From Clicks to Bricks: Unlocking Omnichannel Potential for Retail Success

Written by: Naresh Sambhawani ,

Enterprise Sales Manager - EMEA, Krish TechnoLabs

Omnichannel Customer Experience, a huge umbrella term, has become a necessity for retailers in today's day and age, where customers are engaging with brands on so many platforms and ways. But why a necessity? Omnichannel experience facilitates retailers to be present on all the relevant channels where the customers are and helps them get closer to them by gaining complete control over the brand experiences. This creates a ground for personalizing the whole brand discovery, engaging, buying decisions, and loyalty to the brand.

But what do you need to implement omnichannel? The simple answer to this complicated question is: Be on as many relevant channels as possible and actively provide a cohesive experience across these channels. Remember, there is no omnichannel if you are not on all the right channels.

Let's dissect the omnichannel framework into four key components mapped with the customer lifecycle.

1) Omnichannel Content

Although little overlooked, omnichannel content plays a major role in overall positioning and how customers perceive your brand for the first time and during repeat purchases. This includes uniform brand messaging across all channels, i.e., website, mobile, social media, email, SMS, and more.

Let's understand this via a hypothetical customer journey of Jack.

Jack wants to buy a Sofa for his new home and discovers a new Home & Décor brand on an Instagram Ad, possibly retargeted from his previous Google search; he clicks and lands on the website - the graphics, visuals, and text represent a trendy yet affordable home decor brand matching his expectation from seeing the ad. He spends some time on the website, wishlists a few designs that he liked and exits. No purchase, but the brand is certainly registered in his consideration set. In another case, if the website reflected a dull and bland visual experience on the website as compared to the Instagram ad, he would not be able to connect with the brand, bounce from the website, and perhaps never come back.

2) Omnichannel Marketing

This is one of the most crucial pieces—understanding your potential customer's buying stage and reaching out to them with the right messaging and promotions to push them to the next stage of the funnel, making it a strong personalization strategy.

With the right technology stack, including CDP (Customer Data Platform), merchants can create centralized and unified customer profiles, understanding their lifecycle stage and segmenting them to drive campaign efficiency and effectiveness. Marketing Automation helps you define your own workflows, whether to send a push notification, email, or SMS with personalized content to encourage the customer to continue the journey.

Let's get back to Jack. He bounced from the website without making a purchase. To get him back on the website and buy that sofa, you need his data to then tap him with marketing campaigns. It can be retargeting campaigns on various platforms or something more personalized like a browse abandonment automation flow (provided he left his email or other contact details with you during the first interaction).

3) Omnichannel Buying Experience

Let's assume that the customer has decided to buy from you, but there are a few things that he needs assurance on. For example, a customer might want to experience the product before buying; this is quite true for certain high-involvement product categories like Furniture and Home Decor, Electronics, etc. At that stage, retailers can help them to experience the products in their physical stores, where the customers can experience the products and then make a buying decision.

Coming back to Jack, he decides to visit the nearest store to be assured of the design, material and other aspects. Jack likes the sofa and wants to buy it. But the pricing and offers do not match between offline and online channels, creating a disconnected experience. Also, he needs to arrange the product delivery himself in case of buying from the store. This is because the tech systems for offline and online are working in silos. However, Jack buys the product, but there is no loyalty system in place that could motivate him for future(repeat) purchases. Also, the collected points online cannot be redeemed across different buying channels, i.e. online points cannot be redeemed offline, creating another bad experience. I hope there won't be as many challenges a Jack would face in a real-world encounter, but these are real-world challenges a customer might face if your omnichannel is not done right!

4) Omnichannel Customer Service

In case of dissatisfaction with the product or service, customers want to reach out to the brand in the easiest and quickest way possible. This is the most crucial part but still faced with a lot of resistance by the majority of customers. Customers can reach out on social media, live chat, or email and want the resolution in the easiest, quickest, and most convenient manner possible. They want to reach out and talk to someone and get their issues resolved ASAP. As there are multiple methods through which customers can register their concerns, there needs to be the right technology and a good team to manage these complaints in a consistent way. One of the effective tools could be a conversational AI tool to help get the resolution quicker. However, it should also not be pushed to extreme cases where the customer wants to speak to a customer service representative but is just not able to get past through the AI bots. Balance and context will be the key here.

Let's say Jack faced a problem with the product and reached out to the brand on Instagram, but the complaint was missed as there was no system and SOP within the CS team to check for it. After a day, he reached out on the live chat and started conversing with the AI bot, but due to inefficient automated response configuration, he was not getting a resolution and was not able to reach out to the customer service representative quickly. Finally, he reached out to the nearest store and was able to return the product easily, replace it with a different product, and receive a sorry note & a free accessory from the store for the inconvenience. Now, although he was not happy with the earlier service experience, he is certainly happy with the in-store customer service - a potential repeat buyer for the brand.

In conclusion, omnichannel is an "easier-said-than-done" mechanism for implementing the best customer journey and facilitating the best experience for your customers, but with the right strategy and team - the rewards are in abundance!

About the Author - Fuelled by a relentless drive for digital innovation, Naresh Sambhawani is at the forefront of crafting transformative experiences within the dynamic realm of digital agencies. With a knack for pushing boundaries and leveraging emerging technologies, he specializes in creating captivating brand narratives that resonate deeply with audiences.