Designing an omnichannel experience

An omnichannel experience is the sum of all the interactions a customer has with your brand. This includes offline channels like stores, billboards, calls to a live agent, and all your digital channels — websites, social media, apps, mobile, influencer blogs, video, digital displays, etc.

How well these channels work together will determine how cohesive (or inconsistent) the omnichannel customer experience is.

“Consistency across channels is no longer a pleasant surprise. It’s expected, and when it’s missing, customers are unhappy.” — Esther Fesenmeier, CEO at Spark Reply

A good omnichannel experience puts customers in the driver’s seat and encourages them to explore your brand and deepen customer engagement. It entices them with engaging experiences and customer touchpoints that are connected and personalized throughout the customer journey.

We should note that omnichannel does not mean publishing the same exact content on every digital channel. An omnichannel customer experience strategy considers how customers engage on their preferred channels, what type of content they want to see on each channel, and how that content can work together to provide a seamless customer experience.

How an omnichannel approach impacts customer satisfaction and loyalty

Customer experiences, even in-store experiences, start long before that first demo call or moment of purchase. They’re reading articles on your website, checking product reviews, looking for how-to-videos, and seeing what people are saying on your social media platforms.

Customers interact with brands through an average of six touchpoints on a typical purchase journey, and 90% of consumers expect a consistent brand experience throughout that journey, according to recent omnichannel statistics from CapitalOne Shopping.

When companies fall short of delivering a cohesive customer experience, customers are quick to react. In their 2024 report, Zendesk found that a single bad customer experience could undermine customer loyalty.

“57% of customers would switch to a company’s competitor due to one bad customer experience.” — Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2024

Customer journey mapping used to be a linear exercise where you could map out each touchpoint in order and build the customer experience around that path. The proliferation of channels and the way consumers move between make mapping the omnichannel customer experience much more complex.

In an omnichannel world, customer journey maps cover a complex sprawl of different touchpoints that marketers can use to motivate customers and encourage them to stay on the desired path. It’s less linear and more responsive to the customer in the moment.

For example, when someone visits your website and clicks away without buying you could retarget them with an ad on social media, trigger an email, or personalize their next visit with recommendations based on their browsing history. With each touchpoint you learn more about customer preferences and how to guide their journey.

Gather customer data and insights

Your goal is to understand how and where your customers want to interact with your brand, what their preferred channels are, and how those different channels can work together to meet their needs or solve their pain points.

Think about all the ways you can gather customer insights and data: analytics software, service mapping, customer reviews, data on the most frequently viewed FAQs, conversations with customer service and sales teams, interviews with customers.

For example, at Contentful we do customer tours and host events where we talk directly with our customers. This helps us understand their evolving needs, where we serve them well, and where we can do a better job communicating and enhancing value throughout their customer experience.

As you gather data, it’s important to aggregate and integrate data from multiple sources. Siloed data makes it hard to get a 360-degree view of the customer and will limit your ability to use data for personalization, localization, optimization, and in combination with AI tools.

Develop a customer-centric omnichannel strategy

We’ve already talked about the importance of an omnichannel strategy. Bringing individual channels together with shared goals and empowering people with processes and tools that help them collaborate across channels and touchpoints sets the foundation for seamless customer journeys.

Align teams around content

Before you think about individual channels, start with your brand story. Think about what key messages sit at the top level of messaging and how other pieces of your story will unfold through the customer journey.

Involve people from different parts of the business to ensure the story is complete and has hooks for multiple channels and touchpoints.

Once teams are aligned on messaging, use your customer data and insights to determine what parts of the story fit best on each channel, where you can add personalization, and what types of content, images, and videos you need to craft a rich omnichannel experience.

See how Canyon Bicycles uses Contentful to orchestrate content and design across channels and throughout the customer journey.

Empower teams to deliver omnichannel customer experiences at scale

Siloed, disconnected systems make delivering connected omnichannel experiences slow and inefficient. This is a huge barrier to delivering omnichannel experiences at scale.

To deliver a seamless customer experience, brands need to facilitate collaboration across teams, while giving teams enough flexibility to tailor the customer experience on each channel.

Think about how teams are structured, how success is measured (so channel owners aren’t fighting against each other), what tools and technology do you need for tighter integrations and orchestration across channels, and what governance features provide the right mix of flexibility and consistency.

See how a composable content platform gives marketing teams the tools they need to deliver cohesive omnichannel experiences.

Kraft Heinz, supported by partner Apply Digital, modernized their technology with Contentful’s platform and Contentful Marketplace apps. The new platform enables teams to deliver interactive content across channels — quizzes, recipe ideas (including “tasty mac hacks”), social media feeds of fans making and using the products, and an AI-powered recipe generator. For some brands, engagement has increased by over 30%.

Up next: Omnichannel marketing

Explore omnichannel marketing, understand its benefits, why it's challenging, and how to deliver experiences at scale.