Why “Omnichannel” is a Myth

“Omnichannel” is one of those high-sounding new buzzwords that has the lofty ring of ambitious customer strategy and high corporate purpose. 

The only problem is that for the vast majority of businesses, the omnichannel customer experience is a complete myth. Like a myth, for most companies “omnichannel” is a total fiction, admired from afar but understood little, widely popular but subject to many different and often conflicting interpretations.   

Contrary to the prevailing belief, a company is not “omnichannel” just because it is capable of interacting with customers in every possible channel. If the word “omnichannel” is to mean anything at all it must stand for a customer experience that is seamlessly integrated across all the different channels any particular customer chooses.

You can only understand an omnichannel capability by looking at a customer’s interactions through the customer’s own eyes – seeing them and experiencing them as the customer does. And the problem is, customers have memories. Whether you remember them or not, they remember you . They are totally aware of what they said to you or asked of you in one channel, and they carry that awareness with them when they interact with you via any other channel. 

This means a company can only be considered to have “omnichannel” capabilities if the history and context of each customer’s interactions in one channel are flawlessly carried over into the next channel, and the next, and the next.

But this rarely happens today, and I can pop the balloon on the omnichannel myth with just one very obvious example from your own experience as a consumer. Think back to the last time you, as a customer, had some problem with a company’s product or service. Almost certainly the first thing you did was to go online and try to address the problem at the company’s web site. But after spending 20 minutes or maybe an hour struggling to update some transaction, or to substitute one service for another, or to do any one of a thousand other tasks that just didn’t seem to fit into the online choices available, you gave up in frustration and decided to call them, right?

In the US today, by the way, more than half of all customer service calls begin exactly in this manner – with a failed online session. But think back now to how that phone call developed. The first thing you had to do was outwit the IVR. But if you were truly persistent, you eventually did manage to connect with a live human being. And once you finally made that connection, now what did you have to do? That's right. You had to explain everything to this associate from the very beginning. Because even though it was that company’s very own web site, programmed and operated by that company’s own people, the associate you were now talking with had no clue whatsoever that you had even been on the site, much less why.  

Believe it or not, it’s almost trivially simple to link a person’s online session with a live customer care interaction – that is, to ensure that the context of the customer’s online interaction is carried over into the actual human interaction. You could do it with a proactive chat capability, for instance, so the human-to-human interaction takes place within the online session itself. Or you could offer to call the customer, rather than requiring the customer to call you (Amazon does that). Or you could deploy temporal phone numbers on your web site, so that the toll-free number any particular customer sees is unique to that customer’s session, allowing you to link any incoming call from that number to that web session (that’s what a number of our own clients do). And in your mobile app, the “click to call” button ought to dial in from within the app itself, rather than simply patching the call in to your existing toll-free number. 

These aren’t even advanced technologies, and I’ve written about them in the past. But the vast majority of companies still don't link their customers' web site visits to their inbound phone calls.

Just because a company can interact with you online as well as by phone, and perhaps even by text and chat and social media, it doesn’t mean they are an “omnichannel” company. A company may interact with its customers via a number of different channels, but if these interactions aren’t linked together from channel to channel by the customer’s own context and history, then the customer will still be frustrated, and subjected to more friction than required.

A company may have the capability to handle many channels, but that doesn’t mean it has an omnichannel capability.

So don’t be fooled by the myth.