Why does the word omnichannel usually lead to the misinterpretation of its goal and what strategies can institutions take to improve true omnichannel delivery? Find the answer in “True Omnichannel – Strategies to Improve Omnichannel Delivery”, a White Paper by Novabase.

1. NOVABASE 2019 ©
Strictly Confidential Information.
All Rights Reserved.
TRUE OMNICHANNEL
STRATEGIES TO IMPROVE OMNICHANNEL DELIVERY
WHITE PAPER

3. KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Why the word omnichannel usually leads to the misinterpretation of its goal
• Strategies to improve true omnichannel delivery
WHO SHOULD READ THIS DOCUMENT
• CIOs
• CTOs
• CEO
• Heads of digital transformation
TRUE OMNICHANNEL
STRATEGIES TO IMPROVE OMNICHANNEL DELIVERY

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PROPRIETARY
NOTE

5. CONTENTS
IT IS NOT ABOUT CHANNELS
OMNICHANNEL
ARCHITECTURE DESIGN
CONCLUSION
What is Omnichannel?
Problems with the channel
approach
Omnichannel requirements
Challenges
Achitecture design
Omnichannel Strategy Q&A
06
08
06
08
07
09
07
10
11
01
02
03

6. 6
1
Folley, E. (2017, February 6). True Omnichannel banking:
Much more than skin deep. Retrieved from https://www.
finextra.com/blogposting/13647/true-omnichannel-
banking-much-more-than-skin-deep
6
IT IS NOT ABOUT
CHANNELS01
What is omnichannel?
Store Phone
Mobile
Web Social
“Omnichannel” is an often-abused tech
buzzword. Most analysts would consider as
“omnichannel” any solution that is able to
provide a continued experience over several
different channels. Accordingly to Finextra1
,
“omnichannel banking is universally recognised
as the ability to deliver a seamless, real-time
experience across any or multiple channels.”
The key points in Finextra’s statement
are “real-time” and “across multiple
channels”. Omnichannel tries to
achieve a consistent customer
experience regardless of the channel
used by customers to reach your
company. This idea has merit: making
the customer experience seamless
on every contact with your company,
while keeping context, intent and
flow is a fundamental step on the path
to a digital business.
More than transactions, omnichannel
focusesthecustomer-businessinteractions
and the data collection and management that
is done in those moments.

7. 7
From the previous paragraph, it should be quite
simple to define what omnichannel stands for.
Theunderlyingproblemisthemisinterpretation
thewordleadsto.Byinterpreting“omnichannel”
as the compound word of “omni” (of all things
or in all places), most companies try to achieve
an “omnichannel” strategy by extending their
existing channel presence.
There are two reasons why this option is
ineffective:
1. Silos - Existing channels (mobile app, site,
self-service, customer-service, branch,
store, ...) were designed as separate silos.
They have their own business owners,
processes (that are often paper-based),
business logic, and supporting IT systems.
This makes it difficult, time consuming and
expensive to have a unified view of the
customer, and much harder to provide a
seamless customer experience across all of
the channels.
If omnichannel’s goal is to build a seamless,
continuous, user-focused experience, what are
the requirements to meet this target?
1. Business processes must be designed
as customer experiences and not as
extensions of the internal processes.
2. There is a transversal, channel independent,
customer experience business process
used on all channels. This process caters for
the full customer experience regardless of
the channel (continuity).
3. Customers want to have the same
experience regardless of using their mobile
app, calling the call centre or visiting a shop
or branch (consistency).
2. Perspective - Most companies design their
omnichannel processes focusing on their
internal perspective: their internal flow,
theirviewoftheirproducts,theirvisionofthe
world. If the objective is to provide a great,
carefully curated, customer experience
this is the wrong way to go about it. You
are not only choosing the wrong focus of
the experience, but you are also neglecting
the authentic experience that customers
want to have. Customer experiences are
built around how customers perceive your
business and products. It is the customer’s
perspective that matters. The experience
should be designed around customers
and the relationships they build with your
business. The keyword here is design: this
is not something you do by externalising
your vision on your processes, products or
services. This is how you want the world
to see your company, and in an increasingly
digital world it is becoming obvious which
companies understand this.
4. Channel variations are related with media
(phone vs computer) or access levels
(partner vs back-office vs direct user access)
and not with having multiple IT systems
supporting them.
5. A customer experience business process
performs the important role of managing
the process flow, gathering and validating
data and linking the designed customer
experience with the “internal reality”
provided by the IT systems.
6. Customer experience should be seamless
independently of channel technology,
supplier, device, media or design.
7. Channels should be quickly and readily
extendable. Adding a new channel or media
to support an existing customer experience
business process should be a simple affair.
Problems with the channel approach
Omnichannel requirements

8. 8
The main challenge for an omnichanel strategy
is the misinterpretation of its objective. An
omnichannel strategy does not rely on the need
to have multiple channels (aka multichannel) or
on extending the existing channels, but on the
premisethateveryexistingchannelmustbeable
to provide a consistent customer experience.
The main challenges for a true omnichannel
strategy implementation are:
• The absence of a role responsible for end-
to-end customer experience or if there
is, this role is not empowered within the
organisation.
• Lack of formal digital transformation
strategy detailing what the organisation
wants to achieve with customer experience
beyond the traditional business.
• There is no underlying IT system catering
for an end-to-end omnichannel customer
experienceintheformofabusinessprocess.
BPM and Integration (EAI) platforms are
focused on solving internal challenges.
BPM addresses escalation or approval flows
(both internal) and EAI exposes simple or
composite services to be used by other
systems, mainly in the form of transactions
or fully automated workflows.
• Considering the broadest definition of
channel, there are two types of IT channel
systems:
» Core systems - Channels that own the core
customer data they manipulate. These are
usuallyusedwithininternal(assisted)channels,
require strictly controlled access, provide their
own UI and carry their own internal logic.
Examples of these are core banking systems,
CRM systems, etc.
» Composite systems - Channels that use
“services” to provide their functions. Most
on-line channels use this approach. These are
whatmostpeoplewouldcall“channels”andare
accessed directly by customers, partners and
internal users. Notice that there are internal
systems designed using this principle.
» Thereisnoobviouswaytoshareacustomer
experienceprocessbetweenthesetwotypesof
channels. Core systems are not usually process
oriented, focusing more on access levels and
transactions. Composite systems are more
amenable to change but needs to be purposely
designed to meet customer experience goals.
• Business logic, data gathering, and flow are
implemented at the channels or at the core
systems level:
» At the channel level, this creates redundancy
and forces each new channel to duplicate
the logic, flow and data gathering already
implemented in other channels. The concept of
omnichannel customer experience is also lost
since no channel centralises this concept.
» Centralising at the core level is beset
with its own problems. It is expensive,
creates additional customisation levels
at the core, time to market is slow and
forces these requirements to compete
with “real” core business requirements.
Additionally, core systems do not have the
concept of customer experience, flow, status
model, which are essential for a successful
omnichannel customer experience.
OMNICHANNEL
ARCHITECTURE DESIGN02
Challenges

9. 9
In this diagram, it is clearly visible that the
customer experience orchestration layer is a
separateITarchitecturelayerthatisresponsible
for the end-to-end orchestration of customer
experiences regardless of the channel.
Thislayerisahigh-levelorchestratorforcomplex
customer experience business processes,
performing data gathering, validation,
orchestration, continuity and integration
(through properly exposed services) with the
core IT systems. Since business processes are
transient, this layer owns no relevant customer
data. Data must be contextualized from the
existing systems, orchestrated throughout the
business process and committed at the end to
the data owner systems.
Architecture design
By now, it should be obvious that there is no
solution within the traditional IT architecture
framework that can be used to deliver the
required omnichannel vision. The traditional
approach of extending the existing channels
won’t work unless significant requirement
concessions are done, while also severely
limiting future flexibility and time-to-market.
The IT architecture design required to
implement the omnichannel vision mandates
a software layer that is responsible for the
expected omnichannel functions. This layer
transversally implements business logic and
flow from the user’s perspective, providing
a flow, continuity and a single development
point for business logic and data gathering,
while making sure that the core systems are
correctly orchestrated to provide the required
business function. This has the main advantage
of removing the traditional silo-based IT
architecture from the “public” view.
The following diagram depicts such a high-level
architecture:

10. 10
Since the introduction of a new IT architecture
is no simple affair and may have significant
future consequences, there are a few relevant
questions that need to be considered while
discussing its introduction:
• Question: Should it cover an important
technical and/or business function that
currently has no owner?
Answer: The new layer covers a new need:
End-to-end customer experience business
processes supported on all channels,
internal or external.
• Q: Does it impact performance,
maintainability, cost over existing
alternatives?
A: The new layer supports a develop
once, deploy everywhere principle for all
channels. It should contain caching for
running processes and enables and end-
to-end vision control of the customer
experience. In fact, maintainability and
time-to-market should be substantially
improved over the current architecture
since both channel development and core
development will become more focused,
standardized and with little redundancy.
• Q: Can I use it in my internal channels (CRM,
branches, partners)?
A: In fact, this is not only recommended
but mandatory for a true omnichannel
experience. Customers need to have
the same experience regardless of their
contact point, thus internal channels need
to have access to the end-to-end customer
experience business process.
• Q: How can I expose my internal channels to
the customer experience layer?
A: There are two different answers to this
question depending on the type of internal
channel being used:
» If the channel is a services-based channel or
hastheabilitytointegratethird-partyservices,
it is no different from integrating an external
channel. Just invoke the customer experience
layer’s services.
» If the channel is not services-based or able
to integrate third-party services, there is a
difficult choice. You can either choose not
to give access to the internal users to the
customer experience business process (not
recommended), create a new user portal for
internal users or provide access to the external
channel (with limited access impersonation) to
the internal users.
• Q: How can I create a new channel or media
based on the existing customer experience
layer?
A:Thecustomerexperiencelayerisexposed
through APIs (or services). Therefore, any
neworexistingchanneljustneedstocallthe
API with the right parameters at the right
time. Thus, launching a new onboarding
process on Facebook or through a chatbot
is much simpler than repeating the whole
implementation again.
Omnichannel Strategy Q&A

11. 11
Companies often fail to correctly assess
and prepare for disruptive events. They are
setup for incremental change, and once true
disruption occurs it is difficult to identify it,
never mind reacting in a timely fashion to it. The
existence of multiple competing disruptions
trends happening simultaneously also does not
help. Things like fintech, blockchain and the rise
of Artificial Intelligence all require a different
strategy and it is not always clear which one
to prioritise. In the end, most companies will
just continue looking for ways to incrementally
improve what they are doing today.
Real disruptive change will only come from a
change on the fundamentals of an industry.
As we have seen in many industries, including
music, software distribution, transportation,
travelling and lodging, true disruption comes
from investing in customer relationships.
Companies that are able to control and foster
a lasting relationship with their customers by
addressing what they expect are the ones that
will thrive on disruption.
Omnichannel’s role is to provide the tools for
traditional companies to compete and reinvent
themselves.
CONCLUSION
03

12. About Novabase
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We improve businesses with frameworks that
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We’re in the business of making businesses
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