What is Omnichannel Communication & How to Create a Succesful Strategy?

As the number of potential customer communication channels and touchpoints continues to increase, omnichannel communication is a must.

As customers switch from email to social media, in-app messaging, live chat, push notifications, and more, you need a way to connect them all and deliver a seamless experience to users.

In this article, we discuss what omnichannel communication involves, how it can help you deliver seamless experiences, and how to get started implementing it.

What is omnichannel communication?

Omnichannel communication (or omni-channel communication) refers to the use and integration of multiple channels of communicating and connecting with customers, including all online and offline channels.

It involves unifying all communication channels to enable you to maintain a consistent brand voice and deliver a consistent customer experience across all channels.

Omnichannel communication vs. multichannel communication

Both multichannel and omnichannel communications require that you have multiple channels of communication, but they differ in important ways:

• Customer communications with multichannel communication are largely disconnected, with each channel having its own goal. Conversely, the omnichannel communication strategy connects and unifies data from all channels under a single platform and a shared goal.
• As a result of the above, the omnichannel communication strategy is heavily customer-centric, involving a profound understanding of customers’ needs, while multichannel communications simply broadcast brand messages across channels.
• Omnichannel communication gives businesses a better understanding of the customer journey, enabling them to make decisions faster than the multichannel communication strategy.
• Channels within the omnichannel communication strategy are designed to strengthen client relationships through consistent experience delivery, while multichannel communications deliver different experiences for different channels.
• Thanks to the interconnectivity of all the channels, omnichannel communication systems resolve issues faster than multichannel communication.

The benefits of omnichannel communication

Today’s customer has more options than ever before. Omnichannel communication strategy makes the most of these options and the changing customer expectations that come with them.

Create consistent customer experience across multiple channels

The modern customer may find you on Twitter, learn more about your SaaS product on Product Hunt, and subscribe to a plan on your website. With the journey jumping from one channel to the next, connecting it all may be difficult.

The omnichannel experience, however, empowers you to deliver a consistent experience by connecting each of these customer journey touchpoints. It integrates every possible channel under one central location and maps each customer’s journey across channels.

By providing you with insights into the customer’s conversation history, previous interactions, etc., it enables you to take proactive actions on all channels.

Deliver personalized communications with customers to drive customer loyalty

Omnichannel communication creates customer experiences that are informed by real-time data from every channel. Thanks to this context, you can more easily understand customer needs and align your services to match their expectations.

For instance, you can trigger an in-app walkthrough that addresses their live chat query. Likewise, your agent can draw from previous interactions to better address current concerns without having the customer repeat them.

By delivering a personalized service experience that simplifies customer interactions, you drive customers to care more about your brand, leading to better customer retention and loyalty rates.

Increased customer engagement and satisfaction

An omnichannel communication strategy is highly customer-centric, bringing you to the customer. It empowers customers to connect with you on their preferred channels, improving customer engagement.

Thanks to the available customer insight, you can also improve customer satisfaction by quickly resolving customer issues.

For instance, you can use context-driven canned responses on live chat to provide quick and effective responses, or route chats on demand to the right agents. Ultimately, it enables you to meet and satisfy customer expectations at scale.

How to execute a successful omnichannel communication strategy

Ready to implement an omnichannel communication strategy? Let’s now consider five steps to ensure you do this successfully.

Identify the communication channels you are already using

The first step to implementing your omnichannel strategy is to determine the channels you already use. Start by listing out all the channels where you have a presence – website, email, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, etc.

Next, conduct a deep dive into each of these channels. What is the predominant user demography on the channel? What do they like to discuss there? How can you connect better with them?

Note that different channels have different goals/purposes and may favor different communication styles. For instance, connecting with Gen Z on TikTok will be wildly different from doing the same with boomers and millennials on Facebook.

Develop a consistent brand voice

Next, you need to fix your “brand voice” or messaging strategy. A good messaging strategy has a clear goal, tells your brand story, and differentiates you from the competition.

Although your approach to messaging on each channel may differ, your voice should remain the same. Put simply, a user who visits your social channels, reads your blog posts, and receives your newsletter, should feel like it was written by one person.

Your messaging should also feel personal to the reader, identifying their pain and addressing it in their language.

This combination of consistent messaging and personalization will help your message resonate better with your audience.

Collect customer data to provide personalized experiences

Having the right customer data and knowing what to do with it is key to a successful omnichannel communication strategy.

Data analytics can help you uncover user preferences, identify patterns, aid personalization, and improve customer satisfaction. For that to happen, though, you need to know what data to collect and where to find it.

There are three major data sources you’ll need for your omnichannel communication strategy:

• In-app analytics: In-app analytics analyze and describe everything a user does within your application. It reveals a user’s engagement level, their most used feature, in-app customer interactions, etc.
• Surveys: Surveys like the welcome survey tell you who your customer is and why they need your product. Conversely, surveys like the NPS, CES, and CSAT surveys tell you how satisfied a user is with your product.
• Social media comments: You can also learn more about how a user views your brand by paying attention to their comments about your product/service on social media.

Provide timely communication

One disadvantage to having multiple communication channels is that desperate users will exhaust as many of them as they can find, creating an unnecessary load for your agents to sort through.

The solution? Respond quickly.

Users will often run into trouble with your app at critical times in their tasks. Providing timely communication and quick resolution will help minimize friction and get them back on track.

For example, you can include a self-serve resource center to help users quickly troubleshoot their challenges. You can also provide a live chat service with standby agents to help users who can’t find their way themselves.

By providing timely resolutions, you’ll improve the customer experience, boost word-of-mouth marketing from happy customers, and grow your revenue.

Set KPIs for each communication channel

Ultimately, different communication channels have different purposes and goals. For example, you may use TikTok to expand your reach, while using email newsletters to nurture warm leads.

As a result, each channel should have a different measure of success and its own set of key performance indices (KPIs) to measure that success.

For example, success for your email newsletters will be high email open and CTA clickthrough rates. You may track likes, comments, shares, and other engagement metrics for your social media channels to gauge your reach.

Be sure to communicate your chosen KPIs for each channel to the relevant teams in charge of them so that there is clarity of purpose amongst everyone.

What digital channels to include in your omnichannel communications?

With multiple channels at your disposal, selecting the right channels for your omnichannel communication is important. Your chosen channels should be engaging, personal, and convenient.

Regardless of your product type or user demographic, you’ll have four primary communication options:

In-app communication

In-app communication is used to deliver messages and personalized support to your users while they’re active on your app. It enables you to send contextual messages that reach customers at just the right moment.

This form of customer communication makes it possible to prompt users to take specific actions, such as upgrading their subscriptions, completing a survey, testing a feature, etc.

Used correctly, in-app communications create a sense of personal connection between you and your customer. It inspires user confidence, boosts customer success, and increases conversion rates.

Email communication

Email communication serves a variety of purposes as an outward-facing channel. From marketing campaigns to content newsletters and news sharing, it is a valuable tool to have in your arsenal.

As a support channel, though, it is too slow. Users often have to wait for hours (or even days!) before receiving a response to their queries, causing undue friction.

Email open and clickthrough rates are also consistently declining, with average clickthrough rates currently at 1.39%. This makes it an expensively underperforming acquisition channel.

Social platforms

Social media allows you to interact with your audience in an informal and very personal way.

From encouraging user interactions on Twitter to driving user-generated content on TikTok and Instagram, social media is a highly valuable tool that’s impossible to ignore.

Some businesses also adopt social media as an additional support channel, receiving and addressing customer complaints on their channel.

However, as support channels, social platforms can easily get overwhelmed with complaints and fall into the same pattern of delayed responses as emails. Likewise, grabbing user attention can often feel like a losing game.

How to provide omnichannel communication with Userpilot

If you’re trying to implement an omnichannel communication strategy, Userpilot can be very helpful. A powerful no-code tool, it helps you collect customer data, track a user’s customer journey, and take data-driven actions:

Collect customer data with in-app surveys

Userpilot enables you to launch a wide array of surveys to help you gather customer insights. It provides an extensive library of survey templates, including user experience, customer satisfaction, product research, etc.

You’re able to choose a ready-made template and edit it to match your use case or create one from scratch. You’ll also be able to trigger this survey at any customer touchpoint of your choosing.

For instance, you can trigger a welcome survey immediately after signup to learn more about a user or a new feature survey to understand what users like/dislike about the feature.

As survey results come in, you’ll learn what customers expect of your product and how to improve the customer experience. Surveys can also help you improve customer communications across channels and arm you to deliver a more personalized experience.

Trigger email campaigns based on real-time customer behavior

When integrated with your app, Userpilot helps you track each user’s journey through the app. This means access to real-time user behavior data as they interact with features/buttons, carry out tasks, etc.

This data is then automatically transferred to your app or a designated third-party software via a powerful webhook, where you’ll be able to use it as you please.

However, Userpilot can do more than notify your backend that an event has occurred. Userpilot’s webhooks also enable you to trigger a series of emails when specific user behaviors or interactions occur.

Use Hubspot data to set in-app experiences

Finally, Userpilot enables you to act on the data you collect from users. For instance, you can build custom user segments based on users’ tracked in-app activities, making it easier for you to deliver personalized experiences.

Thanks to Userpilot’s integration with Hubspot, you can extend this power even further to drive growth at every customer journey stage.

For example, you can design contextual Hubspot email campaigns targeting specific user segments based on their in-app behavior.

Conclusion

As you can see, omnichannel communication is a necessity in today’s digital world. It helps you create a personalized, consistent customer experience that boosts customer engagement and satisfaction.

If you’re ready to start putting every in-app customer data to use, then it’s time to get your free Userpilot demo!