Optimizing omnichannel user journeys

Omnichannel user journeys are about much more than being everywhere at once. They’re deeply rooted in strategic placements and delivering value. As a part of our continued commitment to our clients, our strategists regularly take courses to improve our understanding of their specialty areas. What follows is a breakdown of our most important Nielsen Norman Group (NNG) Omnichannel Optimization Course takeaways that can help you create a better experience for your customers across all channels.

Defining terms

Getting a foundational understanding of all the parts and pieces of an omnichannel user journey is a helpful way to start assessing it. We’ll start with the most granular pieces and move up from there:

Touchpoint - Any interaction that takes place between a consumer and an organization.

Channel - Where the interaction between a consumer and an organization takes place.  

Examples of channels include:  

• Email
• Website
• Mobile website
• Social media,
• Direct mail
• Live chat
• Customer support

Some channels are unidirectional, they provide only one-way communication between the consumer and the organization. Think of direct mail or some informational emails.

Other channels allow for two-way interaction between the consumer and an organization.  These could be physical locations, phone calls, websites, apps, social media, and others.

Devices provide the access point to different channels. These could be mobile devices, laptops or desktops, smartwatches, or a kiosk found in a physical location.

Customer journey - The end-to-end process a person goes through to complete a task over time. This could be as short as signing up for a demo or filling out a contact form, or a longer task like finding a doctor through an insurance website.

An omnichannel user experience is the aggregate of the experiences that a person has with an organization while completing a single activity on more than one channel. This collection of separate experiences could take place on different devices, on different channels, and over the course of multiple touchpoints.

With a foundational understanding of the parts of an omnichannel user experience, we can now talk about how to assess our own organization’s level of maturity and how to identify opportunities to optimize the user experience across multiple channels.

Omnichannel maturity

To have a mature omnichannel user experience, you need to do more than simply communicate with consumers across multiple channels. Often organizational silos can lead to an inconsistent user experience across different channels.

The NNG offers five key components of the omnichannel experience that can be assessed and optimized to create a well-planned and smooth experience for all audiences across your various channels of communication.

These five elements are listed below from the lowest level of effort (time & cost) to the highest.

The first is consistency. Often consistency is thought of in terms of visual design. While that is an important factor, other factors like core functionality, user flows, information, and brand tone of voice should be assessed for consistency as well. It can be pretty frustrating for users when they learn how one channel functions, and then find another channel functions in slightly different ways (unless that functionality is unique and strategically optimized to a particular channel.)

The second is optimization for the context of each channel, device, and stage of the journey.  This can come in two different forms:  

1. Optimizing the same content and functionality across every device. Think of desktop web pages versus mobile web pages and how the content is specifically laid out for each device.
    
2. Providing the right content and functionality on the right device.  the difference between displaying information on a smartphone versus a smartwatch. Reading long-form content on a smartwatch would be a pretty poor experience.

This can be at odds with the above element (consistency) so the two must be balanced with the user experience as the guiding principle.   

The third element is seamlessness. Organizations should work to create a seamless experience between channels for consumers. Many of us have had the experience of filling in a form on a digital channel, and then we were asked the same questions on a customer service call. Motivation is the only way to tolerate such an experience!  

“Successful omnichannel organizations are 60% more likely to utilize customer data to maintain the context of prior interactions across channels.” Omnichannel Customer Care: Empowered Customers Demand a Seamless Experience - Omer Minkara

The fourth element is orchestration. This is about how an organization uses customer data to help customers pick up where they left off on their personal journey. To provide the best experience, this must be done helpfully and not in a “data-tracking-creepy” way. People are more likely to be comfortable with data tracking if the resulting benefit is a positive, helpful, and engaging experience.  

The final element is collaboration. Your channels should work together to create a smooth experience for consumers. Have you ever tried signing into a streaming service account using your TV remote? Many services now provide a code for you to hand off the sign-in experience to your phone, tablet, or laptop. This allows for a much smoother account creation or sign-in experience by taking advantage of a more user-friendly device to complete the task. 

Omnichannel strategy

Getting your omnichannel strategy started or re-strategized takes some organizational buy-in, collaboration, and up-front research, but the juice is worth the squeeze!

“Businesses that adopt an omnichannel strategy achieve a 91% greater year-over-year increase in client retention compared to businesses that don’t incorporate an omnichannel customer-engagement strategy.” – Omnichannel Customer Care: Empowered Customers Demand a Seamless Experience - Omer Minkara

Creating stakeholder alignment and documenting assumptions is an important first step to being able to define the current state of an organization’s omnichannel strategy.  Imarc can help guide those conversations to document the current state of assumptions across stakeholders, and cross-functional groups within the organization.

This is also the time to take an honest inventory of what you can handle. Don't bite off more than you can chew! Start with mapping one key persona and one key journey. What does it take for your key persona to complete the task you want them to complete? A journey map can help to identify pain points, and pain points are opportunities to create a better experience for your customers.  

As the strategy is planned and refined, additional journeys can be mapped and additional opportunities identified. The goal is to produce step-by-step optimizations that help your organization reach omnichannel maturity, and ultimately provide a smooth omnichannel experience for your customers.

If your organization’s omnichannel experience is not working seamlessly to create a positive customer experience, let's talk to see if we can find ways to optimize the experience together.

*Processes cited in this blog were produced by NNG.