An omnichannel experience enables users (whether they’re customers, employees, or partners) to engage with an organization through applications and systems no matter where they are or what device they are using—without noticing a difference.
Table of contents:
- What Is Omnichannel Customer Experience?
- Enterprise Omnichannel: Getting on the Magic Omnibus
- Example 1: The Burton Snowboards Logistics Omnichannel Experience
- Example 2: The Beeztees B2B eCommerce Platform
- Example 3: The Zurich Insurance Omnichannel Agent Experience
- Example 4: Banco BPI’s Omnichannel Unified Digital Experience
- Example 5: A World-Class Digital Experience for CM Customers
- What Else Do These Omnichannel Experiences Examples Have in Common?
You probably think of them mostly as experiences for consumers and customers, but what you might not know is that enterprises can deliver other kinds of omnichannel experiences.
Let’s learn a little more about omnichannel customer experiences, omnichannel experiences for the enterprise, also known as “enterprise omnichannel,” and what the difference is. Then we’ll look at 5 great omnichannel experiences to help you transform your customers’ and employees’ experiences.
What Is Omnichannel Customer Experience?
Think Disney, Starbucks, Bank of America, Amazon, and Virgin Atlantic. Each offers customers the ability to interact via web, mobile, voice, digital, and email, all in a connected way. So, if a customer switches from one channel to another, the experience continues seamlessly. That’s an omnichannel experience.
As a result, customers feel satisfied and build trust in the company, leading to longer relationships and positive word of mouth. Just like in the 1980s shampoo commercial, “tell two friends and they tell two friends and they tell two friends and so on.” Over time, companies notice an uptick in retention and customer growth.
Many people associate these types of omnichannel experiences with big brands and enterprises so sometimes the concepts of omnichannel customer experience and enterprise omnichannel are used interchangeably. But don’t give in to the temptation.
Enterprise Omnichannel: Getting on the Magic Omnibus
Omnichannel customer experience is a form of enterprise omnichannel. That’s because enterprise omnichannel can extend to all corners of an enterprise: customers, employees, operations, field, sales and marketing, branches, regional offices, partners, suppliers, and more.
The goal of enterprise omnichannel is to offer numerous ways of interacting and engaging with others inside and outside an organization via different touchpoints, all of which not only offer the same experience but also enable users to continue where they left off if they switch devices.
I think of enterprise omnichannel as a kind of magic omnibus, collecting numerous different user and customer experiences and combining them into one, just like an omnibus collection of books or a government omnibus bill. The “magic” is how it takes complicated processes and interactions and makes them seamless and effective.
Consider a push notification for single sign-on to a company’s inventory control portal. An employee enters a username and password to log in. A push notification is sent to the employee’s wearable device, smartphone, or tablet, asking the employee to approve the login.
With a simple tap of the wearable, phone, or tablet, the employee can access the portal. The approval experience is the same on all three devices. This example is the absolute bare-bones minimum of what enterprise omnichannel can be. So, let’s look at 5 robust omnichannel experience examples for the enterprise so you can get a really good idea of what it is.
Example 1: The Burton Snowboards Logistics Omnichannel Experience
U.S. snowboarding company Burton has a logistics application that connects all sales points and ties them into their back-end systems while providing an omnichannel customer experience. Customers can purchase from any channel—stores, dealers, and Burton’s e-commerce site. If the Burton warehouse runs out of snowboards or children’s backpacks in February, employees can scour stores and get products sent to buyers quickly. Employees themselves can walk around with tablets, tag and package specific items for shipment, and get the items sent to buyers quickly.
The app enables Burton to move goods through its sales channels and avoid big inventory carrying costs. After a year in use, Burton has averaged 56 shipments a day, kept pace for 14 days straight of 200+ shipments, and generated 10 times ROI in revenue. The company is maintaining historically low inventory, avoiding off-price store sales, and turning summer sell-offs into “shopping events” rather than clearance sales.
Example 2: The Beeztees B2B eCommerce Platform
Beeztees is a leading business-to-business (B2B) supplier of pet supplies with employees and customers in 45 countries worldwide. Beezteez offers a B2B omnichannel e-commerce platform for retailers that includes product, inventory, pricing, and order information. Through integration with SAP that enables Beeztees to unlock SAP data to web and mobile applications, retailers see a real-time inventory of the different products.
During the ordering process, retailers can easily choose to have a product delivered in the store or straight to the consumer's home.
Track-and-trace functionality is integrated into the portal, so retailers always know where the packages they ordered are in the supply chain. Other vendors can easily connect to it as well.
Beeztees is especially proud of the pricing capabilities, which include individual pricing agreements. Beeztees employees can easily adjust prices, so the customers always see the correct products. And the result of offering this omnichannel experience to retailers and other vendors? Beeztees has improved its competitiveness by offering customized, up-to-date pricing and features for active marketing that contribute to increasing sales.
Example 3: The Zurich Insurance Omnichannel Agent Experience
Zurich Insurance Group is a leading multi-line insurer that serves its customers in global and local markets. In Portugal, the company partners with more than 1,000 agents to offer policies to individuals and small-to-medium enterprise customers. For those agents, Zurich created a comprehensive omnichannel agent experience, starting with a dedicated online portal, an app for tablets, and an app for smartphones, that make it easier and more fun for agents to use while handling all their business.
Agents immediately adopted the new platform and reacted positively to a long list of new features. For example, after a quick search, they can have a 360-degree view of customer activity. They can log in to the app using a fingerprint reader. And, they get mobile notifications on the fly. This omnichannel experience has contributed to a sharp increase in policy business. (If you’re interested in other stories of insurance and customer experience check out this blog post.)
Example 4: Banco BPI’s Omnichannel Unified Digital Experience
BPI is a major bank in Portugal owned by the Spanish CaixaBank.
The bank transformed its customers’ experience by creating a unified digital experience across mobile, web, branch, and contact centers.
By creating an application architecture designed to maximize the reuse of components across touchpoints, BPI delivered a new home banking portal and a mobile banking app in less than 6 months. In addition, the banking institution ensured that all touchpoints shared the same UX, resulting in an all-time high customer engagement level and a 4.3 rating on the Android app store.
Example 5: A World-Class Digital Experience for CM Customers
Christelijke Mutualiteiten (CM) is Belgium’s largest health insurance fund with 500 branches, serving 4.5 million customers. The insurance organization launched several applications in its quest to deliver a world-class digital experience to its customers.
They started by building "Care Volunteering," an Uber-like application that assigns social-care tasks, such as home visits and medicine deliveries, to CM's 70,000 volunteers. This web portal and mobile-friendly web app for volunteers enables CM to manage clients, care requirements, and volunteers and even provides required reports to the Belgian social services department. Plus, it gives external volunteer users secure access to the system thanks to integration with Belgium's eID service.
After the successful launch of these two apps, CM has launched “MyCM”, its most strategic project, that comprises a native mobile apps on iOS and Android, a customer-facing web portal, and the internal customer service app, that have replaced the need for customers to call the contact center or visit branches.
Feedback and ratings have been extremely positive—App Store 4.7 and Google Play 4.5, and CM is proud of being able to serve their customers on their preferred channels.
What Else Do These Omnichannel Experiences Examples Have in Common?
The applications and experiences cited in this blog post were all developed and delivered with a high-performance low-code application platform (LCAP). That high-performance LCAP is OutSystems, which Gartner says “provides robust security, multiexperience development and AI-augmented development capabilities to enable faster application development.”
If you want to learn more about how OutSystems can help you deliver omnichannel personalized experiences for your customers, download the ebook An IT Leader’s Guide to Building Customer Apps and Portals.
