Where Omnichannel Thinking is Going Off the Rails

This is probably going to sound heretical, but maybe it’s time for customer experience professionals to take a step back from that “omnichannel” marketing buzzword and look at the big picture. That’s likely a suggestion that will sound like it’s as much paradox as heresy, considering that most strategists, digital or otherwise, think that omnichannel is the big picture – but that may be where it’s going off the rails.

Yes, companies need to create that seamless customer journey. Yes, the era of the customer has arrived – although it’s hard to envision a time when businesses weren’t in the era of the customer, if one thinks about it. Yes, it is customer experience that defines that era, in part because mobile, social and other technologies have changed their expectations. Yes, the millennial demographic is a cultural driver for omnichannel strategies, but it’s well past time to understand that with some context and common sense – and Farhad Manjoo, writing for the New York Times last week, finally said it: Millennials are a myth.

So, in a sense, is “omnichannel,” but let’s think about what Manjoo is getting at first. His piece focuses on how corporate America is chasing the millennial mystique while overlooking the time-honored truths about any generation or group. They’re not monolithic, there’s really no such thing as a representative millennial speaking for an entire cohort, and marketing, in particular, is losing both its credibility and its dignity insisting that this emperor needs new clothes – so we should find shiny new ways to sell them.

Manjoo’s piece includes an interview with Laszlo Bock, head of human resources at Google, and Bock gets to the heart of it. If you look at millennials and identify what their underlying needs and aspirations are, Bock says, “there’s no difference at all between this new generation of workers and my generation and my father’s generation. Every single human being wants the same thing in the workplace — we want to be treated with respect, we want to have a sense of meaning and agency and impact, and we want our boss to just leave us alone so we can get our work done.” In other words, they’re just people. It’s a loss to business to have to hire consultants tasked with erasing preconceived notions about them.

The same dynamic is at work when we chase “omnichannel” as if it were marketing’s unifying theory of everything, and miss the entire point of what being customer-focused means, from the standpoint of who customers are. To speak of “omni” anything is to conjure up images that are almost deified. As marketers, we are now ever-present. On the basis of our data and our geo, we are now all-knowing. It’s subtle, perhaps, but the problem with omnichannel-think is that the vision is entirely about defining us.

So the problem isn’t really that our marketing strategies are integrated – they should be. The problem isn’t that the customer’s journey shifts smoothly between the physical store experience, the mobile app, or simultaneously screen and store; that’s reality, and customer experience is enhanced by the access. But what’s getting lost in the race to capitalize on all that omni-connectivity is that it’s just not about us.

In the big picture that we’re missing, customers want context but they remain the creators of their own lives and define what that context means. Where companies are missing the mark, and perhaps failing their customers, is when they treat omnichannel as if it were glorified stalking – with the emphasis on their pop-up presence, rather than the autonomy of people acting on preferences in their own time.

Whether you’re a millennial or not, there’s a good chance – following Bock’s wisdom – that we’ve all heard the same advice in a self-conscious moment: The truth is that the world is complicated, people are busy, they’re thinking about their own lives and schedules, they hear their own internal dialogue all day, and the cold reality is that your existence, most of the time, isn’t that exotic to everyone on I-95.

So if they want to hire a software vendor or an auto mechanic, buy flowers or buy pizza or buy a house, they do so because they’re people and not because they’re data. When our omnichannel strategies rely too heavily on demographics and data analytics, and on the algorithms that decide “what is supposed to happen” on the basis of market segmentation drilled down to a social profile, they’re doomed to failure.

Just as the hype about millennials needs that well-deserved critique that Bock and Manjoo offer, so do the corporate techniques, omnichannel included, that companies are relying on to build brand. Manjoo is damned straightforward in a spot-on assessment: “If your management or marketing theories involve collapsing all millennials into a catchall anthropological category — as if you’re dealing with space aliens or some newly discovered aboriginal tribe that’s suddenly invaded modernity — you’re doing it wrong.”

That doing it wrong part, because it rests entirely on assumptions about who people are and how to reach them, is true of any customer experience vision that preens in the mirror about its own capacities to be all things to all people, everywhere, all the time. The truth is that customers aren’t that impressed, because they stubbornly cling to their own contexts – and that means they just want to shop with the better tools they now have, enjoy the level of quality and service they expect, and share that story with peers. To that end, companies still see room for improvement in getting the basics right on any channel!

Those basics don’t change simply because a potential customer can research products online before setting foot in your bricks-and-mortar location. Besides, they’ve been doing that for years, and everyone knows that. They don’t change because e-commerce options let them tap a screen, or because after they do they can just pick stuff up nearby. It may be heretical, but what omnichannel needs to get right as it grows beyond its buzzword stage, is that marketing hasn’t “suddenly invaded modernity” either – and the respect and responsiveness customers want in this generation is the same thing they wanted in the last one too.