Key Challenges to Omnichannel Customer Experience & How to Solve Them

This article was written by Gaurav Mishra, Director, Technology 

Omnichannel customer experiences are more important than ever.  With evolving consumer expectations and a growing number of digital natives holding significant purchasing power, brands need to provide seamless omnichannel experiences to effectively connect with consumers and remain relevant.  

Below, we’ll take a closer look at three of the most common omnichannel challenges that arise while transforming omnichannel strategy into an operational reality. We’ll explore how to enable omnichannel communication, create seamless customer journeys and manage the resulting data effectively. 

Omnichannel Challenge 1:
Enabling Seamless Communication 

The cornerstone of omnichannel experiences is the ability of brands to connect with customers across their preferred platform. This means messaging and information must be delivered to different channels simultaneously – and effectively – to impact consumer behavior. For a retail giant, this could include the promotion of the season’s biggest sale across their website, mobile app, shopping app and through push notifications on wearable devices or virtual assistants like Alexa. For a media company, it may involve distributing a breaking news story – publishing the full article on their website, featuring a headline banner on their web and mobile homepage, sending a brief snippet to subscribers via Facebook Messenger and issuing a notification through their news app. 

Effectively delivering information across multiple channels is the first of the omnichannel marketing challenges for enterprises pursuing this strategy. 

Though businesses recognize the importance of multi-channel interactions, many struggle to implement them effectively. Typically, content and editorial teams spend significant time reformatting content for various channels, leading to delays and inefficiencies. Manual content recreation provides little to no ROI – it’s costly, error-prone and ultimately unsustainable. Successful omnichannel communications need to be scalable. 

Omnichannel Communication Through Content-as-a-Service 

The scalability required for omnichannel communication can be achieved through Content-as-a-Service (CaaS). This approach delivers structured content across multiple channels, independent of the presentation or display layer. It can help overcome omnichannel challenges because it allows editorial and marketing teams to “write once and publish anywhere.” Content doesn’t have to be repeatedly reformatted in expensive, error-prone and time-consuming processes. Once stored in a central repository, a piece of content can be pushed out to different channels and displayed in the manner most effective for each.  

With a CaaS solution in place, like Acquia Content Cloud, businesses can ensure quick and easy omnichannel interaction with their customers. Seizing time-sensitive opportunities is as simple as updating content in a central repository, from where it’s automatically distributed across all relevant channels with no extra effort. 

Omnichannel Challenge 2:
Building Seamless Integrations 

An omnichannel experience seamlessly weaves together interactions across all channels. Brands must offer an interconnected experience across different devices and platforms, ensuring customer journeys are seamless from start-to-finish – even if a customer pauses and then resumes its interaction on another device. Integrating all of these interactions and channels presents a significant challenge.  

Many businesses begin with point-to-point integrations, like linking their mobile app to their customer service solution, or integrating chatbot conversations with their product recommendation engine. But these point integrations often lack scalability or prove inflexible when forced to adapt to new technologies or processes. Creating point-to-point integrations is time-consuming and requires additional effort each time a new channel is added. This makes it extremely difficult to create a truly omnichannel framework. 

Omnichannel Integration Through APIs 

Seamless omnichannel integrations require an API-first approach – even if the scope of your strategy is currently small. APIs open up integration and communication across different delivery channels and customer touchpoints, allowing data to quickly get to where it needs to go. This is beneficial for both businesses and consumers because 

• Seamless integration between channels lets customers initiate, continue and conclude their journeys without the frustration of repetition. The order they placed on a mobile app will appear in their cart when they log in from their desktop, or a complaint they raised on Facebook Messenger will be addressed when they open the app. 

• The technology architecture of the entire customer journey remains flexible and highly scalable. Adding a new channel just takes a simple API integration into the existing architecture. 

• APIs make your omnichannel strategy future-proof, letting you quickly and easily scale and incorporate new channels or technology. 

Omnichannel Challenge 3:
Data Management and Governance 

Integrating multiple channels into a single holistic customer journey means bringing together all the data associated with each. Often, data formats are as diverse as the channels being integrated. These pools of data had previously been stored in silos and were not expected to work with each other. 

But to create truly seamless omnichannel experiences, your data architecture needs to support a flexible data management and governance strategy. 

Omnichannel Data Management Through  Data Lakes 

An integrated customer journey will generate a huge volume of data that needs to be effectively managed and governed. A data lake implementation is the best solution for: 

• Informing your customers’ omnichannel journeys – what they did on one channel has to be reflected the next time they log in and interact on another channel. 

• Allowing access to – and experimentation with – a large amount of data to create insights and drive personalization.  

• Segmenting, securing and controlling access to data. Effective data governance ensures data is ready to be securely and compliantly leveraged throughout your organization. 

Build Impactful Omnichannel Experiences
with Material 

Omnichannel experiences have become a basic customer expectation, meaning poor or siloed experiences can severely limit engagement and growth. 

Material has partnered with leading global brands to deliver seamless omnichannel solutions. We are equipped to enable API-first architecture and implement data lake strategies – making true omnichannel experiences possible and profitable.   

If you are interested in building and scaling modern omnichannel experiences for your customers, reach out to Material today. Our expert team is ready to help.