Omnichannel

Omnichannel means handling each customer through all of a company's channels, such as app notifications, email, SMS, website chat, WhatsApp, phone calls and the shop counter, from one platform that keeps one shared record of that customer. So when the customer moves from one channel to another, the conversation continues where it stopped, and the customer does not have to repeat anything.

Here is how it works in general. Every channel the company uses is connected to one platform. Each message, call or visit is recorded against one customer profile, whichever channel it came from. So the person or the bot that picks up the next contact sees the full history. The platform also decides which channel to use next. It may choose the channel that this customer opens most often, and it avoids sending the same offer on three channels at once. If the customer has already bought, the reminders on every channel stop.

Without this, each channel runs on its own system. The email team does not know what the WhatsApp bot said, and the phone agent cannot see yesterday's chat. The customer gets repeated messages, and has to explain the problem again each time.

Take, for example, a broadband customer whose internet has stopped working. The customer reports it in the app's chat, and then calls. On the phone agent's screen, the help desk software already shows the same ticket with the chat attached, so the agent can start by fixing the fault.

Consider an online pharmacy that reminds customers about refills. Its customer engagement platform sends a push notification first, sends a WhatsApp message only to customers who did not open it, and stops both once the order is placed.

Say a bank builds one virtual assistant. On a conversational AI platform, the same assistant answers on the website, in WhatsApp and on the phone helpline, with the same answers and the same customer record.

How is omnichannel different from multichannel? A multichannel company offers several channels, but each one runs separately, with its own records. An omnichannel company joins the channels around one customer record. A related idea in shops is unified commerce: one system for the stock, orders and prices of the stores and the website. Omnichannel is about the conversation with the customer; unified commerce is about the sale and the stock. In a large customer service team, the calls, chats and messages from every channel arrive at the contact centre.