The days when customer interactions were conducted through a single channel are long gone. Yet, many companies struggle to find the right customer communications strategy.
You’ve probably heard terms like multichannel and omnichannel communications. What do they really mean when it comes to customer engagement? Let’s define and unpack these terms together.
An omnichannel customer experience results from a company sending consistent, centrally managed communications across all channels. This results in a universal customer experience regardless of the channel the customer chooses to engage with the business on.
Omnichannel is about providing a unique and consistent brand experience across touchpoints, including brick and mortar stores, mobile, and live chat. With omnichannel strategies, there is no distinction between channels resulting in a single view of the customer across physical and digital channels. It’s the customer, not the product or brand, that is at the core.
A successful omnichannel user experience delivers a uniform experience across channels – whether at a physical store or on a mobile app. It is orchestrated to proactively lead customers through their journeys with the proper personalised interactions and messages at the right time.
Omnichannel communication

A multichannel customer experience means communicating with customers via multiple channels such as print, e-mail, web portals, and mobile applications.
From an internal management perspective, multi-channel communication involves sending out material and information via multiple channels. There is often little internal coordination or consistency in what is being sent. For example, a piece of communication may look different in e-mail than on paper (in terms of data or branding). Additionally, a multi-channel communications strategy does not support bi-directional or interactive communications with customers.
Multichannel communication

Consumers are increasingly expecting a consistent, comprehensive experience from the brands they choose to do business with. They demand proactive, personalised, relevant, and easy-to-understand communications via the channel of their choice.
Companies need to provide the information and functionality customers want, how they want it, and where they want it. The key is to have every experience be consistent no matter the channel. Omnichannel customer experience is the way to achieve this.
Customers demand better experiences through omnichannel. 75% of consumers and business buyers expect a consistent experience across channels when they engage with brands.
Within omnichannel, mobile matters. 82% of customers use their smartphones to research the products they want to buy. They use search engines, the official brand websites, and recent newsletters featuring the brand or product. A great omnichannel experience is vital, provided that the mobile experience is given priority. Recent studies show that consumers check their phones 150 times per day, spending more than two hours on them daily.

To be successful, organisations must clearly define their customer communication goals as a part of the overall CX strategy. When evaluating a CCM solution, business leaders are urged to ensure the technology provider can meet their needs and requirements. Every vendor can claim an omnichannel or cross-channel experience in their sales and marketing pitches—but can they prove it? You be the judge.
The primary way to improve omnichannel customer experience is to utilise a modern customer communication management (CCM) platform.
According to Gartner, “CCM technology supports the creation, management, and distribution of B2C or B2B customer communications. CCM applications create personalised, on-demand communications that support multi-experience distribution, often based on the recipient’s preferences rather than the senders.
Industries like insurance, banking, healthcare, and utilities use CCM to generate documents such as invoices, statements, correspondence, and marketing communications. These communications are often highly regulated and contain personally identifiable information (PII) such as account numbers, financial data, or health information. As a result, these systems provide a level of governance, auditing, and data security that is not always necessary in marketing-based communication platforms.”
CCM Capabilities
Leading CCM solutions:
- Feature highly advanced design capabilities
- Handle variable data with ease
- Make keeping up with ever-changing regulations simple
- Give business users the ability to send personalised messages at any time, on the customer’s preferred channel
- Enable bi-directional interactions
- Break down organisational and digital silos
- Manage complex business processes such as digital onboarding
- And so much more.
Consider all the interactions that occur after you have won a customer.
- Are they relevant, personalised, and accessible on-demand?
- Are they brand-compliant, and do they reflect positively on your brand?
- Are they consistent and in compliance with regulations?
- Are they bi-directional?
- Are they delivered via your customers’ preferred channel?
- Do they incorporate the knowledge of subject matter experts in your organisation?
If you answered ‘no’ to any of these questions, CCM can help.
Complex variable data
Data-rich industries like banking, insurance, and healthcare are challenged by the need to handle complex variable data. These industries manage personal customer information, account activity, and transaction history, which are stored in many disparate core IT systems.
CCM software can pull complex data from disparate systems and organise it into personalised customer communications that are simple to navigate.
Ever-changing industry regulations
Industry regulations and compliance standards change frequently and vary across countries. Organisations in highly regulated industries struggle to keep up with ever-changing regulatory requirements. Noncompliance results in stiff financial penalties. How do these organisations ensure that the correct regulatory language is included in every communication they send out?
The key is to involve the compliance function in the design and delivery of every customer communication.
This is only possible with a CCM solution that enables:
Collaboration: Providing legal and compliance teams with ownership over regulatory content blocks that will be leveraged across the communications portfolio. Content blocks are locked down to safeguard regulatory language.
A holistic view: Granting compliance teams visibility to the entire communications package in every form it will appear (mobile, web, etc.).
Greater control: Giving compliance teams the ability to quickly and easily manage, track, audit, and approve regulatory language.
Interactivity
Leading CCM solutions enable companies to transform their existing customer correspondence. Communications can be personalised and deliver responsive experiences that include interactive tables and charts. Additionally, upsell/cross-sell messages can be included by integrating with existing core systems.
Digital forms and processes
CCM makes onboarding new products and services easy by providing digital application flows with forms pre-populated with customer data. Customers can review and sign contracts from any device with integrated e-signature capabilities.
Complex document management
Many organisations struggle with effective complex document assembly and delivery. CCM solutions make it simple to create, assemble and manage complex documents from one centralised hub. And they facilitate delivery across all channels. They allow complete control of the complex relationships between different types of content, document order, compliance messaging, and more.
The result of this powerful combination of capabilities? Your customer receives a personalised, interactive, easy-to-read information package via their channel of choice. The package can feature sortable tabs, interactive charts and graphs, and built-in e-signature capabilities.
Connecting Silos and Empowering Business Users
Large organisations often have separate teams responsible for creating customer communications for different channels, such as mobile, print, SMS or email. Others rely on third parties to support communications across specific channels. These teams often don’t collaborate and share content, which can lead to:
- A fragmented customer experience
- Duplication of efforts
- Inefficiency
- Heightened compliance risk
- Inconsistent branding and messaging
Leading CCM solutions can help large organisations overcome three critical silo challenges:
- Data silos
- Channel silos
- Organisational silos
Overcoming data silos
Large enterprises often have a complex IT infrastructure of mission-critical technology. Many can’t replace or upgrade these systems due to the related costs, but the data they house is extremely valuable.
Organisations like banks and insurance companies are sitting on a data goldmine. They have access to billions of data points on their customers. These data points can be leveraged to engage in a highly contextualised manner.
The key to delivering a personalised customer experience lies in the supporting technology and its integration capabilities. Leading CCM solutions can pull data from anywhere within your existing data ecosystem. This enables your non-technical business users to create and deliver highly personalised interactions across all channels.
Overcoming channel silos
Many organisations have assembled a collection of channel-specific or project-specific marketing and customer communications technologies. This has resulted in a tangled mess of technologies that hurts the customer experience and endangers customer loyalty.
Today’s CCM solutions eliminate the need to develop channel-specific messages independently from one another. Approved templates, content blocks, branding elements, and required regulatory language are stored centrally and leveraged across all channels. If a change is made, the update is made once and propagates across all channels.
In the case of Quadient’s solutions, communications are designed in a channel-agnostic way. The omnichannel preview lets you see how the communication will look to the customer on their preferred channel.
Overcoming organisational silos
In years past, when IT departments were the only ones involved in developing systems, they led by default and maintained control. As businesses have gone digital, business users now dictate how things should be done. While the IT department acts as an enabler.
Business users need ownership of communications with intelligent workflows connecting various stakeholders to create and deliver personalised messages.
CCM platforms make it easy for business users to create, edit and manage content. Without the need to rely on IT to make changes.
- Content authors can design communications according to branding and personalisation rules and use approval workflows to ensure compliance.
- Business administrators can determine who can access each template. They can specify the types of changes users can make and define related approval rules and workflows.
- Business users have access to pre-defined content blocks through an easy-to-use web editor to add a personalised touch.
Large enterprises send millions of customer communications every month, which are potentially based on thousands of templates. Changing document templates can be time-consuming, so it’s clearly a win-win to offload these responsibilities to the business.
Omnichannel communications technology is vital in designing and delivering excellent customer experiences. An omnichannel approach blends connections between all channels, creating a seamless customer experience across every interaction.
An excellent omnichannel customer experience enables the business to anticipate the customers’ needs. And allows customers to interact on the channel of their choice in real-time. It provides a seamless experience to customers, regardless of channel.
Examples of good omnichannel experiences include:
- Proactively sending customers notifications via mobile
- Providing self-serve options for customers. For example, enabling customers to update their personal information or communication preferences without having to contact customer support.
- Delivering communications that are personalised to the customer’s unique journey and that provide information and resources at the right time
- Offering paperless billing
- Delivering personalised videos to simplify complex topics
- Pre-populating forms to reduce the requirement for manual entry by customers
Today’s consumers expect the experience they have interacting with your organisation at one touchpoint to be consistent at another. Seamless communication across every channel reinforces trust in your brand. This is what omnichannel communications are all about. Today, customer expectations are high. Omnichannel customer experience solutions, such as CCM, are the key to delighting your customers at every interaction.