Despite the customer journey being more connected than ever, UX remains siloed to individual products. Omnichannel user experience seeks to solve this gap and bring UX to its original definition and purpose: improving the entire user experience.

In This Article:

The Airport Customer Journey: Then and Now

Last weekend I flew out of town for a quick get-together with friends. On my way home, I started to think how differently I fly these days compared to not that long ago.

Before

Now

Stage in the process

Book my flight online in advance

Home

Search for the flight info and confirmation email in my email folders

Receive a push notification to check in the day before the flight

Home: check-in

Log in to the website, enter my confirmation number, check in, and print out my boarding pass

Choose between multiple options to receive my boarding pass (I save it directly to my phone for easy access.)

Home: check-in

Wait in line at the airport to have my bags checked by an attendant

Scan my boarding pass from my phone and print my baggage tickets from the kiosk, then wait in a short line for bag dropoff

Airport: baggage drop

Wait in line for security while searching for the printed boarding pass (often misplaced by this point)

Get through security using my digital boarding pass

Airport: security

Prepare to board the plane –– again searching for my boarding pass (shoved somewhere in my travel gear)

Show my phone to the gate agent to board

Gate: boarding

Periodically check airport monitors and listen to announcements to check flight status

Receive flight-status updates immediately by text message or email

Airport (or home)

Watch a preselected movie on a monitor available to half the coach area

Visit the airline website to watch movies and TV shows from any of my devices

Plane

A comparison of two different travel experiences (A more effective way to visualize these journeys is a customer-journey map — a tool for effectively understanding and communicating such customer journeys within an organization.)

Nowadays, air travel is a lot more streamlined. When I am away from my computer, I still have access to my smartphone and airport kiosks that help with travel-related tasks. However, the biggest reason for the improved air-travel experience is that airlines use these tools effectively. They simplify my journey and, like a well-oiled machine, they successfully lead me through the entire travel process, from booking to boarding.

The Current Customer Journey

Today’s customer experience is much more dynamic than ever before, and individual interactions with organizations are no longer as isolated as they once were. The discrete steps that made up my overall air-travel experience are strung together into one holistic customer journey.

A customer journey is the end-to-end process that a customer goes through in order to complete a task over time. This process may use multiple devices and interaction channels (e.g., web, desktop or mobile apps, email, online chat, social media, text message, phone, kiosks).

My customer journey with the airline started on the laptop and ended when I walked off the airplane. Other touchpoints along the way included interactions with the airline via email, mobile app, kiosk, and text message, as well as interactions with gate agents and other staff.

Omnichannel User Experience

As UX practitioners, we spend a lot of time evaluating and improving the user experience of the individual interactions that make up customers’ journeys. This is the micro level of user experience. However, there is also a higher, macro level of user experience, called the omnichannel (or crosschannel) user experience. Omnichannel user experience addresses the whole customer journey, from users’ transitions across channels to their ability to proceed smoothly through various journey stages over time.

According to the original definition of user experience, UX encompasses the totality of the user’s experience, so saying that omnichannel UX should be designed as an integrated whole across individual channels means going back to basics. But since each channel emerged separately and was often managed in organizational silos, this holistic approach has not been taken in many companies.

There are several reasons why you should consider the macro level of the customer experience:

  • The changing landscape of devices and technologies
  • The volume of interaction possibilities
  • Evolving customer behaviors and expectations

The Changing Landscape of Devices and Technologies 

New devices such as smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches allow customers to interact with organizations in new and unique contexts. Technologies afforded by these devices introduce new opportunities for businesses to improve their customers’ experiences (for example, the capability to present digital QR codes for boarding passes and customer identification).

The Volume of Interaction Possibilities 

Customers now have many personal devices, and each affords different possibilities for interaction with the same organization. For example, a customer’s phone can be used to:

  • Browse an organization’s website
  • Transact through a mobile app
  • Dial the customer-service hotline
  • Get business updates via social media
  • Send and receive email and text communications

All these channels across so many different devices make customer-business relationships more complex than ever before. The more channels, the more opportunities for failure.

Evolving Customer Behavior and Expectations

The many new interaction possibilities change customers’ expectations and behaviors. Users now have the means to access streamlined, personalized, enjoyable customer experiences, and they expect as much.

With these new capabilities at their fingertips, they are no longer confined to predetermined channels and ways of interacting. They want to take control of their journeys, smoothly transition from one device to another, and engage with organizations on many channels as they complete tasks.

Creating an Effective Omnichannel Experience

A great customer experience is the product of an effective and well-designed omnichannel ecosystem. To achieve it, organizations must research and understand the customer journeys that users take as they complete tasks across devices and channels. To every single customer, a journey is one holistic interaction with your organization, one experience rather than a collection of individual experiences. Users don’t think in terms of channels and devices, so they will not understand or tolerate experiences that are fragmented across channels. For this reason, organizations must stop thinking about their individual solutions on each discrete channel and begin designing for experiences and journeys across channels.

Simply existing on all channels is no longer enough: multichannel is not omnichannel. Omnichannel strategies focus on designing the most appropriate experience on each channel based on the customer’s journey, and on designing the transitions and experiences across channels.

There are five components that together create a successful omnichannel user experience.

  • Consistent: Providing a consistent, cohesive, and familiar experience across all channels
  • Optimized: Creating individual channel experiences that are best suited for that particular device, channel constraints and contexts of use
  • Seamless: Making channel transitions as effortless as possible and helping customers pick up where they left off when they switch from one channel to another during a task
  • Orchestrated: Proactively leading customers through their individual journeys with the right personalized interactions and messages at the right time
  • Collaborative: Enriching the customer journey by allowing customers to take advantage of multiple channels at the same time to improve the overall user experience (such as enabling users to login on a desktop bank site by using fingerprint authentication on their smartphones)

These five components make the difference between having solutions on many channels and having a cohesive and effective omnichannel experience.

Multiple screens showing a user's journey. When selecting membership option in the app, there were only options to upgrade. Upon exiting and opening the same page in a browser, there is an opportunity to cancel a membership.
I recently canceled a security camera subscription. However, the app only offered the option to upgrade the subscription. Instead, I had to go to a web browser, log in again, navigate to the same page, and then cancel my subscription.
Series of screenshots showing a user journey. Upon selecting "Continue on a computer" from the Hulu log-in screen, the user could then log-in, apply a code, and enter the app using their computer keyboard.
Hulu offers a seamless transition between the Fire TV app and its web interface. Instead of logging in using the clunky TV controls, users can log in from a web browser using a keyboard.

Conclusion

Customers are becoming increasingly sophisticated. They’ve already encountered excellent omnichannel experiences, and they are beginning to expect this quality of experience from every organization they interact with. For this reason, organizations should be expanding the scope of their UX efforts to address the entire customer journey.

Reference

Google 2012. The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-platform Consumer Behavior. http://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/multiscreenworld_final.pdf