Many individual and professionals share different views about Omnichannel.
The word first appeared around 2010 and has gained much traction over the past few years in both business and marketing.

Expert marketers were the first at understanding its fundamental benefits by delivering a unified message with personalized communication that was representative of the brand to their different customers.

What’s next in omnichannel experiences?

There is no question that customers are increasingly expecting seamless experiences. They wish to feel unique, remembered and surprised by the companies they decide to invest their hard earned money into.

In more recent context, they also demand for cleaner and safer environments, with new ways to pay and receive their orders.

Nobody enjoys wasting 15 minutes of their day behind cash registers or ticketing lines, or search for help from a representative to not get the right advice, or even call customer care about a mischarge only to hear that they can’t do anything about it after a 30 minute wait on the phone.

In an increasingly fast paced lifestyle customers also understand that “Time is money”.

With this shift in customers’ lifestyles and expectations, companies are more and more aware that they need to rethink the way they operate, and a few understand that omnichannel is the way.

It carries an end result that is consistent and impactful by merging physical, online, mobile, social, and customer support efforts.

Investing in Omnichannel might mean short-term discomfort in culture change, standard operational processes and staff training but it reaps great rewards on the medium to long-term goals of any business.

Its success depends on the right customer-centric strategies with a focus on behavioral changes. By truly understanding your clients and keeping a continual dialogue, you will be guided towards the right touch points to change, so that they can keep coming back for more:

• personalization

• seamless checkouts

• availability to expert advice

• unified multichannel experience

are only some of the important preliminary omnichannel strategies to invest in that can lead to great revenue growth and customer retention.

Companies only need to decide at which level they are willing to implement it:

At the marketing level 
Achieve consistent Communication across multi marketing channels (social, email, sms, etc.)

At the commerce level
Centralize online, mobile and offline services to offer a homogeneous support and message to customers shopping in a multichannel way.

At the operational level
Integrate different internal tools and systems capable of unifying the traditionally siloed data into a single customer view.

At the business model level
Reimagine the way the company has been conducting its business and push boundaries by surprising clients with sensorial, entertaining  and state of the art personalization and services at every touch point of the shopping journey.

One thing is clear, from a business perspective omnichannel is still at its infancy and will keep evolving with time by adapting to customers behaviours and new market trends.