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)