivering tailored advice, enhancing communication, or providing further services.

Prioritize the discovered opportunities and pain points in accordance with how they will affect your company’s objectives and the client experience.

Implementing Changes and Monitoring Progress

You’ll need to create a plan to improve all the weak points, solve the problems customers face, and use all the opportunities. You can use a template action plan to get started if necessary. To ensure that your customer journey mapping and action plan stays applicable and efficient in achieving your company objectives, continually examine and update it.

Customer Journey Mapping Best Practices

Understanding the mapping process is crucial, but looking for additional solutions is still imperative to make the process easier and more efficient. Here are some valuable tips worth paying attention to.

Employ the Relevant Tools

Use digital technologies to streamline the omnichannel customer journey mapping process. Here are a few examples:

• Customer Journey Mapping Software: These products make planning out customer journeys simpler and more logical by offering drag-and-drop interfaces, pre-built templates, and other capabilities. Software for charting the customer journey includes Touchpoint Dashboard, Smaply, and CX Journey.
• Analytics Tools: Data regarding consumer behavior and interactions across many channels may be gathered using analytics tools. When utilized to identify pain points and potential improvement areas, these tools can offer insights into how customers interact with a company at various stages of their journey. Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and Kissmetrics are a few well-known analytics programs.
• CRM Systems: To keep track of client interactions across various channels and touchpoints, customer relationship management (CRM) systems are utilized. Such tools help personalize customer interactions by gathering data on consumer preferences, previous purchases, and other important data points. Among the popular CRM systems are Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho.
• Social media listening: Such technologies may be used to track what clients say about a company on social media platforms. Businesses may use this to pinpoint areas where their customer experience could be enhanced and respond instantly to consumer complaints and feedback. Sprout Social, Brandwatch, and Hootsuite are a few known social media listening apps.
• User testing: Utilizing testing technologies, businesses may learn from actual customers about their interactions with their goods and services. Surveys, focus groups, and other kinds of user testing might fall under this category. User testing may offer insightful information on how customers interact with a company through various channels and touchpoints. Optimal Workshop, UserTesting, and UsabilityHub are well-liked user-testing software programs.

Head to the Integration Catalog to browse in-app, compatible, and Zapier integrations with Landingi.

Integration and automation tools will optimize your workflow and make it easier to manage data from various sources in one place.

Always Ask for a Customer Feedback

Your decision-making process should be guided and informed by customer feedback if you want to innovate and make improvements to your product or service. It brings wonderful possibilities that can aid in enhancing the omnichannel consumer experience.

Providing customers with a simple option of leaving feedback is essential for exceptional customer service. Thanks to the omnichannel strategy, brands can interact with customers through any channel and get feedback at each point of contact. There are several ways to get client feedback, including through websites, social media, emails, in-app surveys, and reviews. The information obtained will help you keep your strategy flawless.

Offer Self Service

Providing customers with self-service choices is another lucrative strategy, capable of enhancing the whole brand experience. One of the most crucial aspects of the customer experience is reaction speed. Customers need prompt responses to their inquiries. Through self-service portals, they may instantly access information, which also helps businesses save time and resources. Businesses can provide how-to videos, manuals, and tutorials to assist consumers in resolving their issues on their own.

Finally, omnichannel customer journey mapping is crucial for companies to comprehend customers’ experiences across all touchpoints and enhance their journey. Businesses may uncover issues and opportunities for optimization and customize their marketing strategies by developing a comprehensive perspective of the customer’s interactions.

In contrast to organizations with weak omnichannel strategies, which only keep 33% of their customers , companies with effective omnichannel customer engagement strategies have an average of 89% client retention. These figures show what a big difference omnichannel customer journey mapping can make to a company’s bottom line.

Businesses may enhance customer experience, better understand consumer wants and preferences, and ultimately increase revenue by utilizing omnichannel customer journey mapping.

Ready to go? Let’s get started!

Join us and create the best-converting landing pages

Content Writer

Related articles

10 Best A/B Testing Tools For Conversion Optimization

Understanding Google Tag Manager: Pros, Cons, and Practical Examples for Landing Pages

Optimizing User Experience for SEO Success: A Guide to Google Page Experience Algorithm Update

The Unbeatable Duo of Call Tracking and Page Optimization

Crafting the Ultimate Omnichannel Customer Journey for Enhanced Customer Experience

The omnichannel customer journey is the new frontier for businesses aiming to provide unparalleled customer experiences. Understand how your customers traverse through various channels, interact with your brand, and the touchpoints they encounter. But, why should you invest your time in understanding this? For one, it’s the cornerstone to significantly improve customer engagement, loyalty, and, ultimately, your bottom line. Dive in to learn how you can create an effective omnichannel journey for your patrons.

Table of Contents

What is an Omnichannel Customer Journey?

The customer journey depicts the entire process a customer goes through, from their first interaction with your brand to the moment they make a purchase or even when reaching out to customer support. An omnichannel customer journey extends this concept by encompassing the end-to-end customer journey regardless of the combination of channels the customer uses to engage.

Imagine a shopper discovering a product on your mobile app, researching it further via your website, then making a purchase in-store, and finally calling your contact center for post-purchase assistance. This continuous, seamless journey across multiple channels exemplifies the omnichannel customer journey.

Why is the Omnichannel Experience Crucial?

The omnichannel customer experience represents a holistic view of a customer’s interactions with your brand, emphasizing the need for consistency and seamlessness. Today’s consumers want their interactions across online and offline channels, like websites, mobile apps, and physical stores, to be interconnected. A cohesive omnichannel experience fosters trust, heightens customer satisfaction, and increases customer retention. Offering a seamless experience across touchpoints ensures an excellent customer experience, boosting customer lifetime value.

Touchpoints: What are they and Why do they Matter?

Touchpoints represent every moment a customer interacts with your brand. These interactions are critical junctures where businesses can influence customer perceptions, decisions, and behaviors. By recognizing and optimizing these touchpoints, especially in an omnichannel model, companies can provide a consistent experience that meets or exceeds customer expectations. Let’s break down the wide range of touchpoints that customers might encounter on their journey:

Digital Touchpoints:

• Website: The most common touchpoint, a company’s website, is often the first interaction a customer has with the brand. This includes product pages, blog posts, and landing pages.
• Mobile App: For businesses with mobile apps, this becomes a crucial touchpoint, especially for users on-the-go.
• Email Communications: These include newsletters, promotional offers, transactional emails, and follow-ups.
• Social Media Platforms: From Facebook and Twitter to Instagram and LinkedIn, social media channels serve as primary touchpoints for engagement and communication.
• Live Chat & Chatbots: Instant communication tools on websites or apps.
• Digital Ads: Display ads, search ads, or video ads on platforms like Google, YouTube, or programmatic advertising platforms.

Physical Touchpoints:

• Brick and Mortar Stores: Physical storefronts where customers can touch, feel, and purchase products.
• Events and Trade Shows: Exhibitions, conventions, or workshops where brands can showcase their products or services.
• Sales Meetings: Direct face-to-face interactions between salespeople and potential clients or existing customers.

Customer Service & Support Touchpoints:

• Call Centers: Telephone-based support or sales interactions.
• Self-service Portals: Online sections where customers can resolve their issues or find information without direct interaction with company representatives.
• Feedback Surveys: Post-interaction or periodic surveys to collect customer feedback.
• Returns & Exchanges: The process customers undergo when returning or exchanging products.

Transactional Touchpoints:

• Online Checkout: The process customers go through when purchasing online, including cart pages, payment gateways, and confirmation emails.
• In-store Checkout: Physical purchase experience, which might include interactions with salespeople, payment counters, and kiosks.
• Invoice & Receipts: Physical or digital invoices provided post-purchase.

Content-Related Touchpoints:

• Blogs & Articles: Informative or promotional content that a potential customer might come across.
• Videos: Content on platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, or embedded on a website.
• Webinars & Online Workshops: Online sessions aimed at training, informing, or promoting to potential and existing customers.

Referral Touchpoints:

• Word of Mouth: Recommendations from friends, family, or colleagues.
• Online Reviews & Testimonials: Feedback from other customers on platforms like Google Reviews, Yelp, or Trustpilot.
• Affiliate Marketing: Recommendations and referrals from affiliate marketers or influencers.

Understanding these touchpoints helps businesses tailor their strategies to improve the customer experience. By providing consistent and personalized interactions across channels, brands can boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Mapping the Customer’s Journey: A Blueprint for Success

Journey mapping is an analytical tool that helps visualize the path a customer takes with your organization. To create an omnichannel customer journey:

• Identify Touchpoints: Understand every interaction a customer has with your organization, both online and offline.
• Collect Customer Data: Harness analytics and feedback to understand customer behavior and preferences.
• Design the Journey: Construct a journey map that outlines the customer’s experience across touchpoints, ensuring a seamless omnichannel journey.

Strategies for a Successful Omnichannel Experience

businessman working with notepaper of strategy ideas.Business communication, brainstorming,meeting,plan conceptsNotepaper with male hand.Business brainstorming and communication marketing plan concepts

Creating a seamless omnichannel journey requires strategies that cater to individual customer needs. These strategies should integrate analytics, understand customer behavior, and offer consistent service, whether online or offline. Moreover, businesses must ensure that their marketing, sales, and support teams are aligned in their efforts.

Consistent Branding Across Channels:

• Example: A business ensures that its color scheme, messaging tone, and overall look and feel remain consistent, whether a customer is visiting its website, mobile app, social media pages, or even a physical store. This helps in building a memorable and easily recognizable brand image.

Centralized Customer Data Management:

• Example: A retail company uses an integrated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to track a customer’s interactions across its website, mobile app, and in-store. This allows sales representatives to have a holistic view of a customer’s preferences and purchase history, enabling personalized service and recommendations.

Cross-Channel Personalization:

• Example: An e-commerce store sends personalized email recommendations based on a customer’s browsing behavior on its mobile app, ensuring that the shopping experience is tailored and relevant wherever the customer engages.

Integrated Inventory Management:

• Example: A fashion retailer allows customers to check the availability of specific items in physical stores through its website or app, and even reserve products for in-store pickup, providing a seamless shopping experience.

Unified Customer Support:

• Example: A tech company offers customer support via phone, live chat, email, and social media. They ensure that if a customer switches from one channel to another, the conversation’s history transitions smoothly, so the customer doesn’t have to repeat their issue.

Leveraging AI and Chatbots:

• Example: A travel agency utilizes AI-driven chatbots on its website and mobile app to provide instant responses to common customer queries, and seamlessly redirects more complex queries to human agents.

Optimize for Mobile:

• Example: A restaurant ensures its online reservation system is as intuitive and user-friendly on mobile devices as it is on desktops, understanding that many customers might book on-the-go.

Feedback Loop Across Channels:

• Example: A cosmetic brand collects feedback on its new product through its website, social media polls, in-store feedback forms, and email surveys. This comprehensive feedback helps the brand understand customer sentiments across various touchpoints.

Reward Loyalty Across Platforms:

• Example: A coffee shop offers a loyalty program where customers can earn points for every purchase, whether made in-store, through the brand’s app, or on its website. The points can then be redeemed across any channel.

Real-time Analytics and Adaptation:

• Example: An online electronics retailer monitors customer behavior on its website and notices that many customers drop off at the payment gateway. The retailer quickly identifies an issue with its payment processor and switches to a more reliable one, ensuring minimal disruption to the customer experience.

Implementing these strategies requires effort, coordination across departments, and often an investment in technology. However, the payoffs in terms of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately revenue can be substantial. By focusing on the customer and ensuring they receive an excellent experience regardless of where and how they interact with a brand, businesses can truly harness the power of the omnichannel approach.

Using Analytics to Understand Customer Behavior

In the world of omnichannel marketing and customer journey management, analytics plays a pivotal role. Analyzing data from various touchpoints helps businesses make informed decisions, identify areas for improvement, and tailor their strategies to match the ever-evolving preferences of their customers. In this realm, there are several critical metrics that marketers can use:

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC):

• This metric calculates the average expense of acquiring a new customer. By comparing CAC across channels, you can determine which channels are most cost-effective in your omnichannel strategy.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV):

• CLV measures the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer over the course of their relationship. It’s essential to track this metric across various channels to gauge the effectiveness of the omnichannel customer experience.

Cross-channel Engagement:

• Track the rate at which customers transition from one channel to another, such as from email to mobile app or from social media to the website. It helps understand the seamless experience across channels.

Customer Retention Rate:

• This metric gauges how effectively a business retains its customers over a specific period. A high retention rate indicates a positive omnichannel customer experience.

Net Promoter Score (NPS):

• NPS measures customer loyalty by asking them the likelihood of recommending the brand to others. By segmenting NPS scores by channel, you can gain insights into which channels provide the best customer experience.

Churn Rate:

• This metric calculates the percentage of customers who stop doing business or interacting with a brand over a specific period. An increasing churn rate might suggest problems in the omnichannel user experience.

Conversion Rate Across Channels:

• Analyze the percentage of users who take a desired action, such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter, segmented by channel. This helps in pinpointing which channels drive the most conversions and where there might be gaps in the omnichannel journey.

Average Order Value (AOV):

• By tracking AOV across different channels, brands can understand where customers are spending the most and tailor their marketing strategies accordingly.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT):

• Often collected through post-purchase or post-interaction surveys, CSAT scores provide direct feedback on customer satisfaction, which can be segmented by channel for more granular insights.

Multi-touch Attribution:

• This advanced metric analyzes the various touchpoints a customer interacts with before conversion. It provides insights into the combination of channels and interactions that lead to the most conversions.
• Response and Resolution Time:
• Particularly crucial for customer support touchpoints. Measuring how quickly customer inquiries or issues are addressed across channels can provide insights into the efficiency and effectiveness of omnichannel customer support.
• Cart Abandonment Rate:
• Especially relevant for e-commerce, this metric tracks the number of users who add products to their cart but don’t complete the purchase. By understanding abandonment rates across different channels, businesses can identify pain points in the checkout process.

Leveraging these metrics, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of the omnichannel customer journey. This data-driven approach ensures that brands can create a seamless and personalized experience, leading to increased customer loyalty and higher returns on their marketing and customer service efforts.

How Does an Omnichannel Approach Improve Customer Satisfaction?

Unified Experience Across Platforms:

• Regardless of whether a customer is shopping online, through an app, or in-store, the experience is harmonized. This seamless transition across touchpoints amplifies convenience and flexibility.

Personalized Interactions:

• With data insights from various channels, businesses can offer tailored interactions. A customer’s online browsing can inform in-store product recommendations, enhancing the shopping experience.

Efficient Problem Resolution:

• An omnichannel approach ensures that support is available across multiple platforms. Whether it’s social media, phone, or in-person, this multiplicity speeds up and streamlines issue resolution.

Enhanced Engagement:

• Being present on multiple platforms allows businesses to engage customers more effectively, ensuring they can reach out wherever they are most comfortable.

Consistent Branding:

• Uniform experience and messaging across channels foster trust and establish a brand’s credibility.

Feedback Integration:

• Multiple channels also mean diverse feedback avenues. This feedback can drive improvements that resonate with customers’ real needs.

Flexibility for Customers:

• The omnichannel model respects the non-linear customer journey, catering to individual preferences at every stage.

Integrating Omnichannel Strategies Across Departments

The integration of omnichannel strategies across various departments is paramount to ensuring a unified customer experience. When every department, from marketing and sales to customer support and logistics, operates in alignment with a shared omnichannel vision, it creates a seamless customer journey that fosters brand loyalty and satisfaction.

Starting with the Marketing Department , the omnichannel approach is all about creating a cohesive brand message that resonates across all platforms. Whether a customer sees an ad on social media, reads a newsletter, or visits the official website, the messaging should be consistent. This helps in not only reinforcing the brand’s identity but also ensuring that customers receive a uniform brand perception regardless of where they engage.

The Sales Department plays a pivotal role in the omnichannel experience. They must be equipped with the tools and data to understand a customer’s history with the brand. If a customer explored a product online, the sales team in a physical store should be aware of this interest, facilitating a more personalized sales approach. This interconnectedness ensures that the customer feels recognized and valued, regardless of the touchpoint they choose to interact with.

Customer Support is another crucial area for omnichannel integration. A customer reaching out for assistance expects the support team to have a comprehensive understanding of their past interactions and purchases. This means if they’ve had a prior chat on the website, they shouldn’t have to repeat the same information when calling the support line later. An integrated system across departments can ensure that all customer interactions are logged and easily accessible, making the support process smoother and more efficient.

Furthermore, the Logistics and Supply Chain Departments are integral to delivering on the promises made by the sales and marketing teams. They must be looped into the omnichannel strategy to ensure that product availability and delivery expectations are consistently met. If a customer checks product availability online and decides to pick it up in-store, there should be no discrepancies in the inventory information provided.

Additionally, departments like R&D and Product Management can also benefit from an omnichannel strategy. Feedback and insights gathered from various channels can guide product development and innovation, ensuring products are tailored to meet customer needs and expectations.

To truly realize the benefits of an omnichannel approach, integration must be holistic. It requires technology, training, and a company culture that places the customer at the heart of every strategy. Only when every department is synchronized in its approach can a business deliver the seamless and personalized experience that today’s customers expect and value.

The Role of Mobile Apps in the Omnichannel Journey

Mobile apps have transformed the omnichannel landscape, seamlessly bridging online and offline brand interactions. With smartphones often being the initial touchpoint for many consumers, apps provide a direct, personalized channel that caters to individual preferences and behaviors.

Integrated with device features, mobile apps can enhance user experience in unique ways. Geolocation services might guide users to nearby stores or offer localized promotions, while augmented reality can provide virtual product trials. Beyond shopping, apps engage users post-purchase through order tracking and customer support features.

The data gathered from app interactions also proves invaluable. Brands can derive insights on user behavior, informing broader business strategies ranging from product placement to marketing campaigns.

Furthermore, mobile apps deftly merge the digital and physical realms. Features like “click and collect” exemplify this, allowing online ordering with in-store pickups. This interconnectedness reinforces the notion of a fluid, consistent brand experience across various platforms, solidifying mobile apps’ crucial role in the omnichannel journey.

The Future: Predictions for the Omnichannel Customer Experience

The evolution of the omnichannel customer experience has been swift and relentless, with emerging technologies and changing consumer behaviors shaping its trajectory. As we look forward to the horizon, several predictions stand out that are likely to define the omnichannel landscape in the coming years:

AI-Powered Personalization: With Artificial Intelligence and machine learning technologies maturing, we can anticipate a hyper-personalized shopping experience. AI will anticipate customer needs, analyzing past behaviors to offer product recommendations, content suggestions, and even personalized discounts. This means the customer journey will be curated even before the customer makes a move.

Virtual and Augmented Reality Shopping: VR and AR technologies are set to revolutionize the online shopping experience. Consumers might virtually “try on” clothes, explore a 3D model of a product, or even take a virtual tour of a hotel room before booking. This will merge the tangibility of in-store shopping with the convenience of online platforms.

Integrated IoT Ecosystem: The Internet of Things (IoT) will play a pivotal role. Smart devices, from refrigerators to wearables, will be integrated into the shopping ecosystem. Imagine your refrigerator suggesting recipes based on its contents and directly ordering missing ingredients from the grocery store.

Seamless Payment Solutions: The checkout process will become more streamlined with innovations in payment technologies. Beyond digital wallets and contactless payments, biometric solutions like facial recognition or fingerprint scans might become standard payment methods, offering both convenience and security.

Sustainability as a Core Aspect: With growing consumer awareness about environmental concerns, sustainability will be an integral part of the omnichannel experience. Brands might offer incentives for eco-friendly purchasing decisions or provide detailed supply chain transparency to assure consumers of sustainable practices.

Dynamic Pricing Models: Leveraging AI and real-time data analytics, prices might adjust dynamically based on demand, stock levels, or even a customer’s purchase history. This could mean more personalized pricing and promotions, enhancing the customer’s perception of value.

Enhanced Use of Chatbots and Virtual Assistants: Customer support will be increasingly automated. Chatbots and virtual assistants will handle a majority of queries, backed by AI to understand and respond to more complex customer needs, ensuring 24/7 assistance.

Mapping the Future of Your Customer’s Journey

The omnichannel customer journey isn’t merely a trend—it’s the new standard for brands aiming to thrive in this digital era. The melding of technology, personalization, and holistic customer experience is shaping a future where the consumer is at the heart of every strategy, and where their journey with a brand becomes more streamlined, insightful, and engaging.

But understanding and optimizing this intricate web of interactions requires more than just cursory insights. It demands a deep dive into data, an understanding of the emerging trends, and the right tools to capture, analyze, and optimize each touchpoint.

If you’re keen on understanding this in greater depth and envisioning how this could revolutionize your brand’s approach, we have something special for you. Download our case study and discover how Wizaly is empowering brands to meticulously monitor and seamlessly optimize their customer journeys. Dive into real-world scenarios, witness transformative results, and visualize a roadmap that aligns with your brand’s ambition. The future of customer experience awaits. Are you ready to navigate it?

Our latest articles

Data Clean Rooms vs. Wizaly: Prioritizing Privacy AND Powerful Marketing Insights

Comparing the Power of Data Driven Attribution Vs. Last Click in Google Ads

Why Your Marketing Attribution Data Is Wrong: 5 Common Attribution Mistakes

You don’t want to miss out on our latest news ?

Sign up for our newsletter !

🔮 Join Xperience Pulse: Where Infinite Tailored Experiences Begin! Exclusive Launch Event on May 16. Claim Your Spot Now! →

• Customer Experience

Omnichannel Customer Journey Mapping: The Ultimate Guide

As businesses continue to shift their focus toward providing an integrated customer experience, the need for effective omnichannel customer journey mapping is becoming increasingly important. The mapping helps companies analyze how customers interact with a brand across multiple channels and touchpoints, allowing them to identify areas for improvement.

This in-depth article will cover the relevance of omnichannel customer journey mapping, examine its advantages and drawbacks, and provide an easy-to-follow guide for creating an omnichannel customer journey map.

Why Turn to Omnichannel Customer Journey Mapping?

Omnichannel customer journey mapping is a process of tracking every step customers take when interacting with a brand's product or service throughout their entire journey—from initial discovery to purchase and beyond.

This implies determining which channels consumers use, what product information they search for, and what actions they take at each journey stage. By visualizing it all on the map, businesses can get an overview of the customer experience with the product or service and identify gaps in their current experience that could be hindering conversions, increasing abandonment rates, or causing dissatisfaction.

By understanding these pain points better, companies can figure out how to create a seamless experience for their customers across all channels. As a result, they drive more sales, ensure conversion optimization , and keep customers returning. In other words, understanding how your customers interact with your products or services is key to ensuring them a positive experience that will lead to increased loyalty over time. Here are other reasons to conduct mapping.

Assists with Marketing Campaigns

Understanding the decision-making process of your target audience allows you to create marketing campaigns to meet your clients' needs and answer the frequent and most pressing questions. You can also identify the platforms where customers make more purchases and create promotional campaigns, encouraging users to explore your goods or services on this channel.

Provides Audience Insights

You can feel more empathetic with your customers when following their journey. The map makes it easy to maintain accurate user personas and client profiles. Yet remember that if your software doesn't automatically combine the data in real-time, customer journey maps, buyer personas, and client profiles should constantly be evaluated and updated.

Increases Retention

Since the relationship with the consumers does not end with an order, a comprehensive customer journey map also goes beyond. It has to include onboarding, brand advocacy, and upselling stages to assess and improve them and ensure better retention as a result.

Consolidates Data for the Whole Team

One comprehensive map makes it easier for stakeholders to discuss ways to enhance client experiences and puts staff from all departments on the same page.

A map directs your team's attention to what the audience is doing and how to address their problems effectively. Maintain the customer journey map's accessibility and visibility so that it can guide your business choices. The customer journey map may be a reference point for new campaign concepts, messages, techniques, and more.

Challenges of Omnichannel Customer Journey Mapping

While the opportunities ensured by customer journey mapping seem very bright, there are also some challenges and limitations to consider:

Automation Challenges

Different technologies used by companies may not communicate effectively due to automation issues; this requires careful integration so that all systems work together seamlessly without any disruptions.

Data Collection and Analysis

The mapping of omnichannel customers' journeys is based on information from various sources, including social media, website analytics, past purchases, and customer interactions. A cohesive customer journey perspective can only be achieved by integrating and combining this data from numerous sources and channels. Yet, data silos, incompatible formats, and poor data quality might hinder the accuracy and thoroughness of the customer journey map.

Maintaining Consistency

A uniform experience across all channels is one of the main objectives of omnichannel customer journey mapping. Nevertheless, maintaining consistency can be difficult because every channel has different features, constraints, and user experiences. Organizations always struggle to strike a balance between the need for consistency and user expectations as well as channel-specific needs.

Organizational Alignment

Omnichannel customer journey mapping calls for cooperation and coordination between several teams and departments. In order to develop a comprehensive understanding of the customer journey, marketing, sales, customer service , IT, and other departments should work together. With complex organizational structures, it may be difficult to overcome silos, develop clear communication channels, and ensure consistent messages and experiences.

Getting Started With Mapping

The omnichannel customer journey mapping approach often begins with identifying your objectives. Think about the particular areas you want to focus on and the precise outcomes you want to achieve. This will help you stay focused and on target. The following are other omnichannel journey mapping stages:

Identify Your Customer Segments

Before you start mapping journeys, you should first identify who your target audience is to tailor experiences accordingly. This includes researching demographic information such as age range, location, gender, etc., analyzing market trends related to these segments (this could involve surveys or focus groups), understanding buying habits specific to each segment, etc.

Group your customers according to any shared characteristics you found. Create fictitious client profiles for each category after identifying the characteristics they all share. List the name, age, employment, interests, and any other relevant information for each category. Utilize your personas to direct your product development and marketing initiatives.

Define Customer Interactions

Knowing what touchpoints are there isn't enough. You should also define what interactions occur at each touchpoint—which type of content do users see when visiting your website? Are there any emails sent after making an online purchase? What does the checkout process look like on mobile devices compared to desktops?

Analyze Your Mapping

After defining all possible interactions between consumers and brands, analyze them using tools such as Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics, etc. Look at qualitative data (like user feedback) and quantitative data (like conversion rates ) to see the whole picture.

Look through the customer journey map to identify issues, roadblocks, and potential improvement areas. Seek areas throughout the customer journey where your customers struggle, encounter obstacles, or lose patience.

Search for chances to enhance the client experience. These options can include improving communication, offering additional services, etc.

Measure and Adjust

After completing an initial mapping exercise, businesses should regularly measure performance and adjust anything that needs improvement; this could involve testing different types of content, analyzing customer feedback more carefully, etc.

Mapping Tools

Consider using digital technologies to streamline the omnichannel customer journey mapping process. You can speed up the process and gain valuable insights with the help of various customer journey mapping solutions, analytics platforms, social media listening tools, user testing software, CRM, etc. Here are a few examples:

The tool combines customer journey mapping and analytics. It allows companies to analyze customer behavior, track trends in their customer base, and generate insights from surveys and feedback.

Google Analytics

It’s a powerful tool that provides insight into web traffic, engagement, and conversions. With this information, businesses can evaluate the performance of their customer journey mapping efforts and identify areas for improvement.

Kissmetrics

Kissmetric collects data from various web, mobile, email, and social media channels to provide a comprehensive overview of customer interactions. This can help companies better understand their customer journey mapping efforts and make changes accordingly.

A tool that helps businesses monitor their brand's presence online. By tracking customer engagement across different channels, companies can get insights into how people interact with their brands and use this information to optimize the customer journey.

A social media management platform assisting companies in monitoring customer engagement on social media platforms. The tool provides detailed analytics of customer preferences and identifies areas for improvement in the omnichannel experience.

Optimal Workshop

Optimal Workshop is a comprehensive user research platform that allows companies to understand their customers' needs and behaviors through surveys, interviews, and usability testing. Companies can use this information to find opportunities for improvement in their customer journey mapping efforts and make changes accordingly.

Zoho is a cloud-based platform designed to help businesses gain insights into their customer journey mapping efforts. The tool provides detailed analytics on user behavior, engagement, and conversions. This can help businesses identify areas for improvement in their customer journey and make changes accordingly.

Mind that there are many alternative tools with various capabilities and price ranges. Hence you can always find something suitable for your business.

The Bottom Line

Omnichannel customer journey mapping can be a powerful tool for businesses looking to get an overall view of how their customers interact with their products or services across all channels.

By understanding customers' journeys better, companies can create experiences tailored toward each user and identify potential gaps in the current processes, all of which lead to increased brand loyalty over time. According to statistics , annual revenue growth for businesses with great omnichannel customer involvement is 9.5%, compared to 3.4% for businesses with poor omnichannel engagement. These numbers demonstrate the significant impact that omnichannel customer journey mapping can have on a business.

Although there may be some challenges associated with this process (automation issues, data collection/analysis, etc.), they can all be overcome by following the steps outlined above.

Frequently Asked Questions About Omnichannel Customer Journey Mapping

What is an omnichannel customer journey.

An Omnichannel Customer Journey is a multi-channel approach to marketing, selling, and serving customers in a way that creates an integrated and seamless customer experience. This journey encompasses all the different touchpoints a customer has with a brand, across multiple channels and platforms, such as online websites, physical stores, mobile apps, social media, and more. The primary goal of an omnichannel customer journey is to ensure a consistent and personalized experience for customers, regardless of how or where they choose to interact with the brand.

What Is Omnichannel Customer Journey Mapping?

Omnichannel Customer Journey Mapping is a strategic process of visualizing the path that a customer takes across multiple channels when interacting with a brand. This mapping process involves outlining all the consumer interactions and touchpoints with your brand, from the initial discovery to the final purchase and beyond.

What Does Omnichannel Marketing Mean for Customer Journey Mapping?

Omnichannel marketing and customer journey mapping go hand in hand. In the context of customer journey mapping, omnichannel marketing means creating a unified and seamless customer experience across all channels and touchpoints.

Learn how to  deliver unique and  personalized customer experiences to increase conversions

Keep Reading on This Topic

In this blog post, we will explore nine of the most common personalization challenges and discuss how to overcome them.

In this post, we will discuss some of the best practices and tips for using website content personalization to delight your customers and enhance user experiences.

• Português (Brasil)

Contact Center Trends

The data-driven contact center: Mapping and measuring the omnichannel customer journey

By Celia Cerdeira

Tell me if this sounds familiar. Your customers are demanding more ways to engage with your business. Your call times are blowing out, and let’s not even start on your first call resolution ( FCR) numbers. Your digital channels seem to be doing well, but you can’t really quantify it.

You know it’s time to embrace omnichannel customer experience, but you’re not sure which channels to focus on first or how to make them successful? 

In this guide, we’ll show you: 

• What an omnichannel customer journey is, and why it matters for your contact center.
• How to map an omnichannel customer journey, so you can access the data that matters when you most need it.  
• How to determine the key success measures for all of your channels (including digital and offline), so you can evaluate the overall customer experience. 

We’ll also share some strategies to improve the quality of your data, and how to use it to make business decisions, like moving to a scalable omnichannel solution.

What is an omnichannel customer journey, and why it’s important for your contact center. 

An omnichannel customer journey is a seamless, integrated customer experience across multiple channels and touchpoints, including offline channels like the phone, as well as digital channels such as social media, chatbots, and mobile apps. It aims to provide a consistent and cohesive experience for your customers, regardless of the channel or device they use to engage with your business.

Most businesses today take a multichannel approach to customer service—that is, they support a variety of channels, but they aren’t integrated. For example, agents might have access to call logs, but they can’t access information from interactions over social media. 

Customers are frustrated by a multichannel approach. In fact, Salesforce’s 2023 State of the Connected Customer Report found that 83% of customers surveyed say they’re more loyal to companies that provide consistency across departments, yet 66% say they still feel they have to repeat or re-explain information to different representatives, even in the same call. 

Your customers will no longer accept frustrating experiences. They expect you to have a 360º view of all their interactions, history, and information. This holistic approach is at the core of a successful omnichannel customer journey.

ON-DEMAND MASTERCLASS

Save costs and drive business growth through CX strategy optimization

Learn how to define, measure, and execute a CX strategy that delivers optimal outcomes based on your business needs.

Eight steps to map an omnichannel customer journey. 

Understanding customer behavior is a crucial first step when you decide to take an omnichannel approach to customer service. There is no better way to do this than to map your customers’ journey across all of your digital and offline channels. 

This involves understanding, documenting, and visualizing the various touchpoints and interactions a customer has with your organization—not just with your contact center .

Here’s a step-by-step approach to mapping your customer journey:

1. Identify your channels.

Determine the channels through which customers interact with your business. This could be phone calls, email, live chat, social media, or self-service portals .

2. Define customer personas.

Develop customer personas to represent different segments of your customer base. Consider demographics, preferences, needs, and behaviors to understand their expectations and goals. To attract and retain the right customers, you need to understand who they are and what they expect, so that your omnichannel approach isn’t just a replication of your existing processes in a new format. To align with your larger strategic goals, your omnichannel strategy should target your ideal customers, and meet them where they are. 

3. Note all touchpoints. 

Identify and jot down all the touchpoints across every channel that customers engage with your business using these criteria: 

• Awareness: What is the point at which your potential customer becomes aware of the problem they are facing? Do your customers read your blogs? Are they watching Youtube tutorials you’ve produced? Are you ranking on any comparison sites? Where are you being seen by potential customers who are not yet educated on their problem?
• Consideration: What is the point at which the customer begins to realize there is a solution to their problem, and your organization might be it? How are they finding your social media profiles? Where are they being driven to your website from? Are they seeing your ads on Facebook or Google ads? Do they see your solutions recommended on industry websites? Where are you converting your customers to initiate the sales process, and which channels are most successful?
• Purchase: Where are your customers buying from you? Where do they initiate sales, and then stop? At this stage you want to consider things like abandoned cart data on your website, and conversations that have dropped off from your chatbots or sales team. Where do you convert the most sales? Where do you convert the least? Why? Where are sales conversions dropping? Get granular. Which agents are converting the most customers? Why? When creating a future state version of your omnichannel journeys, this information will help you make data-driven decisions about where to focus your budget, and improve the process. 
• Service: Where do customers go when they need help with your products or services? Where do they ask questions? On your social feeds? In your inboxes? Emails? As blog comments? What channels could you be missing opportunities to provide support? Engage your agents in this conversation. What are the most frequently asked questions they receive on a daily basis, and how could you convert this into an externalized self-service knowledge base for your chatbots, or a customer portal where customers can find answers to their own questions? 
• Loyalty expansion : How do you continue to retain your customers after purchase? Do you have a newsletter? An affiliate or referral program? A loyalty program? Or nothing at all? What could you offer to retain customers once they have made their first purchase? How could you encourage additional purchases at the point of sale? How could they be rewarded for recommending you to a friend and effectively growing your lead base for them?

4. Analyze interactions.

Analyze your customer interactions and journeys across channels to identify common patterns, bottlenecks, and opportunities for improvement. Look for points of friction or inconsistency, and scrutinize customer feedback for clues. Don’t skim over this step. Your omnichannel experience must be data driven to be effective. Give your customers what they want and they’ll remain loyal. 71% of consumers switched brands at least once in the past year. The more customers you can retain, the better your bottom line.

5. Document the omnichannel customer journey.

Create a visual representation of the customer journey map, including each touchpoint, customer actions, emotions, and key decision points. You can leverage the Talkdesk visual flow designer to map your customer journeys. Just point, click, and publish.

Contact center insights: The gold mine retailers don’t know they have

Learn how you can analyze interaction data, sentiment, and emotion to understand why customers are reaching out, and how these insights can inform decision-making.

6. Enhance channel integration.

In this step, identify areas where channels can be better integrated to provide a seamless experience. For example, if your customer emails about an issue, then follows up via chat, your agent should be able to see the email and immediately provide support. With integrated channels, your agents should have a 360º view of each customer. This enables your agents to provide a seamless experience regardless of where your customer contacts your business.

7. Continuously monitor and adapt.

Before deciding that your customer roadmap is complete, monitor it. Regularly review and update it based on customer feedback and evolving needs to can be sure you’ve mapped everything. Monitor key metrics such as customer satisfaction, first contact resolution, and channel-specific performance to track improvements. 

8. Foster cross-team collaboration.

Encourage collaboration among contact center teams responsible for different channels. This helps with consistent messaging, knowledge sharing, and alignment on strategic goals. The days of siloed sales, marketing, and CX teams are long gone. Just as your customers expect an integrated experience, your teams should be collaborating on customer experience from first interaction to becoming a raving fan.  

Mapping the omnichannel customer journey in so much detail enables you to gain a holistic view of all customer interactions and identify opportunities to optimize your processes, enhance customer satisfaction, and increase your revenue at the same time.

The data-driven contact center: Measuring customer service.

When mapping your customer journey, use your customer satisfaction metrics to determine where to make improvements.

Customer experience (CX) omnichannel metrics.

There are three key metrics that define customer satisfaction across an organization. Within your contact center you’ll be tracking more specialized metrics like first call resolution (FCR), call volume , and average call times. But for the benefit of this exercise, keep your focus on overall metrics that come directly from customers, such as:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS measures customer loyalty and advocacy by asking customers how likely they are to recommend your brand to others. It provides an overall assessment of customer satisfaction.
• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): CSAT measures customer satisfaction by asking customers to rate their satisfaction with a specific interaction or experience with your business. It helps identify pain points and areas for improvement.
• CES: CES measures the ease of the customer’s experience when interacting with your brand. It assesses the effort required to achieve their desired outcome, highlighting opportunities to reduce friction.

How to turn customer conversations into actionable insights

Learn how to find patterns in customer intents and sentiments so you can create seamless omnichannel customer journeys.

The contact center of the future is data-driven.

There is so much more to omnichannel customer experience than just adding social media channels for customers to contact you. Customers expect seamless interactions, regardless of the channel they use. 

To learn more about how Talkdesk is leveraging customer interaction analytics to increase revenue and skyrocket customer satisfaction, download our Inner Circle Guide to Customer Interaction Analytics! 

The inner circle guide to customer interaction analytics

Get expert tips for leveraging interaction analytics to optimize efficiency, reduce costs and increase revenue.

Celia Cerdeira

Célia Cerdeira has more than 20 years experience in the contact center industry. She imagines, designs, and brings to life the right content for awesome customer journeys. When she's not writing, you can find her chilling on the beach enjoying a freshly squeezed juice and reading a novel by some of her favorite authors.

Other blog posts.

Artificial Intelligence

The death of the IVR: How generative AI is transforming customer service

By Pedro Andrade

7 ways to improve customer experience

IVR hacks that are killing your contact center performance

By Crystal Miceli

5 important customer service skills in an AI contact center

What an Omnichannel Customer Journey Looks Like

An overview of omnichannel customer journeys and how to implement them.

What is an omnichannel customer journey?

4 stages in a customer journey + relevant channels for each, a true omnichannel journey requires a fully integrated tech stack.

Companies that are customer-centric have been found to be 60% more profitable than those that aren’t. But what do we actually mean when we say “customer-centric”? More often than not, we’re talking about the quality of customer experiences across channels. 

Optimizing omnichannel customer journeys is essential for acquiring new customers, strengthening retention rates, and as we mentioned above, becoming more profitable. By understanding how customers move between platforms and channels, businesses gain the upper hand – gaining deeper insight into their behavior. 

Omnichannel has come to define customer journeys today: referring to how users switch between multiple channels when interacting with a brand (and expect their experience to be uninterrupted as they do so). Today, 76% of consumers expect consistent interactions across all areas of a business. 

A common example of this is with a streaming service. You could start a show on your laptop, and then switch over to your mobile device and pick up at the exact timestamp you left off at. That’s an omnichannel experience. 

Or, perhaps you start a live chat with Customer Support, are disconnected, and then decide to call their hotline instead. The Customer Support agent that picks up should be able to see your previous conversation over chat, and begin problem solving from there. 

74% of customers use more than one channel to start and complete a purchase. The following sections serve as an example of how an omnichannel customer journey can unfold. 

The customer journey begins when someone first discovers a brand, whether it’s through a paid advertisement, a blog article, or a social media post. During this stage, your brand’s primary goal is make people aware of the products or services you offer, and acquire new leads.

This isn’t the time for a hard sell. Instead, focus on how to help your prospective customers by offering valuable information, unique perspectives, and solutions to common challenges.

Content marketing

Content marketing is the creation and distribution of relevant, useful content that doesn’t explicitly promote your brand or sell your products. Examples of content marketing include:

Blog articles

White papers

Downloadable guides

The best content marketing focuses on your customers’ top concerns, pain points, challenges, and questions. By offering educational information to prospective customers, you can position your brand as a trusted authority in your industry and increase online visibility.

Social media marketing

Social media marketing is another powerful tool for the awareness stage: as its able to reach a large audience at no cost (if on organic channels). Today, 55% of consumers discover new brands through social media , such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Social media marketing includes:

How-to and educational videos

Infographics

Sponsored posts

“Shoppable” content

Active engagement is an inherent part of social media (when done successfully), so this is a great way to build a community of leads who are more likely to become loyal customers.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing involves endorsements, product placements, and sponsored content from people who have a high level of social influence or expertise in their field. Influencer marketing includes content such as:

Product unboxing videos

Brand ambassador programs

Live streaming

Influencers have cultivated a loyal audience that trusts them to share useful recommendations – an invaluable asset to your omnichannel marketing strategy. 

Consideration

Once your audience has discovered the root cause of their pain points, they move onto considering possible solutions. During this stage, a customer conducts research to determine their options: comparing aspects like pricing, available features, and customer support.

This is when you need to convince prospects to see your brand as the best choice. To do so, you need to create informative, educational content that highlights your company’s competitive differentiators (and showcase real-life success stories from current customers). 

Landing pages

Each tactic used in the awareness stage – whether it’s a blog article, a sponsored Instagram post, or an influencer’s unboxing video – should lead your audience to a landing page on your website. This creates the seamless connectivity between different platforms that enables omnichannel customer engagement . Landing page content includes:

Product demos

Gated or downloadable content

Side-by-side comparisons with your competitors

Client testimonials

Industry-specific use cases

Your landing pages should contain all the information a potential customer needs to answer their questions about your brand. Don’t forget to include details like pricing, benefits, integrations, and other features that differentiate you from your competitors.

In-app and on-page marketing

This type of marketing is developed for and displayed to customers while they are actively using your app or website. Examples include:

In-app messages

Splash pages

Modals (full-screen overlays that remain until the user dismisses them)

This is an especially powerful strategy for SaaS companies that offer a free trial of their mobile or web-based apps. When customers try your software before they commit to a purchase, you get the added advantage of marketing directly to them while they test-drive your product. By guiding their experience, you will further unlock the value of your product for the user as they compare their options.

The decision stage is where you ensure you are a customer’s final choice. Although each stage of the customer journey is crucial, this is where the magic happens: a lead completes a purchase and converts into a paying customer.

Now that you’ve guided your customers through the marketing funnel and convinced them to choose your business, you need to demonstrate how your product or service performs as promised.

Live chat marketing

Live chat enables you to engage with prospects while they’re actively browsing your website, and encourage them to take specific actions (like completing a purchase). Examples of live chat marketing include:

Personalized product recommendations

Product walkthroughs

Sales call scheduling

Live chat is your chance to deliver a tailored customer experience. With the additional context of a prospect’s previous interactions – which you gleaned from consolidated customer data – you can get straight to the point and offer solutions that are specific to their pain points.

Email marketing

Email marketing gives you direct access to your customers, and is easily testable (which drives more insights). By segmenting your audience , you can launch highly personalized, targeted, and well-timed emails, which can increase revenue by 18x .

Examples of email marketing include:  

Order confirmation emails

Follow-up emails with product recommendations

Abandoned cart emails

Drip campaigns

Support and retention

The chances of selling to an existing customer are as high as 70%. Once a customer has purchased from your brand, you don’t want to let them slip through your fingers.

During this stage, your goal is to increase the chances of a higher customer lifetime value (LTV). After each purchase, continue to engage with customers early and often to nurture loyalty, and unlock long-term revenue growth.

In-app and on-page support messaging

Similar to the in-app and on-page marketing methods we discussed earlier, this channel targets your customers while they’re interacting with your brand’s website or mobile app. However, this content is designed specifically to help paying customers get the most out of their purchases. Examples include:

Personalized promotions

Tooltips (overlays that show users how to use and navigate an app)

Cross-selling

To remain competitive, use the information gathered throughout the omnichannel customer journey to proactively reach out with personalized support messaging.

Knowledge base

A knowledge base is like a self-service customer support library. This enables customers to learn about different features and offers how-to guides to help maximize the value of their purchase. A knowledge base might include:

Case studies

Technical product documentation

Suggestions for high-impact activity

By following the routes that lead customers to your knowledge base, you can identify touchpoints in the omnichannel customer journey that need further clarification. For instance, if many users look for information about a specific feature after the onboarding process, you can add a tutorial or interactive demo to better explain that feature. 

To provide an omnichannel customer experience , you need to connect all of your data and attribute it to individual customer profiles. Look for features like:

Customer segmentation

Automated personalization

The ability to trigger interactions based on real-time data

Segment unifies touchpoints across all platforms so you can fully understand the omnichannel customer journey. Our customer data platform uses robust customer analytics to provide you with deeper insight into customer behavior. Plus, multi-touch attribution identifies all of the touchpoints that lead to a conversion, not just the last one.

Interested in hearing more about how Segment can help you?

Connect with a Segment expert who can share more about what Segment can do for you.

Frequently asked questions

What are some common channels in an omnichannel customer journey, what is an example of an omnichannel customer journey, how can twilio segment help companies implement an omnichannel customer journey.

Send us an email

Omnichannel customer experience: exploring seamless customer journeys

Written by by Dorcas Adisa

Published on  June 26, 2023

Reading time  13 minutes

Enhanced customer satisfaction, high customer engagement, and increased revenue are good reasons to develop an omnichannel customer experience. Still, it takes more than integrating multiple channels to build a successful one.

It takes a strategic approach, continuous optimization, a customer-centric mindset and a well-planned omnichannel strategy to make it all possible.

This guide introduces the benefits of a successful omnichannel strategy, the challenges of implementing one and best practices for creating an omnichannel experience that delights customers and drives business results.

What you will learn about omnichannel customer experience:

• What is the omnichannel customer experience?

The significance of an integrated customer experience

Unlocking the advantages of an omnichannel approach, omnichannel vs. multichannel: unveiling the key differences, building a cohesive customer experience across channels, enhancing the omnichannel customer experience, examples of successful omnichannel experiences.

Social Customer Care by Sprout Social

What is omnichannel customer experience? 

An omnichannel customer experience is a fully-integrated approach that revolves around delivering a consistent, seamless, and delightful experience to customers across various sales channels. It is a holistic strategy that integrates every customer touchpoint, whether email, social media, or in-person, to provide the best customer experience.

An omnichannel strategy aims to see customer experience differently by creating a unified and personalized customer experience, regardless of the channels they choose to interact with the business. However, it’s important to note that this form of experience does not replace traditional channels; instead, it combines them into a unified strategy.

How effective is your CX strategy?

To answer the above question, conduct a customer experience (CX) audit of your existing strategy, including:

• Document existing strategies: Record and analyze the current approaches that your business is taking to the CX experience across all channels. That includes understanding the goals, processes, and technologies currently being used.
• Identify key customer touchpoints : Track your key touchpoints to understand every interaction a customer has with your brand. Analyze each touchpoint to evaluate its strengths, weaknesses, and areas of improvement.
• Compare customer ratings: Gather feedback to evaluate the customer’s experience with your product and customer service . Collect quantitative data and qualitative data for an extra layer of insights.
• Benchmark against competitors: Compare your CX metrics to industry standards to identify if you’re falling short and recognize opportunities to differentiate yourself.

You can read more in our guide to learn how to build a winning CX strategy .

Creating an integrated customer experience is crucial in today’s digital landscape for numerous reasons, including:

• It boosts customer satisfaction, loyalty, and promotes advocacy: Customers who have a great experience across all channels are more likely to remain paying customers. Every positive experience fosters loyalty and encourages customers to become brand advocates.
• Optimized Resource Allocation: Implementing an effective omnichannel strategy allows businesses to optimize resource allocation by identifying the most impactful channels to invest the most effort. This helps companies to streamline operations, reduce costs, and increase profit.
• Creates a consistent brand experience: An integrated customer-centric experience provides a consistent brand experience for users across every touchpoint, whether chatting with a customer support agent over the phone or visiting a physical store.
• Enable teams to pivot quickly and make data-driven decisions: Businesses adopting an integrated experience use analytics and customer behavior data to personalize customer journeys and introduce new features.
• Increased revenue by improving customer retention and attracting new customers: When businesses understand customers, it’s easier to address their pain points, anticipate their needs, and build products that meet their expectations.

Apart from integrating multiple channels to provide a frictionless experience, an omnichannel approach can impact your business in other ways:

1. Create a Seamless customer journey from pre-purchase to post-purchase

Interrupted transitions in the customer journey create friction, frustrate customers, and disrupt their user experience. In an omnichannel experience, customers can easily switch between channels and enjoy continuity, resulting in a more enjoyable journey.

2. High customer retention and loyalty due to accurate segmentation and personalization.

Omnichannel experiences provide a complete picture of the customer across multiple channels so that brands can have a unified view of their interactions and history. Leverage this data to segment customers and create a personalized experience based on their unique needs, preferences, and behaviors.

3. Supports multi-channel engagement within a single interaction

On average, 51% of companies use at least eight channels to interact with customers, including emails, social media, websites, phones, live chat, and in-store. An omnichannel experience allows consumers to reach out to companies on their preferred channels and receive a quick and helpful response from a customer service expert.

4. Create a consistent customer experience across any channel to reduce customer effort.

Embracing an omnichannel approach creates a consistent experience across channels. This means customers can trust that they will receive a similar level of service, quality, convenience, and information regardless of the channel they use. This way, it’s easy to eliminate variations in the customer journey, making it an effortless and frictionless experience.

5. Increased revenue due to higher customer engagement, more conversions, and more sales

When customers have a positive experience, they actively interact and engage with the business. This creates more opportunities for brands to create deeper customer connections and build product loyalty.

Omnichannel and multichannel are strategies for communicating with customers, with two distinct goals.

The term “omnichannel” translates as “available in all channels,” meaning that a customer can switch between any sales channel, like a website or a physical store, and still get a consistent brand experience. Multichannel means “many channels,” meaning customers can interact with many channels, but their experience isn’t unified.

Omnichannel focuses on the customer and utilizes every available channel to provide a seamless experience, whereas multichannel focuses on the product and uses multiple channels to promote it.

Implementing an omnichannel experience requires data synchronization of customer history and alignment between teams to eliminate channel gaps. On the other hand, multichannels operate independently within their respective silos, sometimes resulting in disjointed touchpoints.

There’s no hard rule for building a cohesive omnichannel customer experience. However, there are practical tips and strategies you can follow to help you build a successful one.

1. Understand your customer’s expectations. 

There’s no better place to start with customer experience than to understand your customers’ wants and needs. An omnichannel strategy aims to create a positive experience, and failing to understand the customer will result in a misalignment between a business and its customers.

To understand your customers, build buyer personas to represent the attributes of your most engaged audience and collect data on their behavioral patterns, preferences, demographics, and needs.

Depending on your customer base, you may have sufficient data from existing customers to create a comprehensive persona. Otherwise, refer to your preliminary research or contact prospective customers for meaningful insights.

2.  Chart the path of the customer journey

Identify the key milestones and touchpoints customers encounter throughout their journey and categorize them based on the stages of the customer journey (pre-purchase to post-purchase). This will help identify where an omnichannel experience can be implemented, such as a live chat pop-up.

Simply put, customer touchpoints are every interaction that a customer has with a brand through a website, social media, or physical stores. Use a visual tool like Miro to organize your data, capture the entire journey (including the stages, touchpoints, emotions, motivations, and pain points), and map the current state of your existing customers.

Once your customer journey map is complete, analyze it for patterns and trends to identify high friction points, opportunities for personalization, and potential gaps in your marketing or sales funnel.

 3. Amplifying insights through customer feedback

Whether good or bad, customer feedback plays a huge role in optimizing your omnichannel customer experience. Listening to what customers say about their experience will help you identify areas for improvement. You can collect customer feedback through the following:

• Run user feedback surveys to gather contextual insights from existing customers.
• Use a social listening tool like Sprout Social to capture conversations that people are having about your brand on social media.
• Conducting interviews with individual users or focus groups
• Analyze customer support tickets and online reviews to get insight into satisfaction levels.
• Talk to stakeholders who regularly interact with customers.

4. Harnessing appropriate technologies for success

Managing customer data across multiple channels can be challenging, especially if you have a huge customer base or a complex product. This is where businesses must leverage advanced technology.

Integration and automation are at the core of an omnichannel experience. Consider integrating multiple technologies like customer relationship management (CRM) systems, marketing automation tools, omnichannel communication platforms, and data analytics.

CRMs like Salesforce can help you store and manage customer data, like contact information, purchase history, and behavior across multiple channels, to personalize your product offerings.

Use automation software to automate and optimize your omnichannel marketing campaign across different platforms. Chatbots also provide instant and automated responses to customers’ queries, so they don’t wait for long.

5. Identifying key stakeholders in the process

Delivering a cohesive omnichannel customer experience becomes easier when all parties are aligned and working towards a similar goal.

By identifying key stakeholders (both internal and external) early on, you can involve them in the planning and implementation to get them on the same page regarding brand image consistency. This can help prevent any issues or delays down the line.

Segment their roles, rights, security, and access so each stakeholder can play their part. Involving stakeholders can help you build buy-in and support for the omnichannel strategy, which can be crucial for success.

6. Optimize your post-purchase experience 

After making a purchase, ensure that customers don’t feel alone in figuring out how to use your product. Why not take a step further by optimizing your post-purchase experience?

You can send out personalized recommendations on how to use their new purchase. A great example is Dossier, a perfume brand that sends personalized tips to help customers smell nicer for longer.

Here’s how to enhance or elevate your omnichannel strategy to create an exceptional customer experience before, during, and after purchasing.

Understand your customers for targeted engagement. 

To truly understand your customers, go beyond analyzing data points. Customers have unique likes, intentions, and needs, which vary depending on innovations, seasons, or trends. Actively engage with them. Learn to delight and excite them without overwhelming them. Tools like Sprout’s social media engagement tool help you understand what customers expect from you and how to address them.

Complement your market research with data sources. Look through social media analytics to see how customers use your products or services and what content resonates with them the most.

Learn from industry leaders

It’s one thing to learn about building an omnichannel experience; quite a different ball game to build a successful one. Why not start by learning from industry leaders?

These are companies that have a successful track record of creating seamless experiences across their channels. Take Starbucks, for example. On the surface, they’re like any other coffee shop, but with an immersive omnichannel strategy, they transformed their brand into an $80 billion business .

Pick the top 2-3 successful companies in your industry. Study their strategies and approaches to gain insight into their omnichannel’s strengths and weaknesses. For example, how do they interact with their audience on social media? This will help you know what to capitalize on and what common pitfalls to avoid.

Enhance mobile capabilities

At least 85% of time spent on smartphones is spent using apps. Many customers interact with brands through smartphones, so businesses must optimize their mobile capabilities. This covers your apps’ functionality, performance, responsiveness, design, and security.

By enhancing mobile capabilities, brands can leverage mobile-specific features for more personalization. Features like location-based offers and push notifications can deliver personalized and contextually relevant content to users, enhancing the omnichannel experience.

Secure support 

Providing an omnichannel experience with the right customer support increases the effectiveness of your strategy. When customers encounter an issue, like a bug, make it easy to resolve by providing user-friendly support channels.

Looking to create omnichannel support? Here are some ideas to help you:

• Create a knowledge base to help customers find answers to questions, guides, or troubleshooting instructions.
• Use cutting-edge technologies like chatbots to give personalized responses.
• Provide email support so customers can send their queries and receive personalized responses.
• Live chat with a customer service rep
• Create an online community where customers can ask questions and get help from a company rep or other members.
• Phone chat, sms messaging, or video chat.

Streamline response times 

Fast response time is an important attribute of an effective omnichannel strategy. Based on The Sprout Social Index™ , we found that 23% of customers expect a fast response to their queries within two hours. And 30% of customers expect a response within the same day.

Streamlining response times can help:

• Reduce wait time and distribute support volume to prevent individual channels from getting bombarded with tickets.
• Alert customer service agents of customers’ intentions and previous actions for a faster resolution time

Using a tool like Sprout’s Smart Inbox, customer care teams can manage incoming messages from multiple platforms, prioritize responses, and access important customer data, all in one place.

Evaluate content for consistent messaging

Maintaining consistent messaging across all channels helps reinforce your brand identity, so anyone who comes across an ad, a social post, or a landing page understands your product.

Every channel has unique features and limitations, and each caters to a diverse audience that consumes content in varying formats. You want to keep your messaging consistent across each channel but not identical to avoid redundancy.

A good example is how Starbucks adapts its content to fit the context of its social channels when introducing the Java Mint Frappuccino. Their Instagram post comes with a short video and an even shorter copy to introduce the flavor excitingly.

Their content is much longer on Facebook because the audience reads more content. Each flavor is introduced with colorful emojis alongside images to match the flavor.

So, how do you evaluate content for consistent messaging? One way is to create a content calendar to monitor content regularly. Sprout’s content calendar includes tools that help you curate your social media calendar and collaborate with teams outside of marketing.

Extend omnichannel strategies offline

Your omnichannel strategy must extend beyond online channels for customers to have a fully immersive experience. Someone should be able to start their shopping experience online and pick up where they left off when interacting with your physical store.

Even with different channels, offline extensions allow channel integrations so customers can transition smoothly between touchpoints without losing context. By expanding your omnichannel strategies offline, you broaden your reach, tap into a larger audience, and reach customers who don’t have an active online presence.

Transform In-Store Experiences

Unlike online shopping, an in-store experience is more personal and emotional for customers. Elevate your customers’ shopping experience by combining decorative and visual elements, including the right colors, layouts, lighting, and music.

More importantly, provide great customer service. As soon as a customer walks into your store, let them easily find a company rep that can answer their questions and help them find what they’re looking for. When brands provide great service, happy customers will spread the word.

Select Channels Strategically

Truth is, you can choose to start building an omnichannel experience on all channels, but that would require a huge commitment. Surviving on every channel is almost impossible, so pick one and build from there. Dig into social analytics to identify the social channel with the highest engagement and optimize it.

Sprout’s audience listening tool can also help you research the type of content your audience is consuming, what your competitors are doing, and, most importantly, how you can do better.

Maintain consistency across the customer journey

To remain consistent, you need clear policies and values that your brand must be known for. Document this in a brand-style guide to get every team on the same page and present a unified vision of your company to the public.

Some components of your brand style guide include the mission statement, typography, color palette, and common vocabulary. Go into the tiniest details. For example, if your brand is known for sustainability, it must reflect your choice of materials or color. Also, organize training sessions to help your staff understand your style guide. Every employee must understand what the brand stands for and their role in protecting it.

Now that we’ve gone through the basics of an omnichannel customer experience, let’s look at some examples of successful omnichannel experiences.

Apple’s integrated omnichannel experience

Apple’s first approach to building a great product is delivering a world-class customer experience. This includes building a seamless digital-physical experience, so customers have the same retail encounter in the US, UK, or anywhere in the world.

What they do well:

• Great in-store experience with highly-trained sales specialists armed with their IPads and ready to help. Their expertise makes it easy for customers to build trust in the brand.
• Embrace an omnichannel retail strategy so customers can pre-order a new product online before it launch and reserve it for pick-up at a local store.
• Remain consistent and true to the Apple identity: clean, smooth, and techy.
• Create an immersive ecosystem so customers can easily connect their devices or switch to a new one.

Warby Parker’s unique omnichannel retail experience

Finding the right pair of frames for your glasses is a miserable experience, but Warby Parker is changing that experience for users. The company has a unique omnichannel retail experience that allows customers to shop for eyewear both online and in-store.

Customers can start personalizing their experience by browsing glasses on the website, choosing five frames, and trying on each frame at home with the Home Try-On program for five days. Their in-store experience is optimized to promote social interaction between customers while shopping.

Warby Parker also invests in virtual try-ons with augmented reality (AR) technology and vision testing technology so customers can find glasses that fit, and book prescription check-ups, and eye exams from the app.

Mbank personalized omnichannel experience

Mbak is a leading digital bank that offers a seamless and personalized omnichannel experience to its customers. Omnichannel means that customers can interact with the bank through multiple channels, such as in-person, social media, or their mobile app.

Mbank focuses on personalization. They focus on collecting customer data in one place to track their interactions across all channels. For example, they use data to understand customers’ preferences and behaviors and tailor their products accordingly.

They also constantly adopt new technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, biometrics, and other emerging technologies to offer smart and secure solutions to their customers.

Here are some amazing results they’ve achieved after implementing an omnichannel experience.

Embrace the power of omnichannel to serve every customer

Ultimately, we’re designing experiences for people. It’s almost impossible to do that if we don’t understand their needs, expectations, and where they’re coming from. Designing a great omnichannel experience is all about collecting customer data and leveraging this data to build a seamless customer experience for your business.

Get started with a free Sprout Social trial to discover how we can help you develop your omnichannel experience through our comprehensive dashboard.

• Customer Experience

How a sentiment score improves your brand strategy

• Marketing Disciplines

What is a customer journey map and how to make your own [examples included]

• Customer Care

How to build customer relationships with social media

The role of AI in creating a more human customer experience

• Now on slide

Build and grow stronger relationships on social

Sprout Social helps you understand and reach your audience, engage your community and measure performance with the only all-in-one social media management platform built for connection.

What is Omni-Channel? 20 Top Omni-Channel Experience Examples

Updated: February 07, 2024

Published: June 09, 2023

The more technology advances, the more it's integrated into our daily lives and the lines between what we do online and in real life have begun to blur. As people change their behaviors, marketers, salespeople, and customer support reps will need to react.

Instead of thinking of a separate desktop, mobile, tablet, and even an Apple Watch experience, we'll need to pursue one, holistic approach — an omni-channel experience that customers can use whenever they want.

In this post, we’ll go over what omni-channel means and how you can use omni-channel experiences to create profitable marketing, sales, and service strategies.

• Omni-Channel Definition
• Omni-Channel Experience Definition
• Omni-Channel vs. Multi-Channel Experience

Omni-Channel Marketing

How to build an omni-channel marketing campaign, omni-channel marketing examples, omni-channel marketing platforms, omni-channel retail, omni-channel.

Omni-channel, also spelled omnichannel, is a lead nurturing and user engagement approach in which a company gives access to their products, offers, and support services to customers or prospects on all channels, platforms, and devices.

Instead of only offering support on my desktop website, for example, I'd also offer support through Facebook Messenger, live chat, email, and phone.

Adopting an omni-channel approach in your marketing, sales, and service strategies has plenty of benefits. The advantages include:

Free Customer Journey Template

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free templates.

• Buyer's Journey Template
• Future State Template
• Day-in-the-Life Template

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Greater reach.

With an omni-channel retail, marketing, or service strategy in place, you’ll be reaching your customers where they are and in more places.

They no longer have to search and search to find you because, regardless of the channel they’re on, your team or your products are only a click, an email, a direct message, or a phone call away.

Plus, when you’re on more channels, opportunities for exposure and building brand awareness with new audiences is even higher.

Seamless customer experience.

Omni-channel lets customers interact with your company across multiple different channels, but still have the same consistent experience. It also allows them to choose their favorite channel for getting service so they don’t have to, say, get off Instagram and pick up the phone. They can just find your business profile and send you a DM — a seamless experience within one single app.

A frictionless process leaves customers more satisfied, and satisfied customers are more likely to become loyal customers.

Boosted customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Your customers will be happier in the long term if they feel they have several methods to reach your customer service and sales teams, or if they can purchase your product easily regardless of their device or preferred platform.

For example, the number of consumers shopping on social media has grown significantly in the past few years , and, in turn, so has the number of social media users who have sent a DM for customer service (27% increase between 2022 and 2023, to be exact).

Customer satisfaction is the key to reducing customer churn and keeping them returning to you for their needs, and satisfied customers become loyal customers.

Faster issue resolution.

Customers want fast service. They expect quick resolutions, but service teams sometimes struggle to provide it .

Offering omnichannel customer service is a solution to this problem. You have the chance to meet customers where they are, exactly when they’re looking for support, lowering your average time to resolution and setting customers up for success.

If you have dedicated reps for each of the channels you offer, you’re lowering resolution time even more because there is someone ready to help as soon as a customer reaches out.

Increased profits.

If and when your prospects are ready to buy, they’ll find it much easier to make a purchase if they can find your product on multiple platforms and channels. Offering a multi-channel retail experience also ensures it’s easier for them to purchase from you again or renew their subscriptions, securing recurring revenue.

As you can see, creating an omni-channel experience for your customers is critical for your business's success. That said, what is the omni-channel experience?

What is the omni-channel experience?

The omni-channel experience is marketing, selling, and serving customers on all channels to create an integrated and cohesive customer experience no matter how or where a customer reaches out. The experience should be the same for customers regardless of the platform or method they choose to use.

Your customers can shop online from a desktop or mobile device, by telephone, or in a brick and mortar store and the experience should be equally seamless.

It's important here to distinguish an omni-channel experience from a multi-channel experience. Essentially, it comes down to the depth of the integration between the channels and platforms your business is on.

Omni-Channel vs. Multi-Channel

In a multi-channel environment, a user has access to a variety of communication options that aren’t necessarily synchronized or connected. However, during an omni-channel experience, there are not only multiple channels, but the channels are connected so you can move between them seamlessly.

The difference between omni-channel and multi-channel experiences comes down to two distinctions:

• All omni-channel experiences use multiple channels, but not all multi-channel experiences are omni-channel. You can have amazing mobile marketing, engaging social media campaigns, and a well-designed website, but if they don't work together, they don’t create an omni-channel customer experience.
• Omni-channel experiences account for all devices, channels, and platforms, whereas a multi-channel strategy might include two or three.

The multi-channel experience is what most businesses invest in today. They’ll have a website, blog, Facebook, and Twitter and use each platform to engage with customers. However, in most cases, the customer still lacks a seamless experience and consistent messaging across each of these channels.

An omni-channel experience accounts for each platform and device a customer will use to interact with the company — and also creates an equally efficient and positive experience across all platforms.

Creating an omni-channel experience is especially important in retail because whether or not you have an omni-channel retail strategy can determine how much you sell.

Omni-channel marketing is a method where businesses promote their products and services across all channels, devices, and platforms using unified messaging, cohesive visuals, and consistent collateral. Omni-channel marketing ensures you reach customers where they are with a relevant and on-brand offer.

By uniting the strengths of each communication channel, marketing teams can use omni-channel marketing to deliver a more effective brand message. They can also reach target buyers at the right time, increasing the chances of converting them into a lead.

Omni-channel marketing uses the customers' perspectives and interests to optimize the consistency of the company's marketing messages. For instance, on Instagram and Facebook, you might only target users with a certain interest and create collateral that appeals to them specifically.

Omni-channel marketing shouldn’t be done on a whim, though. I recommend creating an organized omni-channel marketing strategy to ensure you always deliver the right content to your prospective buyers at just the right time.

Below I’ll go over how you can start implementing your own omni-channel experience and highlight examples from brands that are already making moves to offer these experiences.

An omni-channel marketing strategy is consistent messaging, visuals, and positioning statements across all channels, platforms, and devices. It's a seamless brand experience for customers and ensures that your brand is presented the same way from platform to platform.

Keep in mind that omni-channel marketing campaigns positively impact your sales and service departments, too. You’re showing customers that you’re on all of the channels and platforms they’re on, so they’ll know to expect a similar experience whether they’re shopping or getting support.

1. Start with the basics: Your website and social media channels.

Creating an omni-channel experience is a slow process. You don’t need to be everywhere all at once; you’ll get there in time. Start with your website and social media channels and nail those down before moving on to other platforms. Ensure that you’re posting consistently and engaging with users who reach out to you via those channels.

If you consistently engage with users on Instagram but don’t answer on Facebook, they’ll notice. Focusing on one and neglecting the other will make your brand look inconsistent and unprofessional.

A shared inbox can be useful for this; putting your social messages, emails, and chat threads into one place. Some social management tools, like the one in Marketing Hub, will even connect your social campaigns to your CRM , so you can keep track of visits and leads.

2. Seek to solve for the customer every step of the way.

While I understand that it’s important to diversify your presence, adding new channels to your omni-channel strategy without considering your customers isn’t worth it.

Why? It’s not just for your company to get more visibility or for you to make more sales. Those are tangible benefits to establishing a strategy, yes, but you mainly want to make sure your customers have an easy and issue-free experience.

When you add a new channel to your omni-channel strategy, do it to solve for the customer along every step of the way.

3. Use the same messaging across channels, but beware of using boilerplate content.

To create a consistent experience, use the same messaging across channels. For example, if I’m running an ad on multiple social platforms, I can vary the ad format for what performs best on each channel, but my messaging needs to be the same to maintain the overall purpose of my campaign. I want someone to be able to see my product announcement email and understand that it’s the same product campaign they just saw a video for on TikTok.

A slight variation in wording across channels can also be important as you can be penalized by search engines and social media platforms for duplicate, boilerplate content. Instead of always using the same phrases, create a consistent brand voice that allows you to mix it up without looking inconsistent.

4. Give customers a device- and platform-appropriate CTA.

Every time you engage with customers on certain channels — whether it’s on an ad, an organic post, a private message, a phone call, or an email — you should end the engagement with a CTA. That CTA should, of course, be device- and platform-appropriate.

For instance, I would have my social media ad lead to my mobile website, not the desktop version. I’d close my email with a link to schedule a meeting, not with a link that triggers an automatic download because my customer might not be using a mobile device to check their email.

Ensure that the CTA doesn’t throw off the customer and only extends the seamless experience you’ve already provided.

Pro Tip: If you use HubSpot's free CMS , you can try out different CTA buttons, pop-ups, and sticky CTAs. You can also A/B test variations, so that you can be sure you're creating an effective omni-channel experience.

5. Create an app if needed.

I have to point out that this step may not be relevant to you, depending on your industry and product.

However, mobile apps bring various benefits to customers and businesses, regardless of their size. For example,

• Ease of access - Many people have smartphones, so if you have an app, customers can easily access it from a device they usually don’t let leave their sights.
• Communication opportunities - With an app, you have the opposition to send push notifications to users to notify them of important events, whether that be flash sales or important product information.

If you’re a small company, you can hire a freelance developer to create an app . Just be sure to have a legitimate reason for offering an app and to think through every functionality. Read this article to learn how to make an app and the steps to do it successfully.

Looking for some inspiration? Read on to find some high-quality examples of omni-channel experiences.

• Virgin Atlantic
• Bank of America
• Benefit Cosmetics
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Chrome

It's one thing to discuss the theory and practice of omni-channel customer experience, and another to see the companies that already implement these strategies. Here are a few that I admire most:

Timberland creates a connective customer experience in its brick-and-mortar locations by utilizing near-field communication technology , which is the software responsible for data transfer tools like Apple Pay and Android Pay. This tech allows users to tap their mobile devices against a chip that wirelessly transfers information between the two devices.

Timberland makes unique use of this tech and gives in-store shoppers access to a tablet to press against products to learn more about them. Instead of seeking out a store clerk, customers can get information independently and ask for help when needed rather than as a first resort. Shoppers also get product recommendations as they shop, and the personalization software learns their interests.

• The individualized experience for the customer highlights products that may be often overlooked.

Walgreens creates an omni-channel pharmaceutical experience by using its mobile app as a primary tool for brand communications. Customers can use the app to check and refill prescriptions without having to call their pharmacy and set reminders that alert them if a prescription needs to be renewed.

• While the Walgreens app doesn't have any groundbreaking features, it’s extremely convenient because everything can be done through the app.

13. Topshop

• The attention-grabbing nature of billboards makes this approach more effective in other channels as well.

14. Pepperfry

Once there, customers tour the studio with a Pepperfry design consultant and make a purchase after making sure they’re sure, eliminating buyer’s remorse. If they’re still unsure after a visit, they can return home and make a purchase online. This reduces friction between customers and salespeople, as leads don’t feel pressured to make an in-store purchase.

This investment seems to be pay off, as the company reports that 10-15% of its sales come from these studio locations.

• Intertwining the online experience with the in-person experience makes it easy for customers to make choices about products.

15. Benefit Cosmetics

After hosting a competition in the UK, Benefit Cosmetics traveled across the region and provided brow bars to its contest winners as part of its "BrowMobile" campaign. It also hosted a beauty drive-thru where customers could receive free eyebrow waxes and product samples.

The company's former head of brand activation, Kyra White , noted that this campaign "shows customers that we're happy to go to them anywhere. Plus it's Instagrammable, which is great for a brand like ours which doesn't do traditional above-the-line advertising."

White isn't exaggerating either, as this campaign helped the company increase its market share for brow-products to 60% in the UK market.

• Making products in a way that’s mobile adds a whole new channel for marketing.

Don't forget to share this post!

Related articles.

How AI Image Misuse Made a World of Miscommunication [Willy's Chocolate Experience]

7 Ways to Delight Your Customers This Holiday Season

14 Customer Experience Fails that Companies Can Learn From

How Customer Experience Has Evolved Over the Last Decade [+ 2024 Trends]

Memorable Examples of AR in Customer Experience [+Tips for Implementing the Technology]

Digital Customer Experience: The Ultimate Guide for 2023

How to Implement a Hybrid Customer Service Strategy That Works [Expert Tips]

User Flows: 8 Tips For Creating A Super Smooth User Experience

11 Best Practices for B2B Customer Experience

Customer Experience vs. User Experience: What’s the Difference? [+ Examples]

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free customer journey map templates.

Service Hub provides everything you need to delight and retain customers while supporting the success of your whole front office

Mapping the Omnichannel Customer Journey in 2023

In 2023, the way in which the consumer engages with a brand has changed significantly. Marketers need to map journeys across various touchpoints and make sure they work seamlessly. This is at the heart of an omnichannel strategy.

A recent report by Arm Treasure Data and Forbes Insight in 2020 shows that 75 percent of consumers are somewhat or very likely to buy from a company based on their experience. This is regardless of price or product. In fact, 77% consider such experiences to be just as important as the quality of a company’s products or services.

Understanding and mapping consumer experience throughout the journey, then, has become an even more critical part of a marketer’s job. As the Arm, Treasure Data Global Head of Marketing Tom Treanor says: “Companies need to look hard at their customer touchpoints, both in-store and online, and understand what their customers value most and where improvements can be made.”

For consumers in the US,  a recent report  indicates that the most important factors across touchpoints are:

• Convenience
• Knowledgeable help
• Friendly service

To help you to map and design such experiences in 2023, we’re going to cover:

• Types of channels and touchpoints 
• How to map the consumer journey
• The challenges to overcome
• Some best practice examples

A 2021 survey of business professionals revealed that their top business priority for the next five years was to improve customer experience. Let’s begin our own journey towards this.

Types of Channels and Touchpoints in 2023

A customer’s journey arises from the interaction with various brand touchpoints.  In 2020 , almost 90% of retail consumers started with digital channels.

This doesn’t mean the role of offline is unimportant.  In one study , 78 percent of marketers believed that digital marketing was important to their overall marketing efforts, while 39 percent said the same about offline campaigns.

In the online space, some consumer channels for touchpoints would be social media, e-mail, and advertising.

The role of mobile in online touchpoints has become increasingly important in 2023. More than half of all web traffic is mobile, and a smartphone analytics study  predicts a 25% increase in mobile traffic by 2025.

Turning to offline, some common channels for touchpoints are direct mail, in-store interaction, and mainstream advertising. All the above should be matched with a high degree of customer service for the best results.

On a granular level, consumers can interact with product demos, checkout forms, giving feedback, signing up for subscriptions and notifications, and more.

It’s important for the omnichannel marketer to focus on providing a consistent and frictionless experience across touchpoints. Today’s consumer uses  an average of  six touchpoints. Nearly 50% regularly use more than four.

How to Map the Consumer Journey

Omnichannel touchpoint mapping consists of outlining all the consumer interactions with your brand. It identifies each step of the buyer’s journey. It allows brands to visualize and link every such experience a customer has.

There are many ways to create such maps, from connected notes to spreadsheets. The process starts with research and data gathering. Consumer questionnaires and user testing are some ways to do this.

From this, consumer profiles can be created. These are the behavioral and demographic characteristics of your main consumers. For example, younger first-time users, older loyal users, occasional users, primarily digital users, and so on.

Based on the main segments, the next step is to list out all the touchpoints that they use. Research should also indicate consumer actions, obstacles, and desired outcomes during the interactions.

After this, the omnichannel marketer will check for consistency across all of the touchpoints and try to create a seamless experience across all of them. In some cases, touchpoints can be mapped in terms of how they enable the consumer to move up the marketing funnel. There are several factors to consider, such as:

• Consideration

Gaps can now be identified and plugged. For example, is customer service lacking in a few touchpoints? Is there a missing touchpoint between sales and after-sales to create loyalty? Is there a touchpoint that does not link to the next?  Here’s a powerful way  to visualize customer journeys, identify the drop-offs and engage them from one single dashboard.

To sum up, omnichannel marketers can map consumer journeys by:

• Creating profiles
• Listing and linking touchpoints
• Identifying and plugging gaps

For more advice on real-time consumer journey mapping and how to make use of this powerful tool to influence customer experience, do  read this .

The Challenges to Overcome

As with any other marketing effort to streamline and improve activities, there are certain challenges and constraints to be overcome.  An earlier survey  of retailers and the omnichannel experience by Price Waterhouse identified some of them.

• Budgets : Linking and strengthening touchpoints involves an outlay. Often, a business case has to be made for this, competing with other spending such as infrastructure.
• Data : For an effective mapping of customer journeys, integrated data is essential. This means integrating all the information that could have been collected separately by various sales and marketing functions.
• Skills and Resources : Over half the companies in  a Forbes survey  a few years ago lacked the analytic skills and tools necessary to analyze data meaningfully. Upgrading of such skills should be a priority for the marketer who seeks to extract meaning from data to create effective consumer journey maps.

Examples of Omnichannel Journey Best Practices

Here are a few examples of companies that have mapped consumer journeys to make a significant difference:

Use-Case 1: Real-time, Personalized, and Hyper-local Alerts

1Weather is one of the top-rated Android weather apps that provides local weather predictions. It has more than 8 million active users, of which 95% are from the U.S. They had the challenge of understanding consumer behavior and providing real-time, personalized, and hyper-local alerts. The brand noticed lower page sessions within the app due to a lack of re-engagement. By mapping users’ app behavior and location preferences, they increased opens and overall engagement rate. More details  can be found here .

Use-Case 2: Integrating An Overview with Navigation Tools

For some time, Disney has been seen as extremely skilled in mapping consumer journeys for an effortless omnichannel experience.  The website  and apps give you an overview of the attractions to expect and tools to plan your stay there.

At the park, the same devices allow you to navigate your way around and offer helpful tips to get the most from your time there.

Use-Case 3: Consistency, Creativity, and Willingness to Experiment

Fashion giant Burberry has used some form of omnichannel marketing  from the start.  They have shown consistency, creativity, and willingness to experiment. They knew that consumers would be looking for Burberry signatures such as a trench coat and tartan design from the beginning of their experience and so made sure these were in focus both offline and online. In their journey mapping, they aimed for consistency. Dedicated customer service accounts and weather advice for fashion were other innovative touchpoints.

What to Keep In Mind

To sum up, omnichannel marketers should focus on providing a consistent experience across touchpoints, integrating online and offline.

There are several ways to map the journey of today’s consumers, and it all starts with research and data.

Skills and resources need to be upgraded to take full advantage of the omnichannel marketing opportunity. It’s also important to remove data silos to gain an overall picture.

An omnichannel journey is what consumers expect nowadays, and brands need to make it a fulfilling experience. That way, they can be seamlessly moved up the marketing funnel.

Subscribe to Our Library Updates

Be the first to access actionable reports, guides, tips, videos, podcasts from experts in Customer Engagement, retention and more!

Related Articles

Here are actionable resources we've curated for you!

5 Little-Known Factors That Could Affect Customer Activation

5 Winning WhatsApp Marketing Campaign Examples to Get You Inspired in 2023

5 Actionable Tips to Drive WhatsApp Engagement and Growth

How to Craft the Perfect Customer Purchase Journey in 2023

Unlock the Key to Customer Satisfaction: A Comprehensive Guide to Customer Journey Maps

Capitalize on Mobile Personalization with 5 ROI-driven Strategies

Please wait while you are redirected to the right page...

Share on Mastodon

• Skip to main content
• Skip to primary sidebar
• Skip to footer
• QuestionPro

• Solutions Industries Gaming Automotive Sports and events Education Government Travel & Hospitality Financial Services Healthcare Cannabis Technology Use Case NPS+ Communities Audience Contactless surveys Mobile LivePolls Member Experience GDPR Positive People Science 360 Feedback Surveys
• Resources Blog eBooks Survey Templates Case Studies Training Help center

Omnichannel Customer Journey: Strategies & Solutions

We live in a time of seamless shopping experiences, where customers seamlessly transition from online browsing to in-store purchases without skipping a beat. So mastering the art of omnichannel customer journeys isn’t just a strategy; it’s necessary.

Imagine browsing your favorite store’s website, eyeing that perfect pair of shoes. But wait, you’re moving, so switch to their mobile app. Later, you stroll into their physical store and seamlessly pick up where you left off. 

That’s the magic of omnichannel customer journeys—a strategic symphony of online, offline, and everything in between. Join us as we unravel the secrets behind crafting these seamless experiences, exploring key components, overcoming challenges, and unlocking the benefits, all with some help from QuestionPro CX. Let’s dive in!

What is Omnichannel Customer Journey?

An omnichannel customer journey is a strategic approach businesses take to provide customers with a seamless and integrated experience across all channels and touchpoints.

This means ensuring consistency in messaging, branding, and service quality whether customers interact with the brand online, in-store, through social media, mobile apps, or any other channel.

Unlike multichannel strategies, where each channel operates independently, an omnichannel approach aims to create a unified experience where customers can transition between channels effortlessly without feeling disjointed. 

For example, customers might start browsing products on a company’s website, continue their research on a mobile app, and then purchase in-store, with all interactions seamlessly connected.

Omnichannel customer journey aims to meet customers wherever they are and provide them with a consistent, personalized, and convenient experience throughout their interaction with the brand. 

By integrating various channels and touchpoints, businesses can better understand customer behavior, preferences, and needs, ultimately driving higher engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction.

The Components of Omnichannel Customer Journey

Omnichannel customer journey comprises several key components that create a seamless and cohesive customer experience across all touchpoints. Understanding these components is essential for businesses looking to optimize their omnichannel strategies.

Here are the main components:

Integration of Channels

Integration involves connecting all business channels and systems to ensure smooth communication and data sharing. This enables customers to transition effortlessly between channels without experiencing disruptions or inconsistencies.

Personalization

Personalization entails tailoring interactions and experiences to meet customers’ needs, preferences, and behaviors. Businesses can deliver targeted messages, product recommendations, and promotions that resonate with each customer by leveraging data and insights.

Consistent Branding

Consistent branding ensures that the brand identity and messaging remain uniform across all channels. This includes logos, colors, fonts, tone of voice, and visual style. Consistency reinforces brand recognition and builds trust with customers.

Cross-Channel Analytics

Cross-channel analytics involves gathering and analyzing data from various sources to gain insights into customer behavior and preferences across different touchpoints. This data-driven approach enables businesses to optimize their strategies, identify opportunities for improvement, and make informed decisions.

Seamless Customer Experience

A seamless customer experience means providing a frictionless journey for customers as they interact with the brand across multiple channels. This involves ensuring that transitions between channels are smooth, information is readily accessible, and interactions are consistent and intuitive.

Omnichannel Communication

Omnichannel communication involves engaging with customers across all channels cohesively and cohesively. This includes email marketing, social media engagement, mobile notifications, in-store promotions, and customer service interactions. Consistent messaging and timing enhance the overall customer experience.

Unified Customer View

A unified customer view refers to having a complete and comprehensive understanding of each customer’s interactions, preferences, and history across all channels. This allows businesses to deliver personalized experiences and anticipate customer needs more effectively.

Customer Journey Mapping

A customer journey map involves visualizing and analyzing customers’ entire path from initial awareness to post-purchase engagement. Omnichannel customer journey mapping helps businesses identify touchpoints, pain points, and opportunities for improvement.

Steps To Create an Efficient Omnichannel Customer Journey

Creating an efficient omnichannel customer journey requires careful planning and execution. Here are steps to help you craft a strategy that seamlessly integrates all channels and delivers personalized experiences to your customers:

1. Understand Your Audience

Start by deeply understanding your target audience. Analyze demographic data, psychographic traits, purchase behaviors, and preferred communication channels. This insight will help you tailor your omnichannel strategy to meet your customers’ needs and preferences.

2. Map the Customer Journey

Identify the different touchpoints and channels through which customers interact with your brand. Map out all the customer journeys, from initial awareness to post-purchase support. Consider the various stages of the journey and opportunities for engagement at each touchpoint.

3. Integrate Channels

Seamless integration of all channels is crucial for providing a cohesive omnichannel experience. Invest in technology solutions that enable data synchronization and communication between different platforms. This integration ensures that customers can transition seamlessly between channels without disruptions.

4. Personalize Interactions

Leverage customer data to personalize interactions across all channels. Tailor messaging, offers, and recommendations based on individual preferences, behaviors, and past customer interactions. Personalization enhances engagement and fosters a deeper connection with your brand.

5. Optimize for Mobile

With the increasing use of mobile devices, optimizing your omnichannel strategy for mobile is essential. Ensure that your website, app, and other digital touchpoints are mobile-friendly and provide a seamless experience across devices. Mobile optimization improves accessibility and convenience for customers on the go.

6. Provide Consistent Branding

Maintain consistency in branding, messaging, and design across all channels. A cohesive brand identity reinforces brand recognition and trust among customers. Ensure your brand’s values and personality are consistently communicated across all touchpoints.

7. Empower Your Team

Equip your team with the tools and training they need to deliver exceptional experiences across all channels. Foster a culture of collaboration and communication to ensure alignment across departments. Encourage employees to continuously share customer feedback and insights to improve the omnichannel experience.

8. Measure and Analyze Performance

Implement analytics tools to track the performance of your omnichannel strategy. Monitor key metrics such as conversion rates, customer engagement, and customer satisfaction across channels. Use data-driven insights to identify areas for improvement and optimization.

9. Iterate and Improve

Continuously iterate on your omnichannel strategy based on customer feedback and market trends. Stay agile and responsive to changing customer preferences and behaviors. Experiment with new channels and technologies to stay ahead of the curve and provide innovative experiences to your customers.

Benefits of the Omnichannel Experience

The benefits of the omnichannel experience are multifaceted and can significantly impact a business’s bottom line. Here are some key benefits:

• Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: By providing seamless experiences and personalized interactions, businesses can significantly enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Increased Sales and Conversions: Omnichannel strategies have been shown to drive higher sales and conversion rates by meeting customers’ needs at every stage of their journey.
• Improved Brand Loyalty: Consistent branding and personalized experiences foster stronger emotional connections with customers, leading to increased brand loyalty and advocacy.
• Better Insights and Analytics: By collecting data from multiple channels, businesses gain deeper insights into customer behavior and preferences, enabling more informed decision-making and targeted marketing efforts.

Challenges of Omnichannel Marketing

While omnichannel marketing offers numerous benefits, it also comes with challenges that businesses must navigate. Here are some common challenges associated with omnichannel marketing:

• Integration Complexity: Integrating multiple channels and systems can be complex and challenging, requiring significant investment in technology and infrastructure.
• Consistency Across Channels: Maintaining consistency in branding, messaging, and customer experience across all channels requires careful coordination and alignment across departments.
• Data Security and Privacy: Collecting and managing customer data across channels raises concerns about data security and privacy compliance, requiring businesses to implement robust security measures and adhere to regulatory requirements.
• Organizational Silos: Siloed departments and lack of collaboration can hinder the seamless execution of omnichannel strategies, necessitating a cultural shift towards cross-functional teamwork and communication.

How QuestionPro Cx Can Help in the Omnichannel Customer Journey

QuestionPro CX is a powerful customer experience management platform that can be crucial in optimizing the customer journey omnichannel model. Here’s how QuestionPro CX can help businesses address key challenges and enhance their omnichannel marketing efforts:

• 360-Degree Insights: QuestionPro CX provides holistic insights into customer interactions across various touchpoints, whether online platforms, mobile apps, social media, or in-store experiences. Businesses comprehensively understand customer behavior and preferences by aggregating data from diverse channels.
• Unified Feedback Collection: With QuestionPro CX, businesses can streamline feedback collection processes across all channels. Whether through surveys, reviews, or social media monitoring, the platform enables consistent and centralized data collection, allowing for a unified view of customer sentiment.
• Real-Time Monitoring and Analysis: Leveraging advanced customer journey analytics capabilities, QuestionPro CX empowers businesses to monitor real-time customer interactions. Organizations can promptly identify issues, opportunities, and emerging trends by tracking key metrics and sentiment trends across channels, enabling agile decision-making.
• Personalized Engagement: QuestionPro CX enables customized engagement at every touchpoint through robust customer segmentation and profiling features. By understanding individual preferences and behaviors, businesses can tailor interactions, offers, and recommendations, fostering deeper customer relationships.
• Omni-Channel Feedback Loop: QuestionPro CX facilitates a closed-loop feedback process, ensuring that insights gleaned from customer interactions are promptly acted upon. By integrating feedback into product development, service enhancements, and marketing strategies, businesses can continuously optimize the omnichannel customer experience.
• Agile Response Mechanisms: Agility is key in the rapidly evolving omnichannel landscape. QuestionPro CX equips businesses with agile response mechanisms, enabling them to adapt strategies, policies, and processes in response to changing customer needs and market dynamics.
• Continuous Improvement Culture: By fostering a culture of constant improvement, QuestionPro CX empowers organizations to iterate and innovate iteratively. Through ongoing measurement, analysis, and optimization, businesses can strive for excellence in delivering a seamless omnichannel customer journey.

An omnichannel customer journey is essential for businesses looking to meet today’s consumers’ evolving needs and expectations. By providing a seamless, integrated, and personalized experience across all channels, companies can enhance and boost customer satisfaction, drive engagement and loyalty, and gain a competitive edge in the market. 

While challenges exist, the benefits of implementing an effective omnichannel strategy far outweigh the obstacles, making it a cornerstone of modern marketing efforts. Embracing the omnichannel approach is not merely an option but a necessity for businesses striving to thrive in the digital age.

QuestionPro Cx provides businesses with the tools and capabilities to optimize the omnichannel customer journey. 

By collecting feedback from multiple channels, monitoring feedback in real-time, analyzing cross-channel data, personalizing customer engagement, implementing closed-loop feedback management, and mapping the omnichannel journey, businesses can enhance the overall customer experience and drive long-term success.

LEARN MORE         FREE TRIAL

MORE LIKE THIS

Top 20 Employee Engagement Software Solutions

May 3, 2024

15 Best Customer Experience Software of 2024

May 2, 2024

Journey Orchestration Platforms: Top 11 Platforms in 2024

Top 12 Employee Pulse Survey Tools Unlocking Insights in 2024

May 1, 2024

Other categories

• Academic Research
• Artificial Intelligence
• Assessments
• Brand Awareness
• Case Studies
• Communities
• Consumer Insights
• Customer effort score
• Customer Engagement
• Customer Experience
• Customer Loyalty
• Customer Research
• Customer Satisfaction
• Employee Benefits
• Employee Engagement
• Employee Retention
• Friday Five
• General Data Protection Regulation
• Insights Hub
• Life@QuestionPro
• Market Research
• Mobile diaries
• Mobile Surveys
• New Features
• Online Communities
• Question Types
• Questionnaire
• QuestionPro Products
• Release Notes
• Research Tools and Apps
• Revenue at Risk
• Survey Templates
• Training Tips
• Uncategorized
• Video Learning Series
• What’s Coming Up
• Workforce Intelligence

REVE Chat Version 4.0

Blending the strengths of IM and Live Chat

Upgrade your website to an instant messaging platform and beyond.

How to Create an Effective Omnichannel Customer Journey?

• Updated Apr 21, 2024
• Estimated Reading Time: 0

Or, do you see creating an effortless experience that delivers a consistent experience as it transitions across multiple touchpoints and provides both added value and access to a live agent? 

It’s natural to start creating an omnichannel customer journey with vision. 

Once a business has a vision, they jump right to functional requirements, skipping the important step of defining the actual customer experience. 

It is critical that you consider how to design a memorable experience in the customer journey that maps to the needs of your particular segment and aligns to your brand values. 

Every customer expects a seamless experience — regardless of the device or communication channel they choose. They are more likely to choose a brand that has invested in the customer journey over brands that create frustrating service experiences. 

9 out of 10 consumers want an omnichannel experience with seamless service between communication methods. 

Hence, it is vital to integrate omnichannel communications into an integrated, seamless platform. Let us discuss what is an omnichannel customer journey and how to create & optimize it effectively.

What is Omnichannel Customer Journey?

An omnichannel customer journey is defined as the one that assimilates multiple communication channels . The journey begins with the very first interaction a customer has with your organization and ends when that customer stops doing business with you. 

It involves interacting with and engaging customers on their preferred channels, creating a seamless, end-to-end customer journey regardless of the combination of touchpoints a customer uses to engage with your business during the point of sale and throughout their lifecycle. 

When businesses gain comprehensive understanding of the omnichannel customer journey, it becomes easier to harmonize the marketing and customer service efforts across interaction channels, while keeping customer needs in prime focus.

Key reasons why businesses should adopt a customer journey omnichannel model

• Clear Perspective of Customer Journey: Having an omnichannel model for customer journey gives businesses a bird’s-eye view of every stage. It streamlines all the interactions across multiple channels under one platform and gives insights into the  actions for improving your business.
• Increase Customer Retention: Focusing on omnichannel customer journey allows customers to reach out to a brand via their preferred channels with a smooth transition in the same interaction. It levels up satisfaction rate and acts as an effective customer retention strategy .
• Higher Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): An omnichannel customer journey model simplifies getting in touch with the company and delivers consistent experience all the time that eventually increases customer lifetime. Omnichannel customers are 30% more valuable to your business over the course of their lifetime.
• Surge Customer Satisfaction: The seamless and personalized omnichannel experiences you deliver based on user mapping lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction. As customers are being heard and responded to in a way that feels right for them. When customer satisfaction increases, so does your company’s revenue.

How to Create An Effective Omnichannel Customer Journey

In order to deliver a great omnichannel customer experience there are different strategies. Implementing the right strategy, siloed engagements can be avoided. Businesses that invest in omnichannel customer service plans witness higher customer satisfaction and retention.

Here is a quick list of the strategic ways of creating a successful omnichannel customer experience management model.

1. Research Extensively on Buyer Personas

“ Personas are the starting point ,” says Michael Hinshaw, CX strategist.

Because a journey map is the story of a customers’ experience – it explains what happens along the way. Personas represent the customers whose journeys we are mapping.

Buyer personas play an important role in the overall customer journey mapping process, it is vital that organizations create valuable personas that provide a robust platform upon which to build the maps.

A good customer persona typically consist of five parts:

• Goals & Objectives – What is your persona trying to do, why and by when?
• Motivations – What are the key triggers and hindrances? What influences their thinking? 
• Behaviors – Where do they find information? Is your persona spontaneous or do they research and plan every detail? What media channels do they like to use?
• Profile – Think about your persona’s demographics. It can also be useful to think about variables like price sensitivity, confidence with technology and amount of leisure time and whether your persona over- or under-indexes on them.
• Quotes & Photos – Bring your personas to life. It is important that they are stereotypes that feel real so give them a name, add comments captured through research and photos of what they look like.

The best part of a buyer’s persona is that they help in making omnichannel customer journeys smoother in the following ways:

• Enhance value propositions that align with the customer expectations.
• Boost business profits by providing customers with what exactly they are looking for.
• Provide a better understanding of buyers, their needs, and how to fix them.
• Accelerate lead generation by aligning teams around a customer-centric vision.

2. Map Your Customer Journey

Nearly 70% of online shoppers abandoned their cart. Why does a customer spend hours adding products to their cart just to close the tab? 

It is likely because you lack a clear grasp of the customer’s journey to purchasing your product or service. You also fail to understand the difference between a buyer journey vs customer journey . The omnichannel customer journey includes every moment a customer interacts with your brand across every touchpoint. 

Documenting these moments sequentially yields a sort of map, known as a customer journey map, that can be used to better understand the obstacles customers face in achieving their goals.

Customer journey maps are often divided into distinct phases to help differentiate between otherwise similar types of interactions. 

The different phases include:

• Awareness and acquisition: This phase is all about discovery. Customers coming across an ad for your business, visiting your website, calling your contact center all qualify as part of the awareness phase. Customers who commit to making a purchase enter into the acquisition phase, which then connects with the onboarding phase.
• Onboarding and engagement: This phase involves all interactions meant to guide new customers via the purchasing process, including details on how to get the most out of your product or service. It leads to the engagement phase which focuses on interacting closely with customers once they are more acquainted with your brand.
• After-purchase support: This customer journey phase includes the interactions that happen after a customer’s purchase such as reaching out to customer support via phone, visiting your company’s self-support portal or knowledge base, and contacting customer service via email, social media, or any other channel.

3. Identify the Touchpoints Most Preferred 

Touchpoints are the key to understanding your customer’s journey. They are basically the place where customer interactions occur. 

On an average it takes seven interactions with your brand before the final  purchase. Based on such interactions, customers usually create a first impression of the overall brand.

By identifying customer touchpoints , it’s possible to cultivate loyalty and improve customer experience. When you map your customer journey across multiple channels and connect them, it helps you understand customers and their requirements better.

It also enables you to gain a better understanding on how your customers are feeling at each stage of the buying process and through different channels.

How identifying touchpoints help to optimize your omnichannel customer journey model?

• Understand customers and engage them the way they want – learning about  the preferred touchpoints helps to be actively available across the channels for real time assistance.
• Personalize your interaction with clients – You can personalize your interaction at the identified touchpoints and create excellent customer service experience examples . 

4. Employ Right Tools for Omnichannel Customer Engagement

Did you know that 87% of customers think brands need to work harder to provide a seamless shopping experience?

A customer ought to spend more when there is a significant number of channels available along their customer journey. 

Ideally, it is difficult to deliver seamless experiences across diverse touchpoints without the right technology to enable it. Moreover, building the right technology model to provide excellent experience across channels is vital  to deliver hassle-free omnichannel user experience.

For any customer to be able to switch between the mobile app and chatbot conversation conveniently, businesses need to use the right digital tools that allow data flow at ease in real-time, to serve customers on their preferred touchpoints.

Some tools that can be used at different touchpoints for creating a great omnichannel customer journey model.

• Chatbots – REVE chatbots can be built and deployed easily to engage customers 24×7 and provide real time answers for simple queries.
• Live chat – Deliver real time assistance to the sales and support related queries with live chat and boost customer satisfaction.
• Visual engagement tools –  Using the co-browsing tool to collaborate with customers in real time helps in guiding through complex issues and improve first contact resolution (FCR). With a video enabled call center , you can identify issues faster and deliver personalized solutions. 

REVE Chat’s omnichannel customer engagement platform offers a complete suite of  digital tools and chatbot solutions to engage customers in real time round the clock. Sign up today with REVE Chat and offer hyper personalized customer experience.

The above mentioned digital engagement tools empower support agents to provide real time response, and effective solutions. You can also strengthen your customer relationships and increase brand loyalty.

5. Scrutinize Customer Feedback Regularly

Getting a handle on how customers view your product, support, and the company is invaluable. 

Customer feedback is essential to guide and inform your decision making and influence innovations and changes to your product or service. It brings in golden opportunities that can help you to improve the omnichannel customer journey. 

It is also essential for measuring customer satisfaction among your existing customers.

Delivering superior service means delivering real time support by being where your customers are and giving them an easy way to share feedback. 

Omnichannel approach empowers brands to engage with customers via every channel and capture feedback at every touchpoint. The different ways to ask for customer feedback are website, social media, emails, in-app, reviews, etc.

Here is how analyzing customer feedback can help to set successful omnichannel customer journey example

• Rightly use feedback to develop an in-depth understanding of  customers (their needs, pain points, wants, expectations) to serve them better.
• Implement a proper system to help you collect feedback, analyze it, and act on a regular basis.
• Reduce friction significantly and resolve your customers’ complex problems and challenges.

6. Balance Automation & Human Support Wisely

Another important aspect of omnichannel customer experience   is balancing automation and human understanding in the balance proportion.

Customers expect brands to understand them with both intelligent technology along with empathetic human experiences.

Choosing the right approach needs a comprehensive understanding of using live chat vs chatbot by learning the pros and cons of both channels. 

Having a balanced support approach of both options manages the resources on priority tasks. 

It is recommended to use chatbots as the  primary contact for customer interaction and use human support for complex conversations.

Designing both for a great customer service experience helps to maintain the right balance that eventually turns to be the real differentiator for the brand. 

Figuring out when a conversation needs to shift from a bot to a human is how the balance manifests – For example, knowing when to please the angry customer with an apology versus an offer or so.

7. Perform a Thorough Gap Analysis

Offering customers seamless, consistent, omnichannel experiences at all customer journey stages is essentially table stakes.

Performing a comprehensive analysis to identify the gaps in fragmented experiences is a vital part of improving omnichannel customer experience. 

Brands putting efforts to create a seamless omnichannel customer journey is always a work in progress as customer habits keep evolving. 

Today, social media is one of the major platforms to provide immediate assistance to customers while also scoring brownie points in full view of the entire customer community.

Evaluating the gaps will give you valuable insights into what actually your customers are looking for and take the right action steps of improvement to deliver a better omnichannel customer journey experience. 

It is recommended to keep a close eye for any data related gaps between various channels, as that may force customers to refer to different sources or channels.

8. Implement Customer Journey Analytics

Customer Journey Analytics allows you to bring your customer data from any channel you choose — both online and offline.

Businesses are increasingly benefiting from customer journey analytics across marketing and customer experience, as the results are real, immediate and have a lasting effect.

Customer journey analytics is a whole new approach to analytics that involves having a journey-based mindset and becoming customer-obsessed. Learning how to choose the best journey analytics platform is just the beginning.

The most powerful benefit of using customer journey analytics is that it connects individual customer behavior to important quantitative metrics and KPIs that you and your business are measured by. 

The key lies in selecting the right metrics and KPIs to monitor and improve, based on the insights generated by your journey analytics platform. Some key customer metrics are:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS),
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) or
• Customer Effort Score (CES)

9. Provide Self Service Options 

Research shows businesses lose nearly $75 billion a year in revenue due to poor customer service.

Creating self service options can be highly effective during the customer journey. Hence businesses are investing to develop self-service portals for improving the overall brand experience. 

As customers expect immediate answers to their queries. In fact, response time is the most important attribute of the customer journey experience.

Self-service portals provide customers with instant access to information and save time and business resources. 67% of customers prefer to use self-service options instead of speaking with a company representative.

Businesses can create tutorials, manuals, how-to videos to help customers to solve their problems on their own. 

Here is how self service portals are an important part of the omnichannel customer journey.

• Use personalized information – Such portals can maintain a record of the products or services purchased and display what is relevant to them. You can identify customer issues and take key steps to address them.
• More positive recommendations – The self service portals help to strengthen brand credibility by creating positive client interactions.
• Educate customers – These portals also help to broaden your customers’ knowledge & skills they require for solving other similar issues in the future. 

10. Offer a Safe Customer Experience 

Omnichannel retailers had to evolve dramatically during the peaks of COVID-19 to comply with public safety policies to raise customer confidence in shopping across all channels. 

As the market looks beyond the pandemic, omnichannel customers not only want an excellent customer experience, but they also want a safe customer experience. 

Focusing on omnichannel retailers and their customers, the latest research on safe customer experience (Safe CX) provides a framework for enhancing customer safety and overall CX in post-pandemic omnichannel retailing.

As illustrated in the SafeCX framework below, the study identified fourteen safety elements in omnichannel retailing. 

These safety elements are classified into three broad categories: safety elements relevant to CX at the pre-purchase stage, during-purchase stage and the post-purchase stage of the customer journey across all channels. 

The SafeCX framework positions the fourteen safety elements into relevant categories:

• Four elements are relevant to the CX at the pre-purchase stage of the customer journey: social inclusiveness, role readiness, employment policy and safety policy enforcement. 
• Six elements are relevant to the during-purchase stage of the customer journey: physical safety, personal hygiene, spatial distancing, fraud prevention, security surveillance and safety signal. 
• The remaining four elements are relevant to the post-purchase stage of the customer journey: delivery safety, safety recall, mental health and data usage.

Retail managers could focus on the fourteen safety elements when designing a seamless and safe omnichannel customer journey.

Omnichannel Customer Journey Examples

When building an omnichannel customer engagement strategy, here is the example of brands who have done so successfully: 

1. Walgreens

Walgreens, the American pharmacy, health and wellness company created a custom mobile app that makes it easier for customers to refill prescriptions, which they can then pickup in store. Their app also showcases store specific inventory making it easier for customers making a trip to decide which location they should visit.

Sephora had brought up a brilliant omnichannel customer experience program for stronger relationships between consumers and the brand.

Sephora Beauty Insiders can tap into the Beauty Bag on their phone or desktop and have access to a truckload of data. Consumers can shop, see their favorites list, any of their past purchases, and how many rewards points they have, scan items in store to see other options available online, watch tutorial videos, and find a store near them.

This extremely successful application of omnichannel marketing strategy has nurtured 11 million members , who spend 15 times more money on Sephora.com than the average user.

3. Timberland

Timberland, the US online store has combined convenience of online with the experience of the in-person customer experience through the installation of near field communication (NFC) technology. They created touchwalls in their store, which leads to further information on their shoes. 

Customers can then add these to their online shopping list or purchase in-store. In addition, Timberland utilizes a product recommendations engine to gain exposure to lesser-known products based on user preferences

Wrapping Up

Although the mechanisms in play behind the scenes of an omnichannel system might be complex, the overall effect for your users and your business is positive. Creating an effective omnichannel customer journey enhances efficiency and simplifies interactions across the board.

REVE Chat is a great customer communication platform that helps businesses to understand customer pain points, engage them in real time, and deliver a delightful experience that improves their lifetime value. Sign in today and create a smooth omnichannel experience.

Start a 14-day free trial, no credit card required!

Snigdha Patel

Snigdha Patel is a customer experience researcher, author, and blogger. As part of REVE Chat, she focuses on helping organizations maximize customer experience using omnichannel messaging and conversational AI.

She creates contextual, insightful, and conversational content for business audiences across a broad range of industries and categories like Customer Service, Customer Experience (CX), Chatbots, and more.

Serving as the lead content strategist, Snigdha helps the customer service teams to leverage the right technology along with AI to deliver exceptional and memorable customer experiences.

Being a customer service adherent, her goal is to show that organizations can use customer experience as a competitive advantage and win customer loyalty.

REVE Chat Blog

Stay updated with the latest trends and ideas we share, how to say sorry for a late response examples & templates.

Have you ever been so busy you forgot to answer someone? It happens to everyone. Isn’t it? Whether it's an...

What is a Support Ticket- A Comprehensive Guide

It's very common for customers to face problems with any product or service a company offers. That's why having a...

What is Customer Connection? 10 Ways to Connect with Customers

In 2018, Sprout Social surveyed over 1,000 customers to understand their expectations of businesses. It found that 64% of respondents...

Related Posts

Signup for REVE Chat on any annual plans at these jaw-dropping prices today and start engagaging your customers across all channels. Limited Time Only.

The AI enabled live chat platform to help your business win and nurture customers across messaging channels.

Join 446,005 businesses who are already engaging up

Get Started

• Respond to customer queries in real time
• Qualify leads automatically
• Reduce the number of support tickets
• Deliver better conversational experience
• Boost customer satisfaction

• More Networks

Human handover: Seamlessly transfer chats to Live Agents

Co-browsing: Eliminate confusions

No-code: Build your chatbot effortlessly

No credit card required

Say No to customer waiting times, achieve 10X faster resolutions, and ensure maximum satisfaction for your valuable customers with REVE Chat.

✨ Power to the Marketer: Omnichannel & AI Masterclass Register for Free! .

Platform overview

See how the Emarsys customer engagement platform helps marketers deliver personalized, 1:1 experiences across multiple channels and drive business outcomes.

Explore the Platform

• Integrated Data Layer
• Personalization Engine
• Marketing Automation
• Cross-channel Marketing
• Customer Lifecycle Management
• Intelligence & Analytics
• Strategies & Tactics
• Omnichannel Integrations
• Customer Loyalty
• Mobile Wallet
• Digital Ads
• Direct Mail
• Contact Center

Solutions Overview

See how the Emarsys customer engagement platform helps marketers in a range of industries deliver personalized, 1:1 experiences that deliver measurable results.

Explore Solutions

• Consumer Products
• Travel & Hospitality
• Sports & Entertainment
• Communications & Media

• Customer Stories

Why Emarsys

We are the purpose-built platform that gives power to the marketer. Build, launch, and scale personalized cross-channel campaigns that have measurable impact.

• About Emarsys
• Emarsys + SAP
• Partner Ecosystem
• Partner Directory
• Become a Partner

Partner Connect Ecosystem

See how Emarsys connects with Technology and Expert Solutions Partners to unlock additional value, revenue streams, scalability and innovation.

• Developer Resources
• SAP Integrations
• Google Integrations

Gibson and Emarsys Orchestrating Omnichannel Customer Journeys

• Whitepapers
• Webinars & Videos
• Power to the Marketer Festival
• Omnichannel Marketing
• Product Release
• Holiday Season
• Email Marketing

5 Pillars of the Omnichannel Customer Journey [+ Examples]

Picture this: A customer starts their journey by browsing your website on their laptop, adds items to their cart, but decides to make the purchase in-store . 

As they walk into the physical store, their smartphone buzzes with a personalized discount offer tailored to their preferences. They leave the store happy with their purchase and later receive a follow-up email with recommendations for complementary products. 

This seamless, integrated experience is the hallmark of the omnichannel customer journey — and understanding it is the key to building long-lasting customer loyalty and driving profitable growth.

In this article, we’ll walk through the omnichannel customer journey, giving you a better understanding of the paths the modern shopper takes to conversion. 

What is the customer journey, and why do we need to understand it?

At its core, the customer journey is the total sum of experiences that customers go through when engaging with your brand. It begins the moment they first become aware of your product or service, continues through the point of purchase and beyond into post-purchase support, and then loops back again for repeat purchases.

So why is understanding this journey important for marketers? 

Simply put, it’s all about perspective. By stepping into your customer’s shoes and anticipating their wants and needs as they move through their individual journeys, you can identify gaps and deliver exceptional experiences every step of the way.

This empathetic approach typically leads to higher customer satisfaction, increased loyalty, and better business outcomes.

By mapping the customer journey, marketers can gain a bird’s eye view of every interaction and decision-making point their customers encounter. This in turn allows for better cross-functional collaboration and is an effective means of shifting from a product- to customer-centric mindset.

The 5 core pillars of the omnichannel customer journey

No matter whether they discover your brand from Google search, a paid social campaign, or a referral from a friend, almost all of your omnichannel customers will have a journey that follows these five stages:

Want to build a 1:1 omnichannel marketing strategy that i ncreases retention , customer loyalty , and revenue ?

Omnichannel customer journey example #1: in-store to online .

Now, let’s explore this further through the context of how a customer would actually experience your brand, mapped out against each of those pillars.

Acquisition: A customer walks into your brick and mortar store, looking to buy a new pair of jeans. They’ve shopped around with a few other brands, have done some research online, and are now weighing up how your product compares. The customer is approached by a member of your sales team, who helps them to find the right size and style of product to suit them. 

Conversion: The customer makes a purchase via a point-of-sale (POS) system, and the sales assistant asks for their email address in order to send an e-receipt. You use this to identify the customer in-store, revealing that they’ve made a purchase previously via your website. 

Growth: You use this first-party data to trigger an email automation that follows up with the customer post-purchase, upselling them to similar products that complement their in-store purchase. 

Retention and loyalty: Your customer has now shopped with you several times, and you want to up the engagement, so you create a CRM ad campaign, backed up by an email automation , that encourages them to download your retail app. 

Win-back: After six months, the regular orders from your customer stop. Two months pass without them visiting your website, making a purchase in-store, or viewing your app. This triggers an email automation which sends them an exclusive offer for a range of products you know they love, tempting them back to the store. 

Omnichannel customer journey example #2: online to in-store

Let’s now shift our focus to a different type of customer journey, this time from online to in-store. In this example, you’re a watch and sunglasses retailer with both physical and online stores.

Acquisition: Your customer is directed to your online store after a Google search for the term “stylish men’s wristwatch.” After browsing through watches on your site, they decide to engage via an interactive quiz which guides them toward a watch that fits their style and budget.

Conversion: The customer decides to buy the watch and completes the transaction through your website’s secure payment gateway. They share basic first-party data including an email address for confirmation and tracking.

Growth: Leveraging this data, you trigger a post-purchase email automation that thanks the customer for their purchase and encourages them to sign up to your loyalty program to receive special discounts and rewards.

Retention and loyalty: The customer signs up and adds a loyalty card to their mobile wallet . This loyalty card enables you to send geo-fenced offers to this customer whenever they are within range of a physical store. 

Winback: A few months later, your customer walks past one of your physical stores which triggers a geo-fenced push notification directly to that customer’s phone. It’s an offer on a pair of sunglasses that compliments the watch they bought. Delighted at this clever use of marketing, the customer walks into your store and buys the sunglasses on the spot.

This journey illustrates how you can leverage online engagements to effectively drive in-store traffic and conversion — omnichannel marketing at its finest.

Real-time customer lifecycle marketing is the key to cultivating loyalty

Your customers have come to expect seamless, personalized experiences at every stage of their journey, no matter which channel they engage with. If you want to keep them spending more money, more often, you need to meet those expectations with an omnichannel customer experience that demonstrates an understanding of their wants and needs. 

This is where Emarsys comes in. Our omnichannel marketing platform helps the world’s most successful brands effortlessly launch cross-channel marketing automations and achieve 1:1 personalization at scale.

Want to learn more about how Emarsys helps brands create and nurture unparalleled omnichannel customer journeys? Watch our 3-minute demo .

See how top brands drive more customer retention and loyalty using personalized, omnichannel marketing.

Dakota Davis is the Head of Global Content at Emarsys where she leads a team that is responsible for developing an integrated content marketing strategy that drives global brand consistency, sales enablement, product integration, thought leadership, and meaningful customer experiences. She and her team deliver resources that empower marketers to build, launch, and scale personalized cross-channel campaigns that drive business outcomes.

Featured on our blog

3 innovative ways to leverage gamification in your digital marketing (with odicci).

10 Ways to Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Power to the Marketer 2024: What’s in Store for this Year’s Omnichannel & AI Masterclass

Pillars of Personalization: 5 Ways to Drive Personalization at Scale with AI

Our Satisfied Customers Include

Deliver the predictable, profitable outcomes that your business demands

• Why CallMiner?

See how we help you translate customer insights into business value.

Contact Center Experience

Frontline agent experience.

Deliver exceptional frontline agent experiences to improve employee productivity and engagement, as well as improved customer experience.

Quality Management

Leverage intelligence to more effectively manage your QA program at scale, driving quality outcomes and improving CX.

Contact Center Efficiency

Improve customer experience with operational efficiency and quality in the contact center.

Risk & Compliance

Understand voice and text conversations to uncover the insights needed to improve compliance and reduce risk.

Fraud Detection

Analyze 100% of customer conversations to fight fraud, protect your brand reputation, and drive customer loyalty.

Sales Effectiveness

Leverage sales conversations to more effectively identify behaviors that drive conversions, improve trainings and meet your numbers.

Experience Management

Customer experience.

Reveal patterns and insights at scale to understand customers, better meet their needs and expectations, and drive customer experience excellence.

Product Experience

Use customer insights to power product-market fit and drive loyalty. Improve quality and safety, identify competitive threats, and evaluate innovation opportunities.

Brand Experience

Capture unsolicited, in-the-moment insights from customer interactions to better manage brand experience, including changing sentiment and staying ahead of crises. 

Conversation analytics provides business insights that lead to better patient outcomes for the professionals in the healthcare industry.

Communications

Make your telecom and communications teams stand out from the crowd and better understand your customers with conversation analytics software.

Take your omnichannel retail and eccommerce sales and customer experience to new heights with conversation analytics for deep customer insights.

Finance & Banking

Delivering the best customer experience and staying compliant with financial industry regulations can be driven through conversation analytics.

Collections

Increase revenue while supporting customers in the tightly monitored and high-risk collections industry with conversation analytics.

Conversation analytics makes it possible to understand and serve insurance customers by mining 100% of contact center interactions.

Energy & Utilities

Conversation analytics can help energy and utilities companies enhance customer experience and remain compliant to industry regulations.

Adopting cutting edge technology, like AI-powered analytics, means BPOs can help clients better understand customer interactions and drive value.

Travel & Hospitality

Drive CX, loyalty and brand reputation for your travel and hospitality organization with conversation intelligence.

Conversation analytics provides business insights that lead to better CX and business outcomes for technology companies.

CallMiner Eureka Platform

Analyze customer interactions at the deepest levels to gain insight.

PRODUCT SUITE

• Screen Record
• Solution Catalogue
• Integrations

Customer Stories

Learn how we’ve helped businesses like yours grow and transform.

• Customer Success

CallMiner Customer Connect

Learn more about our customer community where you can ask, share, discuss, and learn with peers.

• Learning Center

Learn from our experts with these whitepapers, webinars, and case studies.

Explore All

Additional Resources

• CallMiner Research Lab
• Frequently Asked Questions

CX Landscape Report

CallMiner lifts the lid on recent CX industry trends

Discover where we’ve come from and where we’re going.

Meet CallMiner

• Investors & Board

Explore product demos and get more pricing details.

Understanding the omnichannel customer journey

The Team at CallMiner

September 20, 2021

A customer journey begins with the very first interaction a customer has with your organization and ends when that customer stops doing business with you. An omnichannel customer journey incorporates multiple channels and involves interacting with and engaging customers on their preferred channels, creating a seamless, end-to-end customer journey regardless of the combination of touchpoints and interactions a customer uses to engage with your business.

Understanding Omnichannel CX: Analyzing Every Customer Touchpoint

Gaining an understanding of the omnichannel customer journey can make it easier to harmonize your marketing and customer service efforts across channels, while keeping your customers' needs in focus.

Demystifying the customer journey

The omnichannel customer journey involves every moment a customer interacts with your brand across every touchpoint . Documenting these moments sequentially yields a sort of map, known as a customer journey map , that can be used to better understand the obstacles customers face in achieving their goals. Customer journey maps are often divided into distinct phases to help differentiate between otherwise similar types of interactions. Examples of these phases include:

• Awareness and acquisition: The awareness phase is all about discovery. Customers coming across an ad for your business, visiting your website, calling your contact center or first setting foot in a physical storefront all qualify as part of the initial awareness phase. Customers who commit to making a purchase enter into the acquisition phase, which then meshes with the onboarding phase.
• Onboarding and engagement: Onboarding, in particular, involves all interactions meant to guide new customers through the purchasing process, including explanations on how to use get the most out of your product or service. This bleeds into the engagement phase which centers on use of your offerings once customers are more acquainted with your brand.
• Post-purchase support: This phase of the customer journey involves the interactions that take place following a customer’s purchase. It can include interactions such as reaching out to customer support via phone, visiting your company’s self-support portal or knowledge base, and contacting customer service via email, social media, or any other channel .

How the omnichannel customer journey works

An omnichannel customer journey progresses across multiple channels, including a cohesion between channels that businesses strive for and the harmonious use of all available channels to support each phase of the journey in a way that suits each customer.

Omnichannel customer journeys account for the dynamic and varied paths to acquisition different types of customers can take. For instance, someone looking to learn more about your business after seeing an ad on TV might choose to visit your website, then purchase a product at your store. Each of these steps involves a separate channel and successfully streamlining the customer's experience across each of these has a direct impact on whether they will follow through with buying from you.

To make sense of the stages of your omnichannel customer journey , you should first base it on real data and then plot it out as a customer journey map – a visual tool that may help clarify concerns customers have voiced or even those they have yet to tell you directly. Armed with a data-backed omnichannel customer journey map, you can then use an omnichannel customer journey as the basis for further development of your business.

Optimizing your omnichannel customer journey

Customer journeys are becoming more complex – adopting an omnichannel approach to understanding them can help reveal more ways that you can serve your customers. The following ideas are a great way to begin:

• Centralize customer information - Some 61% of Americans have been reported to be willing to share their own personal data to gain access to more customized communications. Leveraging a centralized system from which captured customer interaction data can be pulled makes it easier to tailor future interactions to fit their needs.
• Consider channel attribution: As you track customer interactions across channels and attempt to link them all together, the need for additional insight about individual channels becomes clearer. Just because a given customer completes a purchase on one channel doesn’t mean they first engaged with your business via that same channel. It does not even mean they spent any significant amount of time using that channel aside from when they completed their purchase. Channel attribution data can tell you what role each channel played in closing the sale or acquiring your newest customers.
• Try customer journey analytics: Customer journey analytics can help take your journey mapping efforts to new heights. This branch of analytics helps expose the underlying behavioral patterns fueling customer engagement habits. Whereas a customer journey map might give you a good idea of how your customers are interacting with your business across channels, customer journey analytics helps to reveal the reasons they have for doing so.

Although the mechanisms in play behind the scenes of an omnichannel system might be complex, the overall effect for your users and your business is positive. Creating an effective omnichannel customer journey enhances efficiency and simplifies interactions across the board.

Omnichannel Capabilities Demo Video

Additional resources you might like:.

Beyond Surveys Volume 2: The Power of Unsolicited Customer Feedback

The Ultimate Customer Loyalty Handbook

Related Posts

How to harness customer insights in the age of information overload.

Most companies still grapple with how to effectively collect and use customer data. This blog offers tips for cutting through the noise and use insigh...

Consumer Duty – How can contact centres help to comply?

Consumer Duty requirements were launched by the UK’s FCA in June 2023 and represent legally binding regulation for financial services. But what does t...

How to improve customer satisfaction in 2024 & beyond

Today's companies face a variety of challenges in maintaining customer satisfaction. This blog why it's important, how to improve customer satisfactio...

CallMiner is the global leader in conversation analytics to drive business performance improvement . Powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, CallMiner delivers the industry’s most comprehensive platform to analyze omnichannel customer interactions at scale, allowing organizations to interpret sentiment and identify patterns to reveal deep understanding from every conversation. By connecting the dots between insights and action, CallMiner enables companies to identify areas of opportunity to drive business improvement, growth and transformational change more effectively than ever before. CallMiner is trusted by the world’s leading organizations across retail, financial services, healthcare and insurance, travel and hospitality, and more.

• Industry Solutions
• Use Case Solutions
• Role Solutions
• CallMiner Customer Stories
• Individual Rights
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy

Contentful Studio is here! Discover what’s new

Why a customer journey map is vital in an omnichannel world

Brian Browning

Customer journey mapping is a critical tool in understanding and influencing complex customer journeys in an omnichannel world. A customer journey map helps companies become more customer-centric, enabling them to address customer needs with unique features and nurture relationships across every phase of the customer journey.

Kin + Carta is a global digital transformation consultancy providing expertise in strategy, customer experience, technology, and data, giving them a full view of the entire customer journey. To chat about customer journey mapping, we caught up with Brian Browning, Vice President of Technology for the Product and Experience Service Line at Kin + Carta. 

Benefits of customer journey mapping

Customer journey maps encourage you to look at your brand story from the customer perspective. What pain points do they face? What does the customer need to overcome those objections? Where are they getting distracted? How can you get them thinking about your product or service again?

If you don't sell something to somebody right off the bat, it doesn't mean there's no value in that relationship. More complex or costly products and services often require a long-tail approach. Mapping this long-term relationship helps you identify and nurture the smaller journeys you want customers to take.

For example, a financial services company specializing in first-time home buyers might have journey maps with goals like helping potential buyers build credit and save for a down payment as part of their long-term goal of financing mortgages. 

Customer journey maps and pinball machines

Before we dive into how to build customer journey maps, let's define what a customer journey map is‌ — and isn’t. Customer journey maps identify customer behaviors that are meaningful to your organization and the paths customers take to reach those goals. They look at the customer journey across multiple channels and identify ways you can reduce customer pain points and motivate them to take the next step. 

The term customer journey map is a bit of a misnomer. We’d like to think we can map the perfect journey that every customer will take, but people direct their own journeys. It’s more like guiding a pinball through a machine. Your customer journey map defines the rails and levers you can use to keep customers on the path and bring them back to the journey when they get distracted.

Why strategic and tactical customer journey maps are important

There are two key types of customer journey maps that we focus on: strategic and tactical. Most people don't think of strategic journey maps as part of customer journey mapping, but it’s an important step. 

The strategic road map

The purpose is in the name: the strategic road map speaks directly to the business value your customer experience needs to deliver. 

It is your brand story – the high-level narrative that unites all the touchpoints for your customer personas, the experiences you want to create for them, and gives your team a North Star.

Strategic road maps are useful when you’re making big changes, like a redesign, replatforming , or creating a new product or service. They illustrate the business functionality you want to put in front of customers, and make sure it aligns to the things you care about as a company. 

In strategic journey mapping, you’ll articulate ideas and prioritize them against what’s meaningful to your business, what’s easy to achieve, and what will produce big results quickly. The deliverable is a multi-phase, multi-year roadmap that includes the business rationale, the user experience, and the technology stack that'll enable it all to come together. 

Tactical customer journey maps

The strategic roadmap provides the story and mission to be delivered in omnichannel experiences, but the tactical customer journey map illustrates how that happens on those various channels. It will get into the deeper steps of specific processes, but all leveling up to the bigger mission. 

For example, what does the registration process look like? How do I create an account? When do I give you my credit card? How do I tactically go through the process of interacting with the elements you built or plan to build? 

Tactical customer journey maps are really helpful when you're building the product itself. They take what might have been a few boxes on the strategic roadmap and work out the details of how you’ll deliver those customer experiences. 

We recently worked with an RV parts company. At the strategic level, they found that customers were leaving the RV market because they didn’t know how to troubleshoot relatively small problems. One strategy to address this was a troubleshooting tool for customers. 

At the tactical level, we detailed how customers would use the tool. How would they diagnose the problem? What repair options would they want? How would they ultimately purchase the parts they needed? 

This tactical map addressed the troubleshooting experience, whereas the larger strategic map detailed the entire lifecycle of troubleshooting from parts procurement to installation and follow-up. 

The customer journey mapping process

Once you have your strategy defined, you can start building tactical journey maps to support different objectives. 

1. Start with a clear goal

It's important to start journey mapping with a clear understanding of what you want the customer to do. There are many possible outcomes you can influence, but defining a clear goal will help you and your team decide what steps you want the customer to take and how you will measure success.

For example, if you’re running an advocacy campaign, your goal might be to get somebody to sign a petition or share the campaign on social media. To get customers from point A to point B on the journey,  you might use gamification and direct appeals to motivate people. Then you’ll track signatures and social media to see if these levers are moving people toward the goal.

But, sometimes your goal is more nebulous. Take Kin + Carta for example. Our goal is not to sell something on our website; it’s to start a conversation with our experts. We use our digital presence to show our position in an industry, our expertise, our credibility, our qualifications, but there’s only so much we can do online. What we’re ultimately asking customers to do is take the next step from online to scheduling a call with us. 

2. Create a baseline

Once you have a clear goal, you can create a baseline journey. There’s almost always a straightforward route along whatever experience you’re trying to build that can serve as a starting point.

In commerce, that baseline journey might be: I need to buy product X >> I go to the website >> I remember I ordered it before >> I go to my previous orders >> I order it again. 

3. Look for objections

With a goal and baseline established, you want to understand where customers have objections along this baseline journey. You can brainstorm what possible objections would be, but go beyond brainstorming. Do your research.  

Look at your analytics and talk to actual end customers to see what they find confusing. Listening to your customers is critical in identifying the problems you need to solve. Otherwise, you can end up investing in something that customers never use because it was never an issue for them.

4. Think like a customer

Using research to understand objections is just the start. As you identify common objections, you can get creative about solving them. Think about the narrative and what interesting brand story elements you can include as touchpoints to address objections and bring customers back to the journey.

You really want to think about the journey from the customer perspective. Separate yourself from your insider knowledge. Forget the acronyms, buzzwords, and everything you know about your product. Empathize and try to better understand what it might be like to be a customer. 

Augment your creative brainstorming with actual end user research to find what really motivates your customers.

5. Gather your tools

Ultimately, a customer journey map is a complex and varied series of different customer touchpoints. Each of these touchpoints act as the guardrails and levers you’ll use to motivate customers and bring them back to the journey when they stray. 

What tools and features do you need to build the journey you’ve mapped out? You might use personalization to proactively reach out to customers when they look at a product and then leave. You could send an email to see if they have any questions, share a review, or show them some accessories that go with that product. 

Or you might use retargeting strategies to see what sparks action in the customer’s mind. Maybe it’s changing the homepage to say, “Hey, Brian, welcome back. Would you like to look at this TV again?”

6. Implement and experiment

Now it's time to test your hypothesis. You can identify numerous objections and brainstorm a lot of creative solutions, but you don’t know if you're right until you experiment. Get something out into the real world and watch what the customer does and then react and adapt.

Experimentation helps you get better and better at setting up those guardrails and levers that move customers through the narrative. It preserves budget by identifying features that matter to the customer before going big. And it’s a chance to add some really interesting elements to your customer journey. 

You can experiment with content based on buyer personas. Or refine customer journeys using data from similar customers to better anticipate objections. These types of personalization and experimentation deliver powerful results when done at scale over a long period. The barrier is typically the amount of content creation needed. 

This is one place where generative AI can be helpful. AI tools trained on highly performant content can adapt content for different personas and experiments. You can use AI to write 100 different button labels or to localize content for every region in the United States. It's one more tool that helps you experiment, adapt, and refine your customer journeys.

Lean into the expertise of trusted partners

Customer journey mapping is far more complex than it once was. Customer experiences are omnichannel. New technology like MACH and composable architecture are changing the way we build experiences across channels. And the teams that build those experiences are changing. It's a huge mindset shift for most of our customers. 

An experienced partner can help you avoid costly mistakes whether you’re in the strategic phase or trying to figure out what composable tech stack fits your needs. A good partner can help you get an MVP out, while showing you how it’s architected so you have internal ownership and are building the capabilities you need for the future. 

Take a tour!

See Contentful in action with a personalized walkthrough.

Get started for free

Don't miss the latest, discover more.

Contentful customers on composability

Broadening Contentful’s global footprint with EU data residency

Contentful events.

Canyon Bicycles: Storytelling with content design

About the blog.

Skip navigation

World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

Customer journeys and omnichannel user experience.

July 24, 2016 2016-07-24

• Email article
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on Twitter

Last weekend I flew out of town for a quick get-together with friends. On my way home I started to think how differently I fly these days. Not that long ago my air-travel experience involved the steps in the leftmost column in the table below.

A comparison of two different travel experiences (A more effective way to visualize these journeys is customer-journey mapping — a tool for effectively understanding and communicating such customer journeys within an organization.)

Nowadays, air travel is a lot more streamlined and enjoyable. When I am away from my computer, I still have access to tools like my smartphone and airport kiosks that help with travel-related tasks. However, the biggest reason for the improved air-travel experience is that airlines use these tools effectively. They provide me with the right functionality to simplify my journey and, like a well-oiled machine, they successfully lead me through the entire travel process, from booking to boarding.

Today’s customer experience is much more dynamic and connected than ever before and individual interactions with organizations are no longer as discrete and isolated as they once were. The individual steps and interactions that made up my overall air-travel experience are strung together into one holistic customer journey.

Definition: A customer journey is the end-to-end process that a customer goes through in order to complete a task over time. This process may use multiple devices and interaction channels (e.g., web, desktop or mobile apps, email, online chat, social media, text message, phone, kiosks).

My customer journey with the airline started on the laptop and ended when I walked off the airplane. Other touchpoints along the way included interactions with the airline via email, mobile app, kiosk,and text message, as well as interactions with gate agents and other staff.

In This Article:

Omnichannel user experience, creating an effective omnichannel experience.

As UX practitioners, we spend a lot of time evaluating and improving the user experience of the individual interactions that make up customers’ journeys. This is the micro level of user experience. However, there is also a higher, macro level of user experience, called the omnichannel (or crosschannel) user experience . Omnichannel user experience addresses the whole customer journey: users’ transitions across channels and their ability to smoothly proceed through various journey stages over time.

According to the original definition of user experience , UX encompasses the totality of the user’s experience, so saying that omnichannel UX should be designed as an integrated whole across individual channels means going back to basics. But since each channel emerged separately and was often managed in organizational silos, this holistic approach has not been taken in many companies.

Describing the customer experience in this way is an important idea, for several reasons:

• The changing landscape of devices and technologies. New devices such as smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches provide the means for customers to interact with organizations in new and unique contexts. Technologies afforded by these devices introduce new opportunities for businesses to improve their customer’s experiences (for example, the capability to present digital QR codes for boarding passes and customer identification).
• The sheer volume of interaction possibilities. Customers now have many personal devices and each of these devices affords different possibilities for interaction with the same organization. For example, a customer’s phone can be used to browse an organization’s website, transact through a mobile app, dial the customer-service hotline, get business updates via social media, or send and receive email and text communications. All of these channels across so many different devices make customer-business relationships more complex than ever before. The more channels, the more opportunities for failure.
• Evolving customer behavior and expectations . The many new interaction possibilities change customers’ expectations and behaviors. We’ve created an environment where the customer experience can move with people. Users now have the means to support streamlined, personalized, enjoyable customer experiences and they’re beginning to expect this much. With these new capabilities at their fingertips, they are no longer confined to predetermined channels and ways of interacting. They want to take control of their journeys, smoothly transition from one device to another, and engage with organizations on many channels as they complete tasks.

A great customer experience is the product of an effective and well-designed omnichannel ecosystem. To achieve it, organizations must research and understand the customer journeys that users take as they complete tasks across devices and channels. To every single customer, a journey is one holistic interaction with your organization, one experience rather than a collection of individual experiences. Users don’t think in terms of channels and devices, so they will not understand or tolerate experiences that are fragmented across channels. For this reason, organizations must stop thinking about their individual solutions on each discrete channel, and begin designing for experiences and journeys across channels.

Simply existing on all channels is no longer enough: multichannel is not omnichannel . Omnichannel strategies focus on designing the most appropriate experience on each channel based on the customer’s journey, and on designing the transitions and experiences across channels.

There are five components that together create a successful omnichannel user experience.

• Consistent : Providing a consistent, cohesive, and familiar experience across all channels
• Optimized : Creating individual channel experiences that are best suited for that particular device, channel constraints and contexts of use
• Seamless : Making channel transitions as effortless as possible and helping customers pick up where they left off when they switch from one channel to another during a task
• Orchestrated : Proactively leading customers through their individual journeys with the right personalized interactions and messages at the right time
• Collaborative : Enriching the customer journey by allowing customers to take advantage of multiple channels at the same time to improve the overall user experience (such as enabling users to login on a desktop bank site by using fingerprint authentication on their smartphones)

These five components make the difference between having solutions on many channels and having a cohesive and effective omnichannel experience. We will discuss each of these components separately in a series of articles.

Customers are becoming increasingly sophisticated. They’ve already encountered excellent omnichannel experiences and they are beginning to expect this quality of experience from every organization they interact with. For this reason, organizations should be expanding the scope of their UX efforts to address the entire customer journey.

We discuss how to research the customer journey and improve the five components of the omnichannel user experience in our full-day course Omnichannel Journeys and Customer Experience .

Google 2012. The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-platform Consumer Behavior . http://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/multiscreenworld_final.pdf

Related Courses

Customer-journey management.

Establish and operationalize journey-level experience design work across functional groups for continuous improvement

Journey Mapping to Understand Customer Needs

Capture and communicate UX insights across complex interactions

Omnichannel Journeys and Customer Experience

Create a usable and cohesive cross-channel experience by following guidelines to resolve common user pain points in a multi-channel landscape

Interaction

Related Topics

• Customer Journeys Customer Journeys
• Interaction Design

Learn More:

Please accept marketing cookies to view the embedded video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhmu0XUaTuM

What is Omnichannel UX?

The 3 Competencies of Journey Management

Kim Salazar · 5 min

Journey Management vs. Service Design

Kim Salazar · 4 min

Types of User Pain Points

Sarah Gibbons · 4 min

Related Articles:

Journey Mapping: 9 Frequently Asked Questions

Alita Joyce and Kate Kaplan · 7 min

How to Conduct Research for Customer Journey-Mapping

Kate Kaplan · 7 min

Seamlessness in the Omnichannel User Experience

Kim Salazar · 12 min

UX Mapping Methods: Study Guide

Kate Kaplan · 5 min

User Experience vs. Customer Experience: What’s The Difference?

User-Feedback Requests: 5 Guidelines

Anna Kaley · 10 min

Navigating the CX Maturity Journey with Customer-Centric Excellence Futurum Tech Webcast

In this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast, The Futurum Group’s Enterprise Applications Research Director Keith Kirkpatrick is joined by Gina Whitty, Product Management, CCaaS + AI at GoTo, about the challenges faced by SMBs and mid-market companies that are trying to undergo a digital transformation, and discusses the maturity journey involved with improving CX delivery via the use of generative AI, omnichannel engagement, and automation.

• Episode Website
• More Episodes
• © 2023 All rights reserved

Top Podcasts In Technology

Experience new growth possibilities with Microsoft Advertising today >

Boost your creativity and productivity with Retail Media Creative Studio powered by generative AI

Lynne kjolso.

Retail media is a fast-growing industry that is expected to reach $100 billion in the next five years and will account for over 25% of total digital media spend by 2026, according to BCG .

Microsoft Retail Media is at the forefront of this sector, offering the most complete omnichannel retail media solution in the advertising market, and is now using generative AI to create new opportunities for retailers, advertisers, and consumers.

We announced the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 2022 and now we’re taking it to the next level with the launch of the Retail Media Creative Studio leveraging generative AI, which can be used to create customized and engaging content for retailers, advertisers, and consumers. Microsoft Retail Media is not just a platform, it’s a holistic omnichannel retail media solution that connects retailers and advertisers with consumers across multiple touchpoints.

Microsoft is a leader in AI and we’re excited to demonstrate how generative AI can unleash the potential of retail media at NRF 2024: Retail’s Big Show in New York City.

Transforming retail media with generative AI

We’re announcing the launch of Retail Media Creative Studio, a comprehensive, end-to-end banner ad creative solution tailored for retail media. Retail Media Creative Studio will be available in preview in the Microsoft retail media platform (powered by PromoteIQ) in January 2024. With Retail Media Creative Studio, we’re leading the way in using generative AI for retail media. Our solution is designed for the specific needs and challenges of retail media, based on customer feedback. With this creative management solution, retailers and advertisers can boost creativity and productivity by generating banner creative with ease, thereby improving banner ads’ participation, performance, and ultimately revenue. With the easy-to-use AI-powered tools, retailers can also support the full breadth of their advertisers, especially the smaller ones who may not be equipped to run effective banner campaigns, thereby unleashing the full potential of banner ads’ growth in retail media programs.

Retail Media Creative Studio is only the beginning of our journey in leveraging generative AI in retail media programs. As Microsoft is leading how generative AI transforms our life and work , we aim to unlock powerful generative AI offerings to transform retail business across personalization, efficiency, and monetization. From simplifying campaign creation through to generating campaign insights, our vision is to harness the power of generative AI to deliver a more personalized shopping experience for retailers’ consumers and ultimately, improved campaign performance and program revenue.

Elevating creativity and productivity with Retail Media Creative Studio

Regardless of retailer or advertiser size, producing high-quality ad creative at scale is challenging. This is because retailers and advertisers must heavily rely on professional services or in-house teams for creative work, which can limit banner campaign participation when resources are tight, resulting in low fill rates, and revenue for retailers’ banner ads business.

With Retail Media Creative Studio, retailers and advertisers can use generative AI to create captivating banner ad creative in mere seconds based on a product’s URL. AI-generated banner creative will automatically align to each retailer’s style guide, saving time for manual resizing or repeated tweaks.

In addition to easy banner generation, retailers and advertisers can rely on Retail Media Creative Studio as an everyday design companion that offers seamless banner editing with user-friendly integrated features—all powered by generative AI. This allows them to:

• Transform a simple product photo into an eye-catching lifestyle image with a simple prompt such as “put this sofa in a cozy living room.”
• Simply input preferred words and phrases into the tool and be wowed by the various tailor-made headline options.
• Crop and clean up any unwanted background or words in an image with a single click.
• Easily modify all banner elements from imagery to headlines until their vision comes to life.

With Retail Media Creative Studio, retailers and advertisers can explore infinite creativity .

After advertisers create banners, retailers can control what appears on their websites through a streamlined creative review process. Different retailer teams can work together to review and approve the same set of banner creatives, enhancing cross-functional collaboration and speeding up the creative approval process so that advertisers can launch campaigns faster.

Once the banner ad campaign goes live, Microsoft Retail Media also leverages AI-powered algorithms to choose and display the most effective banner creative based on key performance metrics such as click-through rates (CTRs) and sales conversion rates. With AI-driven optimization, advertisers can improve banner campaign performance without spending time running A/B testing. This in-flight optimization can unlock incremental revenue for retailers and advertisers.

Retailers and advertisers are unlocking the full potential of generative AI in retail media

With Retail Media Creative Studio, retailers and advertisers can leverage Microsoft's cutting-edge generative AI technology and deep retail advertising knowledge to create and optimize banners that meet specific business goals.

By partnering with Microsoft Retail Media, each retailer can harness the power of generative AI technology, training and iterating the generative AI models continuously to further tailor them based on the retailer’s unique requirements.

To learn more about Retail Media Creative Studio available in preview, visit Microsoft Retail Media.

From NRF 2023 to now: delivering on our vision

Microsoft Advertising has grown through acquisitions (PromoteIQ, Xandr) and partnerships (Netflix, Roku, Yahoo) to offer innovative solutions for digital advertising and have signaled a new era of collaboration centered on consumer relevance. We announced changes to some of our platform names, reflecting this evolution, where PromoteIQ became Microsoft Retail Media.

Last year at NRF, we announced Microsoft Retail Media In-Store proof of concept, which supports our vision of enabling retailers to succeed in an omnichannel consumer landscape that includes unified measurement across onsite and offsite channels.

Today, we’re delighted to share progress on our In-Store pilot.

Microsoft Retail Media In-Store will provide a comprehensive omnichannel solution for retailers; integrating in-store will unlock a more complete view of the shopper's journey and enable advertisers to optimize their investments. In-store ads face challenges such as fragmented channels, disparate hardware, and lack of measurement. Microsoft can help solve these problems by offering a unified omnichannel solution for running, optimizing, and measuring campaigns across all retail media channels.

Our in-store measurement solution shows promising outcomes for solving a long-standing challenge of disconnected measurement across online and offline channels. This is an innovative offering that Microsoft Retail Media can provide, thanks to our distinctive capabilities and partnerships.

We’ve made significant progress since our last NRF update in January 2023. We’ve partnered with Vibenomics, a Mood Media Company and leading expert in audio ads, with an in-store network reaching over 170 million monthly unique shoppers in the US . 1 This scale provides the perfect partnership to collaborate and integrate in-store channels. Vibenomics provide the hardware and Microsoft Retail Media will manage measurement, providing unified reporting and attribution. The goal of this successfully completed pilot was to create an omnichannel retail media solution that integrates onsite, offsite, and in-store channels. We’ve demonstrated the effectiveness of our audio activation solution in collaboration with Vibenomics, and our solution has shown a positive impact on sales metrics with an unnamed yogurt advertiser that ran onsite and instore advertising, resulting in an increase of 40% higher household spend and 50% share of category results.

We’re excited about our collaboration with Microsoft Advertising to bring omnichannel retail media capabilities in-store. Our expertise in infusing in-store audio and display experiences within the broader shopping journey complements Microsoft’s strength in measuring true campaign impact across online and offline touchpoints. This integration demonstrates the vast potential of unifying digital and physical channels to immerse audiences while also providing advertisers transparency into what messages inspire action.

—  Paul Brenner, SVP of retail media and partnerships at Vibenomics, a Mood Media Company

Our vision is to build a future that adapts to the changing demands of retailers, advertisers, partners, and consumers, by offering cutting-edge retailer monetization capabilities, and engaging shopper experiences. We help retailers and advertisers connect with customers online and offline, using advanced retail media solutions.

To partner with Microsoft Retail Media, contact us .

Help us improve Microsoft Advertising

Your comments and feedback are integral to shape and improve our product. You can use the Microsoft Advertising Feedback portal , in-product feedback , Twitter , or Instagram , and as always, contact Support .

[1] Placer.ai aggregated point-of-interest data (chain-level cross-sampling of average monthly visits within the retail stores that we serve from October 2022 to September 2023)

Stay informed

Sign up for the Microsoft Advertising Insider newsletter to keep up with the latest insights, product news, tips and tricks, thought leadership, customer case studies, and resources.

VP OF GLOBAL PARTNER AND RETAIL MEDIA, MICROSOFT ADVERTISING

Recommended for you

Boost sales and expand brand awareness with promoteiq offsite.

Learn about Microsoft PromoteIQ, a holistic retail media platform that allows retailers to help their brand partners connect with shoppers during the customer journey.

January 25, 2023

Accelerate business growth and transformation with the power of retail media

With Microsoft’s retail media platform, PromoteIQ, retailers will be able to fully enable their brand partners to connect with audiences through onsite, offsite, and in-store activations. Learn what's new and how you can grow and transform your business.

January 11, 2023

Changing retail media: PromoteIQ integrates Microsoft AI

PromoteIQ is adopting Microsoft AI to drive innovation in retail media and value for brands by leveraging machine learning technologies across their algorithms.

May 25, 2022