Omnichannel vs Multichannel

If you’re in the CX landscape, you’re probably aware of how essential Omnichannel is for the modern business’ customer engagement operations. This importance cannot be overstated: Omnichannel is simply a must if you want to stay competitive and relevant to your customers in the modern world. However, quite often business owners and decision makers are not fully sure about the difference between Omnichannel vs Multichannel.

We’ll answer that question in this article. Here’s a hint: the key word is integration.

But first, let’s get reminded of what Omnichannel is and why it is so important.

The importance of Omnichannel

There is no question that Omnichannel is becoming the new standard across industries when it comes to customer engagement and Customer Experience. The pandemic made businesses realise the importance and variety of online interactions to engage with customers and solidify a brand identity; but it also made them aware of the wide multiplicity of communication channels customers have to engage with brands and businesses, as well as the variety in customer preferences regarding the use of different channels.

Today, 75% of consumers expect a consistent experience across channels, and 73% are at risk of changing brands if they don’t get it. In this context, Omnichannel is key to fulfilling those expectations.

In a nutshell, Omnichannel is a customer-centric approach to Customer Experience and customer engagement centred around providing a seamless and consistent experience for customers across all channels and touchpoints. These channels can include physical stores, online platforms (websites and social media), mobile apps, or phone calls.

The key idea behind Omnichannel Customer Experience is to integrate these various channels and ensure that customers can switch between them effortlessly while experiencing a unified and personalised journey. This approach aims to eliminate the silos that often exist between different channels and create a cohesive and memorable experience for customers, regardless of how they choose to engage with a brand.

The key to understanding the difference between Omnichannel vs Multichannel lies in the concept of integration

The goal of Omnichannel is to improve customer satisfaction, increase brand loyalty, and ultimately drive business growth by delivering a superior and holistic Customer Experience.

But what is the difference between Omnichannel vs Multichannel?

Many business owners and decision-makers lack a clear understanding of the distinction between Omnichannel vs Multichannel strategies. They may think that merely incorporating various communication channels, such as creating a business Facebook or Instagram page or implementing Live Chat on their website, is sufficient for delivering a superior Customer Experience across different channels.

Unfortunately, this is not so. Often, these organisations are unaware of how significantly they trail behind their competitors in terms of customer engagement.

So, what differentiates Multichannel vs Omnichannel? Let’s try to clarify that.

First, let’s delve into the strict definitions of these terms: Multichannel signifies “many channels,” whereas Omnichannel denotes “all channels.” This distinction hints at one crucial difference between the two approaches: a Multichannel approach simply adds more channels for customers to contact a company, whereas an Omnichannel strategy seeks to go a step further by seamlessly integrating all available channels.

As we said earlier: the key word here is “integration”. But what does this mean?

In a multichannel approach, various communication channels are provided for customers to connect with the brand. However, these channels operate independently of each other, resulting in a fragmented customer journey. To put it differently, the multichannel approach prioritises the availability of the brand to customers but lacks a customer-centric focus. It can be described as a “channel-centric” approach, primarily enhancing accessibility without a holistic view of the overall Customer Experience.

On the other hand, an Omnichannel strategy is highly concerned with the Customer Experience as perceived by customers at every stage of their journey. It goes beyond offering multiple channels for customer engagement; it strives to comprehend the customer’s perspective and origins to provide better service and create more memorable experiences.

As previously mentioned, the objective of Omnichannel is to establish a seamless, unified experience across all channels. But what does this concept look like in practice?

3 Essential differences between Omnichannel vs Multichannel

We can illustrate the practical difference between Omnichannel vs Multichannel from three angles:

Integrated, not disjointed

Viewed through an Omnichannel Customer Experience lens, it’s insufficient for a brand to simply offer customers access through all channels. While channel presence is indeed a fundamental aspect of Omnichannel, there’s more depth to the concept. To simplify, all Omnichannel strategies encompass Multichannel features, yet not all Multichannel strategies embody the comprehensive nature of Omnichannel.

The core objective of an Omnichannel approach is to synchronize brand efforts across multiple channels, with the ultimate aim of crafting a seamless, unified customer experience. This encompasses all customer conversations with representatives across email, social media, phone calls, Live Chat, WhatsApp, and more.

Enabling customer contact through any channel is just the initial step; the essence of Omnichannel lies in ensuring that all interactions seamlessly blend together, fostering a sense of being heard, understood, and valued. This leads us to the following point:

Customer-centric, not business-centric

An Omnichannel strategy places the customer as its top priority. It doesn’t view the use of various channels solely as a means to expand a brand’s reach. Instead, it regards these channels as tools to create a more seamless and consistent experience.

In essence, Omnichannel marketing goes beyond the goal of merely increasing a brand’s visibility through a wider range of channels. While Multichannel primarily focuses on extending the brand’s presence to reach more people, Omnichannel seeks to establish a uniform customer experience for individuals who are already familiar with the brand.

It’s not just about reaching and serving customers through diverse channels; it’s about enabling them to switch between these channels while feeling immersed in a cohesive and captivating brand experience. Moreover, it strives to minimize wait times, ensuring that customers feel heard and acknowledged at every point of their journey, and ideally, connecting them with the right representative in each interaction.

In simple terms, Omnichannel operates within a framework where the utmost priority is given to Customer Experience.

Quality over quantity

If we were to encapsulate the core principle driving the success of the Omnichannel approach in a single word, it would be “personalization.”

In a Multichannel approach, the primary focus is on expanding a brand’s presence across multiple channels to reach a broader audience. However, the strategy often stops there. When customers reveal their channel preferences, a strict Multichannel approach tends to overlook the broader customer journey. It tends to treat each channel in isolation, failing to consider touchpoints, the reasons behind channel preferences at different stages of the customer journey, or the challenges and disjointed experiences customers may encounter along the way.

In contrast, an Omnichannel marketing strategy takes a more comprehensive view of the customer’s relationship with the brand. Its objective is to harmonise the brand’s presence across all channels, delivering a unified yet personalised experience that empowers customers to engage with the brand on their own terms. Omnichannel regards multiple channels not as an end in themselves but as a means to create more robust, engaging, seamless, and memorable customer experiences.

Hopefully, by now you understand more clearly what’s the difference between Omnichannel vs. Multichannel. If you want to learn more about how Omnichannel works, why it is becoming the new standard in the CX and customer engagement world, and how it can help different types of businesses, you can speak to one of our representatives or read some of our other articles on the topic.