The many benefits of omni-channel

There are three principles by which an omni-channel business lives and breathes: convenient, consistent and connected. Convenient refers to putting customers at the centre of everything. It is all about making your product and services available wherever the customers choose and making it as easy as possible to use their chosen method of transacting or communicating with you. It’s the customers who are omni-channel and they select which channel or channels that want to use and should not suffer a penalty for favouring one over another.

An omni-channel brand should be consistent, which means valuing customers equally and giving them an identical experience regardless of their chosen channel. Range (prices and markets), offers, reward and redemption are the same regardless of where the customer is looking and are interchangeable. In other words, the offers or rewards are with the brand not the channel.

Finally, customers’ activity should be connected. They should be able to start journeys on one channel and complete them on another. Customers need to be able to access all their transaction history in one place and seamlessly move between channels without interruption or complication. Ultimately, it’s important to remember that omni-channel is an approach to business and not something you can just ‘fix’ in your product. To implement omni-channel successfully often requires a cultural change and usually a change to an organisation’s structure, too.

Fostering loyalty

It’s a misunderstanding to think omni-channel is all about getting shop customers online; it’s not. It’s actually about creating brand-loyal customers. The digital transformation that has swept consumers along in the last few years hasn’t passed by the older generation either – in fact the ease of using smartphone technology has helped get the older generation using digital services far more than PCs or the internet ever did. Digital now forms part of our everyday lives for all but a few.

The challenge bookmakers have failed to address is providing a seamless way of integrating digital services within retail, giving customers a value-added service to their retail experience. The digital landscape of services has moved on, but the retail proposition has remained static.

It’s worth noting that paying for bets in cash over the counter, and importantly collecting winnings, is one of the biggest walls between the two business models. Behaviourally, retail customers of any age have never been asked to deposit money at the shop door on entry and, even stranger, asked to leave it overnight in case they want to come back the following day.

Enforcing behavioural change is also a faux pas of many omni-channel deployments happening around us. Brands (whether gaming or not) should be looking to support customer behaviour with experience-enhancing services, not asking them to change their behaviour.

Connecting digital and retail

A number of operators, including Ladbrokes, William Hill and Paddy Power, have companion services allowing retail customers to track and cash out shop bets. There is a huge potential for all these brands to leverage what they’ve got that pureplay operators haven’t – their retail estate. This offers the ability to reach out to, communicate and build relationships with customers at a human level. This is a very powerful tool in the box when used alongside the digital tools available and one with which the digital-only firms simply can’t compete.

But this involves a seismic shift in thinking, the area where most are struggling, either conceptually or because they see it as too big a hurdle. Furthermore, the age-old fear of cannibalisation rears its head as the retail arm believes the digital business is just interested in stealing customers, which prevents organisations working together to embrace the future. What they fail to grasp is that if they don’t support their customers in the digital transformation going on around them, they will still migrate to digital – just to a competing brand. What price would you put on failure? Think Woolworths, HMV, Athena, Comet…