Omnichannel — Designing Cohesive and Seamless User Experience
Successful organizations take care about their customers loyalty and user retention. Emotional experience is an essential part of user-brand interaction. Positive and delightful experiences can be reached only by robust service that shows cohesion and consistency between multiple touchpoints.
What is the omnichannel
The omnichannel concept represents organization services as one holistic ecosystem to maintain continuous communication with a user. Live service implementation requires consistent integration between all channels. The goal is to provide the user with a seamless experience for single activity completion through multiple channels.
The model of organizations’ communication strategy defines the type of interactions between the service and its users:
- Singlechannel — a single type of touchpoint
- Multichannel — multiple independent touchpoints
- Crosschannel — multiple touchpoints, recognized as the same brand, but operated as an independent silo
- Omnichannel — the seamless experience of simultaneous operations through multiple touchpoints
Why focus at omnichannel
Omnichannel origins from customer centricity in commerce and retail but further spread around other industries like banking and healthcare. Today the target is not only the company’s customers but employees as well.
71% of employees say that they want their employers to provide the same level of technology they use in their personal lives.
Seema Kumar in Salesforce blog
Classical Michael Porter’s strategic advantage concept differentiates three generic strategies that can be applied to any type of business:
- Differentiation — an attributes based offering for all segments of the company like higher quality of product or service
- Overall cost leadership — offers the lowest price on the market for all company segments
- Focus — differentiation or cost leadership in selected segments
The case of competition between Best Buy and Walmart in 2000’s is a perfect example of differentiation strategy usage. Best Buy had no chance against Walmart on the field of cost leadership but they win their market with a differentiation approach for customer centricity.
55% of consumers would pay more for a better service experience
Laura Fagan in Salesforce blog
Price is not always a key influencer on customer purchasing decisions. Nowadays users expect coherent experience in all industries whatever red or blue ocean organization strategy takes place. Differentiation strategy focused organizations can’t pass by modern communication paradigms and stay competitive at the world market.
How approach to omnichannel design
Implementation of omnichannel experience requires multiple devices support to allow user to conduct an end-to-end journey across selected channels. Start from understanding how do your users solve the problems right now to find really user centered ideas and solutions.
The best multi-device experiences are those that first look at people and what they need rather than focusing on technology and what it can do.
Michal Levin
Key stages for cohesive and seamless experience design
- Research current experience
- Map the experience
- Assess experience
- Communicate business impact
- Prioritize next steps
- Prototype and validate
- Implement changes within the service
1. Research current experience
Input information gathering is an essential point before the current state analysis for the system experience. Qualitative research practices like a contextual interview or diary study help to gather user insights.
2. Map the experience
Select the way to structure research information and build the shared understanding within your team. Use user journey and service ecology mapping exercises to reach alignment.
User journey map works as visualization for the entire end-to-end experience that a “generic” user goes through to accomplish a goal.
Service ecology diagram is aimed to map involved parties and investigate relationships within and without your service. Generate a new concept by reorganizing these relationships from being affected to make an influence at key points of experience. Examples for car-sharing from FiAT’s Future Design Group and social services ecology in Singapore.
3. Assess experience
Assess user experience across the journey with 5 components of successful omnichannel experience by Kim Flaherty:
- Consistent — experience is similar, cohesive and expected at any channel
- Optimized — channel experiences are designed for the context of the channel and the journey
- Seamless — transitions between touchpoints are simple and frictionless
- Orchestrated — organization uses data to anticipate users needs and provide the right content at the right time
- Collaborative — experience is enriched by using channels together to create something new and useful
4. Communicate business impact
Frame the statement to communicate business impact to stakeholders with: What (new experience), Why (problem/opportunity), How (needed resources, processes, technology), Result (for users & business).
Talk to your business stakeholders with their language. Represent business value to get them on board and receive support during further stages.
5. Prioritize next steps
Focus on the intersection between importance and feasibility, evaluate your ideas, and place them on the grid. This visualization will help your team to discuss further service improvements.
Don’t dwell on the no-brainers — obvious choices for you and competitor.
Focus at making Big Bets more feasible or utilities more valuable for users.
Joelle Williams practical tips about Prioritization Grids
Pay attention to the question of Desirability, Viability, and Feasibility to harmonize this criteria within your service.
6. Prototype and validate
Start prototyping with a storyboard to show how the service should work. Create tangible artifacts for the key areas of experience. Use them to collect feedback from subject matter experts and users.
7. Implement changes within the service
Plan execution strategy and long-term roadmap for ideas implementation. Split it to milestones with key goals to achieve. Iteratively review your progress according to plan and find out what can be improved.
Measure omnichannel numbers
The mature service monitoring approach combines qualitative user journey diagnostics with quantitative measurements for business and user metrics.
Kim Flaherty from NN/g, Kerry Bodine and Harley Manning from Forrester Research emphasizes to three types of customer experience metrics:
- Descriptive metrics for observable characteristics of customer interaction like Avg. Contact Time / Avg. Transaction Value
- Perception metrics for customer’s subjective impression like Customer Satisfaction Rate, Net Promoter Score
- Outcome metrics for actual user doings like Actual Purchases
Mike Gergye highlights two levels of the focus in the retail industry for monitoring and success measurement in the omnichannel era:
Summary
Design and maintenance of any robust service require iterative validation and monitoring. Use combinations of qualitative and quantitative research approaches to gather input information for analysis. Build your ideas on the ground of collected data to make meaningful improvements within the service ecology.
References
- “Service Design: From Insight to Implementation” by Andy Polaine, Lavrans Løvlie, Ben Reason
- “Mapping Experiences” by James Kalbach
- “Designing Multi-Device Experiences” by Michal Levin
- “Outside In” by Kerry Bodine and Harley Manning
- “Customer Journeys and Omnichannel User Experience” by Kim Flaherty
- “Success Measurement in the Omnichannel Era” by Mike Gergye
