What is Omnichannel Management?

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Omni-channel management, also known as all-channels sales, is a multichannel approach that monitors and manages all the means of a company’s distribution. Unlike the single-channel model, which focuses on a single-distribution system (brick and mortar stores or ecommerce stores) omni-channel management aims to support both offline and online activities of customers as well as optimize the customer experience.

Omni-channel management is important because a customer’s behavior is changeable. For example, one customer can purchase something offline from a brick-and-mortar store but usually, he tends to buy everything online. Due to the product’s availability, a situation, and time limits customers can switch between channels of sales which is called channel hopping. Channel hoppers became today’s modern type of customers and that’s why omni-channel management is required for almost every type of business.

To create a website that will suit the customer’s needs and also to have better omni-channel management,  businesses tend to create their ecommerce stores using a certain ecommerce platform. If you want to find out which platform to choose, please, consider checking our article about enterprise ecommerce platform comparison.

Best practices omnichannel management

Here are some of the best practices that’s can be used to get maximum advantage of omni-channel management:

• Separation of inbound and outbound channels. When customers require certain information they don’t want to spend a lot of time writing and replying to emails. Creating different channels for inbound and outbound can accelerate the speed of problem-solving and throughout time.
• Adapt to customer’s changes. Customers change their preferences very easily and that’s why it is important to use flexible software that can help you monitor touchpoints with existing customers and remain competitive.
• Automated management. The current development of artificial intelligence allows to automate the process of some decisions. Such practice has been already implemented by AliExpress that uses AI to answer customers’ inquiries regarding a product or service.
• Customer’s view. A single customer view, also known as propensity modeling, is the company’s data about its customers. Understanding customer’s past behavior can make changes for omni-channel management and create better interactions in the future.
• Coordination of offline and online activities. When businesses have online and offline activities there are able to test certain keywords online to see how they are working for their client base choose an implemented for offline advertising.

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