Multichannel and Omnichannel: What do these terms mean, and what are the differences and benefits?

• Personalization: with this strategy you can customize the way you will deliver information to your customer, for example: In your brand’s blog you will share with the customer the benefits of your products or services and on Instagram, besides sales, you can share pictures showing the products and other customers giving testimony of the quality offered.
• Segmentation: by having several channels where you expose your brand, you have great possibilities to segment the content you are going to deliver according to customer needs. In other words, you already know that the events you organize in your physical channels, the main guests will be customers over 40 years old, while if you want to invite consumers between 20 and 30 years old, probably the appropriate channels will be the digital ones.
• Trial and error: When you have multiple channels you can experiment which ones work for your business and which ones definitely don’t, this not only pleases the customer, but is efficient for your business.

Now that you know the benefits, let’s talk about the main disadvantage. In the multichannel strategy, the ways you reach the customer are disconnected, this means that there is no coherent communication with the customer and the service they receive in the channels is different, this can confuse customers and affect the reputation of your brand.

Omnichannel: in addition to including different access channels to your product or service, as the previous strategy does, with omnichannel there is a connection and coherence for the customer, since all channels are connected, making it much easier for customers, and providing a unique experience for users.

• Interaction: by using this type of strategy, customers can interact with your brand, buy your product or service or just access the information you provide them through different channels without noticing any difference, since they will always receive the same information when they are connected.
• Loyalty: when customers perceive that they receive the same attention through all the channels you provide them with, you turn them into validators, and therefore, into loyal customers.
• Efficiency: When you use an omnichannel strategy, all your physical and digital media are integrated, so there are no backtracking processes. For example, when customers want to make a claim, if your channels are integrated, it doesn’t matter if they do it through the online or physical store, the information of the change and the experience will be the same.

Omnichannel is a strategy that is recommended when a company wants to be available to customers in a unified way, delivering the same attention and, of course, understanding their needs. If we talk about what can be considered a disadvantage, it could be the cost, since implementing this kind of strategy generates higher costs, but in the long term, it delivers great benefits.

In addition, the introduction of flexible benefits could potentially reduce your business’s running costs. It allows employees to exchange taxable salary for tax-efficient benefits, which may result in lower payroll taxes for the employer. To discover more about the financial implications, it’s worth visiting this page on FlexGenius.