What's Wrong with Omnichannel Strategy and How to Right it!

What's Wrong with Omnichannel Strategy and How to Right it!

Omnichannel is a cross-channel strategy that organizations use to improve user experience. Omnichannel strategy optimizes the end-to-end experience. Every organization supports relevant channels that make up a unique omnichannel ecosystem. The channels may comprise Email, Website, Tablet apps, SMS, Kiosks, Live Chat, Social Media, Mobile App, Smartwatch app, Phone support, Brick and mortar stores etc

Interaction Channels

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The traditional brick and mortar stores are now replaced by many digital channels. Users switch between channels to complete a task. Consider a leisure traveler planning to book flights for his annual vacation. He explores several flight options and prices on the mobile apps (includes airline mobile apps, online travel agent apps or flight aggregator apps). He might resume this search on the desktop website with filters like the number of stops, direct/non-direct flights, flight departure times, red-eye flights, insurance options, special services like seats, wheelchair, etc. He may still not book the tickets as he awaits a review from his friends. He'll share flight details over social media/phone with his friends. He'll then look for baggage allowance on the airline chatbot. He'll go back to the website / mobile app to complete the flight booking. 

Omnichannel Strategy

Organizations aim to go omnichannel on all channels. On the one hand, they keep adding more channels. These days, almost every enterprise organization adds a tablet app, a mobile app, and a chatbot to their channels with the goal of acquiring new users and attracting young talent. On the other hand, they create the same flows and experiences over and over again on every channel to maintain consistency. On above counts, organizations hope that revenues will grow exponentially and when the revenues don't increase as expected, they wonder why.

Why Omnichannel strategy may not work

Traditional omnichannel strategy tells organizations to build the exact same product on every channel they own. However, building the same features/products across all channels for consistency does more harm than good. Here is one example: 

Example 1: Imagine building an entire booking flow on a mobile app. Consider booking a simple flight from Bangalore to New York for 4 travelers - 2 adults, 1 child, and an infant. The booking flow is very long including flows like search, availability page, flights selection, travelers details, fare review, payment page, confirmation page, etc. If booking flow is built into the website and displayed on a 5-inch smartphone or a KaiOS feature phone, a traveler will face difficulties in keying all the data on the phone. The flow that is simpler on the website suddenly appears complex. Imagine the same booking flow on a chatbot. Will a traveler speak to the chatbot and feed all the information one by one?

Is a consistent omnichannel strategy really beneficial? Maybe not.

How to make Omnichannel strategy work?

An omnichannel strategy must be used to power. By this, I mean that each channel's strengths should be put to full advantage. For example, a booking flow for a mobile app must be simplified as compared to the desktop website version. A chatbot can be used to its full advance to seek details about an already booked flight. Displaying a web-based payments page on the mobile app is not mobile-friendly. Instead, building native payment pages for mobile app is apter. 

Users don't really mandate an omnichannel experience. Neither do they really bother if a feature on one channel exists on the other or not.

Users want to continue their task seamlessly from one channel to another and complete the task successfully.

Consider the leisure traveler use case I discussed above. A good omnichannel strategy ensures that a mobile app user searches for flights on the mobile app, continues that saved search on the desktop to view more details, use the live chat / chatbot to ask some queries, share the details with friends on website / mobile app over social media, resume booking on the desktop website/mobile app and complete the booking. Throughout the flows, user switches between multiple channels without losing information or the state of the flow. 

An ideal omnichannel strategy offers seamless experience to users by offering right information, at the right time irrespective of the channel they use.

Key characteristics of an ideal omnichannel strategy include:

1. Deep understanding of the user journey

2. Creating strong presence on relevant channels for relevant features/products

3. Personalizing the experience on each channel

Analytics and Omnichannel Strategy

Organizations want to be on most channels that exist today. How do they decide which existing channels to invest in? Usage metrics on each channel offers information on how many users use features and how often. This is where a strong analytics platform can bring in data intelligence. Depending on these metrics, organizations can derive which channes are frequently used, map them to most used features/flows and design product roadmaps based on these findings.

As users move from channel to channel to complete a task or multiple tasks over time, organizations must think about which channels to build for, and whether they really need to be consistent across channels or not

Next time you think about creating an omnichannel strategy, ask yourself which channels you want to be on and whether you want to stop at consistent experiences or move beyond to create meaningful experiences on those channels.

Need help to set up or manage UX Competency / User Research teams ? Write to me at parimala.shankaraiah[at]gmail.com!



Parimala Hariprasad

Senior Staff Program Manager at Google

5 年

Thank You Anirudh. Glad to be sharing the same ethos!

回复
Anirudh B Balotiaa

Program-Project Manager | Product Ops | IIMB Alumni

5 年

Interesting. Companies tend to spread themselves thin just to be present on various channels and end up ruining every channel experience as they are not able to make even one channel delightful.? You rightly said Users don't care about the various channels...all they care is that whichever channel they interact, it gets their job done as efficiently and effectively as possible.? Another common mistake is to have the ditto experience on every channel...which also doesn't work. Experience should be optimised for that medium. What works on the web will not work on Chatbot as you mentioned.? Scaling is tempting and yet one needs to be measured as more chances of things breaking up.?

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