What is Omnichannel? The Golden Rule for Increasing Customer Satisfaction

The doors to your business are no longer just a physical address. One of your doors is your website, another is Instagram, and yet another is WhatsApp. Your customers can walk through any of these doors. The question is, do you greet each customer who enters as if you’re seeing them for the first time, or do you recognize them and say, “Welcome back, how can I help you since we last spoke?”

This is where the massive difference between “Multichannel” and “Omnichannel” begins. Multichannel is simply having more than one door. Omnichannel is being an intelligent host who recognizes every customer, no matter which door they enter, and offers them a seamless, single experience.

Let’s explore how this unified experience transformed a business, through the story of our customer Alex, the founder of a boutique travel agency.

“I Realized I Was Blind from the Customer’s Point of View”

Alex, founder of a specialized travel tour agency and a Vera.Support customer:

“I always believed in the philosophy of ‘be where your customers are.’ We had live chat on our website, our Facebook page was active, our WhatsApp number was written everywhere. I was proud that customers could reach us from anywhere. I called it ‘great customer service.’ The day I realized how wrong I was, was the day I lost a big sale.

It all started on a Monday, when a potential customer, Jane, wrote to us on our website. She asked for general information about our Italy tours. My agent helped her, shared a few links, and the chat ended. A successful interaction, right?

On Wednesday, Jane saw a post about our Rome tour on our Facebook page and asked a question in the comments. A different agent answered her question.

On Friday, having made her decision, Jane wrote to our company WhatsApp line with one final question about visa support. The third agent who saw this message had no idea about the two previous conversations. He asked Jane from the very beginning, ‘Of course, which tour were you interested in?’

We never got another reply from Jane.

That day, I was looking at three separate conversations that three different agents had marked as ‘resolved’. But in reality, there was only one customer and her ever-growing frustration. We were completely blind from the customer’s point of view. We couldn’t see her journey; we could only see the separate stops she made along the way. While we called it ‘service,’ for the customer, it had become a ‘chore.’

After we switched to Vera.Support, we had a similar journey. But the result was completely different.

A new customer wrote to us on Monday from our website. On Wednesday, she asked a question on Instagram. And on Friday, she reached out on WhatsApp for a final detail.

The agent who received the WhatsApp message didn’t just see that one message on his screen. He saw the website chat from Monday, the Instagram conversation from Wednesday… all of it, in a single, unified stream.

His response was: ‘Hello again! Let me answer that final detail about our Italy tour for you…’

The customer’s surprise and satisfaction were evident in her words. I realized in that moment that Omnichannel wasn’t just a tech term. It was the most modern way of telling a customer, ‘We remember you, we value you, and your time is precious to us.’

Thank you, Vera.Support, for giving us back our sight and our memory from the customer’s perspective.”