Omnichannel vs Multimodal Customer Experience

Consumers no longer turn  to local businesses to meet their needs. They have tons of options and they can choose to shop in-store or through desktop, laptop, smartphone or tablet. More options mean more opportunities for a brand to connect and engage with consumers, but it also means more complexity. Keeping interactions consistent across multiple channels and ensuring a continuous experience for consumers is the new challenge that every business should confront.

It is a real challenge for businesses to provide this continuous experience and in this effort, a lot of businesses miss the big picture, by offering multimodal customer experience and not omnichannel customer experience.

What’s the difference between multimodal and omnichannel customer experience?

Multimodal Customer Experience

The multimodal or multi-channel customer experience is what most businesses invest in today. They have a website, blog, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other channels like price comparison websites, Amazon or eBay.

All of these platforms are used to engage and connect with customers, but what about consistency? Each channel has its own characteristics, so if these channels are designed and built separately, the consumers do not find it easy to move through them, making it hard or unpleasant for them when jumping from one channel to the next.

Omnichannel Customer Experience

On the other hand, an omnichannel customer experience accounts for each platform and device a customer will use to interact with the company. Consumer data are used to align the company’s message, goals, objectives and design across each channel and device, within the scope of providing a consistent and aligned customer experience.

According to Forbes, an omnichannel customer experience signify the ability of customers to immediately contact with a company through a variety of channels and to be able to pick up from where they left off on one channel and continue their purchase on another.

An omnichannel experience involves a holistic view of all customer interactions, across all channels and over time, equipping customer support departments with every possible detail about a customer aiming to provide the most consistent customer experience. Customer support agents are more efficient which in turn leads to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Omnichannel can help your company convert first-time customers to long-term brand evangelists because of the wealth of information available to the customer support agent and consequently, interactions will be made more personal than ever before.

To sum up, multimodal experience grants the basic cross-channel functionality required for easy customer interactions and engagements, but omnichannel takes customer experience to a higher level and applies the multimodal process in the framework of a long-term customer journey and a long-term relationship between a brand and its customers.

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Also published on Medium.

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