Beyond boundaries: Exploring the impact of AI on connected omnichannel experiences

When customers use two or more communication channels to finish a purchase or receive service, they’ve experienced an omnichannel journey, whether it was a connected experience or not. An inconsistent experience as they moved between channels can impact customers’ satisfaction and impression of the brand.

While the concept of omnichannel has been around for decades, brands still struggle to deliver an effortless, connected omnichannel experience because their internal processes, skills, technology and knowledge are not aligned with the omnichannel definition.

In this article, we’ll explore omnichannel experiences and how artificial intelligence (AI) overcomes internal challenges and enables brands to provide the seamless journeys customers want.

What is omnichannel?

An omnichannel experience connects digital channels and physical spaces, providing a seamless customer journey whether they’re using mobile apps, social media platforms, websites, or are in-store. It focuses on the entire customer experience rather than individual channels, ensuring consistent and unified interactions across all touchpoints. This strategy integrates all communication channels smoothly, allowing customers to switch between them without interruptions and delivering personalized and contextualized experiences tailored to individual preferences and behaviors.

Customers use their preferred communication channels to interact with the brand at different stages of making a purchase or getting support and expect to have the same experience across all of them. However, many brands treat these channels as silos, each with its own processes and data. Without an omnichannel strategy that brings together all the processes and data into a single understanding of customer needs, attitudes and behaviors, brands cannot deliver a consistent, unified experience.

Brands have been struggling with this for a while, but today AI can help them provide a seamless experience across all touchpoints in a way older technologies can’t. And to keep an AI-powered seamless omnichannel experience trustworthy to customers, it must have built-in guardrails and integrate ethical practices. By taking measures such as transparent data usage and customer consent and avoiding demographic biases along the journey, brands can ensure trust and compliance in their omnichannel experience.

Impact of AI on connected omnichannel experience

As AI continues to evolve, it gives brands the power to adapt to changing customer expectations and understand how to interact with their customers across different channels. Brands who can effectively leverage those technologies will be well-positioned to deliver a truly connected omnichannel experience.

Let’s look at three areas where AI improves the omnichannel experience.

Unified customer view

An AI-powered omnichannel experience integrates data from all digital and physical touchpoints into a comprehensive profile of each customer. An aggregated AI-driven data platform centralizes those data resources, consolidating customer information into a single, unified database layer to ensure all relevant data is accessible and updated in real time.

This allows businesses to understand customer behavior and preferences, enabling them to deliver personalized support throughout the customer journey. It also predicts future behavior and preferences. This enables proactive engagement, such as anticipating customer needs before they are expressed and offering timely solutions or products. And by adhering to ethical practices, businesses ensure that customer data is handled with respect and transparency, fostering trust and loyalty.

As many as 54 percent of organizations stated that their biggest barrier to leveraging data was fragmented or siloed data.

There are three benefits of this unified customer view:

1. Connected experience, seamless transitions across channels: Customers have a seamless experience when they engage with the brand on their preferred channels. Customers don’t have to repeat information when they switch channels and their journey moves forward without retracing any steps, encountering friction, or increasing customer effort. AI ensures that customer contextual information is consistent across all channels.
   
   
2. Consistent personalized experiences: A unified view lets brands personalize interactions across channels. They can provide tailored interactions based on individual context. and customized marketing, sales, or service responses that align with the customer’s past behavior and preferences.
   
   
3. Proactive engagement: With a comprehensive view of customer behavior, preferences and interactions, brands better understand their customers’ needs. AI can predict the right level of proactive engagement with customers, which enables the brand to craft better growth and retention strategies.

The more channels they use, the more consumers spend: 73% of consumers use multiple channels throughout their entire purchasing journey.

Improved frontline experience

Frontline employees, the ones directly interacting with customers, reap a multitude of benefits from an AI-powered omnichannel experience.

By providing context from a 360-degree customer view along with previous interactions, AI ensures agents quickly understand customer intent. By analyzing customer communication in real time, AI identifies negative sentiment and warns of potentially difficult interactions, allowing frontline employees to adopt a more empathetic and de-escalation-focused approach and enabling proactive responses.
AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) can understand context and intent, providing more sophisticated and accurate responses than older rules-based versions. These systems must incorporate ethical considerations to protect customer and employee privacy and reinforce trust in the omnichannel experience.

These sophisticated chatbots and assistants can provide pre-defined use case responses to common questions and initial customer inquiries, freeing frontline employees to focus on issues that require human intervention. If a customer wants to escalate the conversation, an employee can proactively take over where the AI-powered chatbot left off.

Among consumers, 48% say their top concern about AI is the lack of a human to connect to. Among frontline employees 74% say that having access to more tools and data will give them more opportunities to personalize interactions.

Additionally, AI-powered virtual assistants and training modules can assist in onboarding new frontline employees and providing ongoing training. These tools can simulate customer interactions, offer guidance and track progress, ensuring that agents are well-prepared to handle real-world scenarios. And they can provide in-moment coaching during customer interactions by suggesting the best and most relevant context on the subject at hand. After the interaction, AI-powered virtual assistants can suggest relevant training materials or recommend best practices based on the frontline employee’s individual needs.

Leveraging AI equips frontline employees with the tools and insights they need to perform their jobs more efficiently and effectively. This not only enhances their experience and job satisfaction but also leads to improved customer service outcomes and overall operational efficiency. There are three benefits of improving the frontline experience:

1. Improved first contact resolution (FCR): By combining real-time knowledge assistance and proactive support, AI significantly increases the rate of first contact resolution. This means fewer customer interactions require multiple touches, leads to a smoother experience and reduces overall processing time.
   
   
2. Reduced manual data entry and errors: AI automates data entry tasks, minimizing human error and saving valuable time. This can include capturing customer information from chat transcripts, emails, or voice recordings.
   
   
3. Better employee engagement: Between real-time assistance and coaching, frontline employees have the context they need to help customers. This improves their well-being, keeps them engaged and results in better customer experience. Employees feel empowered and excel in dealing with complex tasks.

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Process efficiency

An AI-powered omnichannel experience can greatly increase process efficiency by optimizing and automating various aspects of customer interactions and internal workflows. Additionally, integrating ethical guardrails and sensible policies within the process ensures customer data privacy, benefiting customers, employees and brands alike.

Automation of repetitive frontend tasks

Automated repetitive tasks have been around for decades; what advanced AI brings is the level of scale and sophisticated logic flow that can be deployed across channels and the entire organization. Current AI chatbots and virtual assistants can handle a significant portion of customer inquiries.

As generative AI becomes more mainstream, it will enable more sophisticated use cases, like conversing and interacting with customers directly. This will bring omnichannel experience to the next level, connecting online, offline and hybrid and allowing customers to move from one channel to another or from one platform to another without friction.

Automation of workflow tasks

AI has already automated repetitive and time-consuming tasks such as data entry, appointment scheduling, order processing and follow-up communications. Now, it can handle complex exception roles and error handling and keep all the data related to the customer moving along the flow until the purchase or service is complete.

Proactive support and routing

AI can streamline data collection and analysis across various channels. This eliminates the need for the frontline to switch between systems or manually search for information. By analyzing customer queries and past interactions, AI can intelligently predict potential issues or needs and routing requests to the most qualified employee or to the most appropriate self-service resources. This allows for proactive interventions such as personalized support messages or automated reminders, which reduce the need for reactive problem-solving and streamline the overall customer journey.

This also enhances knowledge management, since AI can manage and optimize knowledge bases by continuously learning from new interactions and updating information. This ensures that frontline employees and customers always have access to the most accurate and relevant information, without searching for solutions.

There are three benefits from AI-powered automation:

1. Next-level CX: Advanced AI-powered chatbots are capable of handling complex customer inquiries and providing real-time support across all channels. These AI systems use NLP to understand and respond to customer queries with human-like accuracy. These systems have access to the customer profile during an interaction, which allows them to assess customer issues, state of mind, past interactions and purchase or service history to form responses that can proactively address issues and provide relevant solutions. If the customer decides to escalate to a human, the frontline employee is equipped to pick up where the chatbot left off and these AI-powered systems will assist them by providing with real-time insights and suggested responses, improving efficiency and effectiveness.
2. Consistent responses: Advanced AI has access to the data that ensures consistent messaging, notification, or action across channels. At the same time, since the frontline employees' applications are integrated into the same systems and data access, they have the same information and AI guides them through the steps in addressing customer issues. This maintains brand coherence.
3. Real-Time Insights: All the data that is available for advanced AI allows for real-time interaction monitoring, which identifies bottlenecks or issues. Based on these insights, AI drives proactive change or adjustment and suggests alternatives to improve the experience in real-time.

About 71 percent of consumers expect consistency across all online channels, yet only 29 percent say that they receive this.

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A look at the future

The future of omnichannel by 2029 is poised to be shaped by several innovative ideas and trends that will further enhance customer experiences and streamline operations.

Here are three efforts that are already under way:

1. Hyper-personalization: As AI advances, it will be able to better know each customer in detail – from their past experience with the brand to their purchase behaviors, attitudes and needs – and convert the information into a specific task or action that delivers hyper-personalized experiences. These systems will further anticipate customer needs, preferences and behaviors, offering tailored messaging or customized shopping or service experiences to specific customers. Imagine a clothing store that, based on your online browsing and smart-mirror interactions in-store, can suggest outfits tailored to your mood, weather forecast for your destination, or even upcoming social events. This hyper-personalization will blur the lines between anticipation and fulfillment, creating a seamless, almost psychic shopping experience.
2. Augmented reality: AR will bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds, allowing customers to interact with products and services in a more immersive way, regardless of location. Imagine being able to be virtually involved in customizing a product to your needs and liking and testing it before purchasing it. Or having a virtual frontline assistant guide you through fixing a broken product.
3. Conversational commerce with chatbots and voice assistants: By the end of this decade chatbots will become indistinguishable from human interaction. Conversational AI will be integrated across the omnichannel, allowing effortless switching between voice and text chat or from mobile app to website throughout a shopping or service journey. Imagine a voice assistant that remembers your preferences and seamlessly guides you through the entire purchase journey, from product discovery to recommending add-ons and processing your purchase.

In conclusion

Even though omnichannel has existed for more than 20 years, the promised experience and personalization still do not match customers' expectations.

The current evolution of AI systems makes it easier to unify data management and insights to make sense of customer information in real time, which brings brands closer to providing the experiences customers expect. And as the technology becomes more advanced, it will predict outcomes, better empower frontline employees and deliver hyper-personalization.

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