The Role of Technology in Omnichannel Customer Experience

The evolution of technology is a game-changer not just for businesses but also for customers. If you are a budding entrepreneur or a business owner, you must have a comprehensive approach across multiple channels. This will help you handle numerous touchpoints that customers utilise for purchase decision-making and product research.

In this article, you will learn the role of technology in omnichannel customer experience and understand how it can help flatten the curve between online stores and brick-and-mortar store counterparts. You will also know the tech tools you can leverage to enhance your e-commerce businesses. 

Let’s get started!

What Is Omnichannel Customer Experience and Why It Matters

Omnichannel customer experiences refers to the smooth and seamless integration of different channels (both online digital channels and offline channels) to create a more personalised and cohesive customer experience. It emphasises consistency across all important touchpoints, giving customers a consistent customer experience. 

In today’s digital and innovative age, an omnichannel customer expects a seamless omnichannel customer experience. This means that whether they are interacting with brick-and-mortar stores or physical stores, shopping online, or on a mobile device, it has to be a consistent experience.

By unifying all customer touchpoints, you can boost customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and customer engagement, create a consistent brand experience, and gain more insights to enhance your omnichannel strategy. 

Omnichannel or multichannel customer experience is important for most businesses because it helps you achieve the following: 

• Build brand loyalty: By delivering a personalised and seamless omnichannel experience, you can build trust and foster loyalty with your customers. Whenever customers feel valued and feel that deep understanding, they are most likely to convert into loyal customers. Customer retention happens when your existing customers always avail of your products or services and also recommend the brand to others.
  
• Increase business growth: When a seamless customer journey is established and caters to customer preferences, they will likely repeat a purchase and become advocates of your brand. Happy customers drive revenue growth and provide instant access to businesses to manage operations costs by gaining insights and pinpointing areas for improvement.
  
• Meet customer expectations: Customers expect convenience and flexibility so you need to adapt to their preferences and needs. Omni channel customer experiences allow you to provide great customer service journeys which in return would drive sales as the customer’s buying process improves. You can also leverage omni-channel retail in order to meet their demands more.  

Overall, an omnichannel approach is essential to businesses because customers prefer accessing more channels for their convenience.

Tech Tools to Level up Your Omnichannel Support

Businesses must deliver smooth and seamless customer experiences across multiple channels with omnichannel supporting it. Your omnichannel support capabilities can improve with the right technology tools. 

Here are some popular tools that can help you for your business and your customers:

• Freshdesk – This tool helps businesses communicate with their customers through different channels by giving superior service options like support tickets, live chat, phone support, and social network integration. These components are essential in an online business.
  
• Zendesk – It is a popular customer support software that provides omnichannel assistance features like, live chat, phone support, email, and social media integration. It lets support agents handle client contacts from a single interface. This technology offers a consolidated view of customer data which is very important for businesses.
  
• Hubspot Service Hub – This support tool has ticketing, live chat, email management, and a knowledge base to support customer journeys.
  
• WhatsApp Business API – WhatsApp business API enables you to engage with customers over WhatsApp. Yes you can leverage this communication platform to talk to your customers who prefer mobile devices.
  
• LiveChat – LiveChat offers real-time communication between websites and mobile applications. With the help of technologies like chat transcripts, auto-response, and chat routing, support agents can deliver cross-channel seamlessly.
  
• Twilio – A cloud communications platform that enables applications to use audio, video, and message features through APIs. You can create omnichannel support solutions with Twilio.
  
• Google Analytics – Google Analytics is a metric used to gather data about your customers behaviours across different platforms. It can help your business understand how customers engage with your brand.
  
• Salesforce Service Cloud – Salesforce CareCloud is a CRM or customer relationship management platform to provide support and resolve customer inquiries and issues.
  
• Intercom – It is a customer service platform that is more than just live chat and delivers faster, and more personalised support to customers. 

If you’re using a modern e-commerce platform, you will most likely have a pre-built ecosystem to integrate and access these tools or others similar to them. If not, you should create an integration roadmap to ensure you have the right tech stack for supporting your omnichannel efforts. 

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and Their Role in Omnichannel Customer Experience

Customer data platforms or CDPs are centralised systems that arrange, collect, and analyse customer data from many platforms, like websites, mobile applications, social media, emails, etc. Unlike other data management solutions, CDPs are made to collect and stitch scattered data sets together and create a more detailed customer profile. 

Here are some of the roles of Customer Data Platforms in omnichannel customer experience:

• 360 degree customer view – CDPs integrate information from many channels to produce comprehensive data of every customer. You can anticipate demands, personalise customer messages, send relevant offers across platforms, etc.
  
• Real-time data processing – Provides you timely insights that are important when catering to a personalised customer experience. With this, you can quickly adapt to customer behaviour, preferences, etc across different platforms.
  
• Personalisation – With the rich data insights gathered from your customers, you can practically leverage it and create a more personal interaction with your customers. You can create messages or interactions that are based on their past purchases, behaviours, preferences, etc.
  
• Unified customer experience – Enables seamless transition between multiple touchpoints by smoothly syncing data across multiple channels, making sure that customers receive consistent messaging and experiences.
  
• Utilise omni-channel marketing campaigns – By monitoring customer segments and measuring your marketing efforts, you can gain insights that could help you make adjustments that would essentially increase return of investments (ROI), and customer satisfaction. 

Businesses that use CDPs achieve growth in customer engagement and an increase in conversion rates. Overall, it helps your omnichannel customer experience strategy to reach customer expectations, manage customer data, and boost customer satisfaction. 

Personalisation and Recommendation Engines 

As innovative technology arises, customer expectations also grow. Many businesses nowadays use personalisation and recommendation engines to enhance and create a smooth omnichannel customer experience and boost customer interactions.

Personalisation refers to making adjustments to experiences, goods, and services to each unique customer preferences. Recommendation engines, on the other hand, are AI-driven algorithms that examine customer data to be able to offer tailored suggestions for products, goods, information, or services.

Here are some considerations why personalisation is important for your omnichannel strategy: 

• Provides seamless customer journeys: Personalisation and recommendation engines enable users a seamless customer experience throughout multiple online and offline channels.

• Enhancing multichannel experience: It ensures that customers receive a consistent and seamless experience across their preferred channels, like e-commerce platforms, online stores, or multiple departments using desktop or mobile devices.
  
• Cost efficiency: Cost savings can be achieved if you provide the right recommendation and personalisation to your target market. This is why customer segmentation is important. You can optimise marketing efforts to decrease business operation costs and streamline operations by saving significant costs. 

Customer loyalty is one great example of what you can get from a great omnichannel marketing strategy. A deep understanding of your customers can be achieved by collecting customer feedback, knowing their behaviour patterns, etc.

This data can help you create customer personas that are an important tool for customer interaction in multiple channels. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) 

From all of the numerous omnichannel commerce solutions, AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) can help ecommerce businesses truly stand out.

AI and ML technologies can help your business gain an in-depth understanding of customer preferences, their buying process, and behaviours across different channels. AI-powered solutions can make it simple to manage operational costs by streamlining processes that are repetitive, improving inventory, and making accurate business demand predictions. 

These technologies enable users with a self-service portal wherein they can figure out queries and how to resolve issues on their own without getting assisted by an agent. 

It can offer personalised and tailored shopping experiences for retailers operating in an omnichannel platform where customers expect instant access and smooth transitions between channels. 

Single View of Customer (SVC) Technology 

SVC or single view of customer technology is also known as 360 degree platform or unified customer view. This technology is a platform or database that combines all important customer data from multiple sources and piles into a single cohesive view. 

For example, if you have an e-commerce business, you can optimise SVC to track customer browsing or searching behaviour, purchase transactions, abandoned carts, and their purchasing preferences. 

By optimising this, you can make a more personalised algorithm for them in the website or platform they are browsing. This can lead to an increase in conversion rates and sales. 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems 

CRM or Customer Relationship Management systems are important in online businesses. These systems serve as a central hub that stores, organises, and protects vast numbers of customer data. This data gives insights to businesses about their target market preferences, and how they interact with other touchpoints like social media, websites, stores, etc. 

Here are some of the roles of CRM in your business:

• Centralised customer data: CRM systems are like storage systems or repositories of customer information. These include contact details, addresses, purchase history, preferences, interactions, and more. The data is consolidated from emails, phone calls, social media, website interactions, and other sources.
  
• Enhanced customer relationships: With the insights you gathered from your CRM systems you can now have a better understanding of your customer’s needs and preferences. This, in return, would allow you to tailor products, shopping feed, and ads for them.
  
• Increased revenue and sales: By identifying the customer preferences, it will now be easy for you to tailor content that is solely for that customer and make it easy for them to make a purchase.
  
• Improved customer interactions: Communication with your customers is important. CRM systems streamline communication with customers by organising and tracking interactions across multiple digital and traditional channels. 
  
• Optimised marketing efforts: To fully optimise your marketing efforts, CRM can help you based on customer segmentation, demographics, and preferences or behaviour. By personalising marketing messages, you can attract more customers and drive traffic to your site. 

CRM systems allow you to track and immediately reply to custom inquiries via social media, live chat, email, or phone calls. You can handle customer complaints easily, provide real-time solution, and build a strong relationship with them that encourage loyalty and retention. 

Chatbots and Virtual Assistants

Chatbots and virtual assistants streamline customer interaction across different digital channels. These technologies are powered by artificial intelligence or AI and natural language processing that enables its interactivity.

Some companies provide these chatbots and virtual assistants for basic inquiries and FAQs then after a short while will connect you to a live agent where you can have a more comprehensive conversation about your queries. 

This technology can help your business to increase engagement with the help of chatbots that can promptly answer relevant questions and resolve issues or deliver important information. 

Customers like it when they are presented with efficiency and innovativeness, especially if they favour digital channels.  

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) 

Augmented Reality AR and Virtual Reality VR are innovative technologies that blend the physical and digital worlds. They enable users to have unique and interactive experiences. 

Both share some similarities but they have more than one key difference :

• AR or Augmented Reality: These are overlays of digital content that enhance the user’s perception of reality. AR technology runs on devices like smartphones, smart glasses, or tablets to place visual elements like animations, graphics and text onto the user’s view of the physical world. For example, Ikea has a mobile app that allows you to envision how Ikea furniture would look in your own home without having to go to Ikea outlets physically. They just use a 3D overlay of the furniture atop a live video stream so that you can interactively imagine how it would look in your house.
  
• VR or Virtual Reality: VR creates a completely immersive digital world that stimulates physical presence, allowing users to interact and navigate through it in real life. VR technology requires you to use specialised devices to access it like VR goggles or headphones to provide you with an immersive experience. 

AR and VR significance in your omni channel customer experience is that it captivates your customer’s attention. Of course, you need to do customer segmentation first because not all people are into high-technology tools and would rather do it the easiest and cheapest way possible. 

Mobile Apps 

Most omnichannel customers shop via mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Mobile apps provide convenience and enhance engagement more simply. They also offer a wide range of productivity tools and utilities that help users stay organised, manage tasks, and increase efficiency.

Ecommerce app development is a powerful move for omnichannel customer experience  because most customers prefer convenience more than anything. It also has enhanced features, offline access, and seamless transitions between channels. 

Your customer support agents can easily call your customers who submitted tickets or have queries via phone, making your business more credible and reliable. 

Integrating Social Media and Messaging Platforms 

Integrating social media and messaging platforms into your omnichannel customer experience involves connecting digital communication channels with your system and processes to streamline interaction with customers. 

Social media like Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn play an important role in modern communication and customer engagement strategies. 

Here is how these technologies help your omnichannel business:

• Enhanced customer engagement;
• Seamless communication;
• Expanded reach and visibility;
• Personalised interactions;
• Increased sales and traffic.

There are currently three billion people around the world using messaging platforms. Facebook Messenger is the leading messaging platform in the United States with around 976 million users recorded last 2023. 

Using these channels effectively can help you reach a wide range of customers and expand your brand awareness. 

Answering and Call Centre Solutions

Traditional call centres are changing to cater to omnichannel customer experience. Customer support now gives temporary solutions by having you submit a ticket and be messaged by an automated answer, then after that you will be connected to a support agent, and from there on you can have your conversation with them. 

Some companies call their customers directly even though they are not initiating calls just so they can understand the problem and resolve it first-hand. Technologies in omnichannel customer experience deliver smooth and effective support from social media apps, messaging apps, phone calls, emails, etc. 

Customer inquiries are sometimes complex and need to be resolved through phone call. This is where call routing technology enters, which enables your customers to get in touch with the most relevant agent that will handle the problem. Intelligent routing ensures that your customers receive timely and personalised assistance regardless of which channel they are using. 

Call centre solutions also provide self service options like knowledge bases, chatbots, and IVR or interactive voice response systems to empower customers and also to optimise cost-effectiveness. 

With this technology, your customer can solve problems on their own and will not have to wait for their inquiries to be answered, which is quite convenient for them. 

Real-time Analytics 

Real-time analytics give businesses actionable insights and important data about customer preferences and interactions across multiple channels. It enables you to track and analyse customer data the moment it was generated, giving you real-time insight. 

Here’s how real-time analytics solutions contribute to omnichannel customer experience:

• Giving personalised experience;
• Creating immediate insights;
• Optimising channel performance;
• Delivering proactive customer service;
• Agile decision-making.

These can ultimately gain you new followers or customers and increase brand awareness as you foster trust, reliability, and credibility.