Optimizing the Omnichannel Customer Experience: 3 Quick Takeaways from Our Benchmark Research

By Smart Communications

People are using more communication channels than ever to interact with companies, with most sources pegging the figure between six and 10. These range from classics like email, phone, and print to newer options like SMS, RCS, self-service portals, and more.

Is your company ready? 

Smart Communications recently surveyed 3,000 consumers across regulated industries to better understand their experience. The results highlight both the importance of delivering a strong omnichannel experience and how far companies still need to go to match these expectations. (Explore the interactive Benchmark Experience.)

Let’s take a look at three key findings from the research, and what they mean for organizations aiming to improve customer engagement, boost journey completion rates, and earn deeper loyalty.

1) There isn’t a clear consensus on what channel customers prefer.

Despite the seemingly endless rumors of email’s demise, it remains the go-to choice for most customers to receive communications from businesses, with 43% selecting it as their top option. Yet four other communications channels—SMS, web portal/mobile app, encrypted messages, and print/mail—also scored in double digits, indicating there’s no dominant preference.

The picture gets even more muddled you when you drill into age and regional differences across the globe:

• SMS: 27% of millennials favor this channel (the most of any age group), as do 38% in Austria, 37% in Japan and 25% in Germany 
• Encrypted Messaging: About one-fourth of consumers in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan prefer encrypted messaging platforms such as WhatsApp
• Web Portal/Mobile App: Twenty percent of DACH consumers favor interacting with companies via this channel, the highest of any region in the study
• Print: Nearly one in five in the UK prefer their communications via print—including 22% of Gen Xers and 24% of Boomers
• Email: The #1 choice of consumers in nine of the 12 countries surveyed, but figures varied from a high of 73% (New Zealand) to a low of 18% (Austria)

The bottom line? Across your customer base, preferences are likely to vary regarding communication options—and they often shift within the same individual depending on the type of communication, timing, and context.

What You Can Do: Develop a strategy to begin to capture digital identifiers such as email addresses and phone numbers to align a more seamless transition to digital communications now (or when the time is right). Also, audit the processes and legacy technologies you have in place to ensure you can meet customers’ communication preferences while maintaining message consistency, brand standards, and compliance. Explore new approaches and solutions as needed.

2) Consistent omnichannel experience is critical.

As communication channels have multiplied, customer experiences across them often vary widely—and that’s a costly mistake. Smart Communications’ benchmark research indicates 80% of consumers across financial services, healthcare, and insurance industries say cross-channel consistency is important to their relationship with providers. Specifically, 60% feel more confident in companies when the omnichannel experience is seamless.

This sentiment isn’t just a soft metric—it directly affects the bottom line. According to the study, 67% of customers are likely to switch providers if their communications fall short of expectations. Beyond retention, the quality of the customer experience can fuel business growth: 78% will recommend providers to a friend if communications exceed expectations.

What You Can Do: Review the way communications are generated and delivered across channels. Are there mechanisms in place, from data collection to communication generation to journey orchestration, that ensure communications complement one another rather than confuse or frustrate customers?

3) Many companies are failing to deliver the experience customers want.

Barely half (54%) of customers in 2025 are satisfied with the omnichannel experiences their providers deliver. That’s a notable drop from 60% in 2024, and it should serve as a wake-up call for organizations who are simply pushing messages across multiple channels rather than orchestrating seamless experiences that drive the outcomes customers (and businesses) want.

What You Can Do: Review the customer journey and look for opportunities to enhance the experience, such as:

• Duplication of content between channels, which can damage your brand reputation
• Points of frustration that lead to high-cost customer service calls or unnecessary administrative tasks
• Failure to switch channels for follow-up, which can lower completion rates

Once you’ve pinpointed areas for improvement, map out processes and technologies that can help automate these tasks—or even leverage AI innovations to level up your efforts. With Smart Communications’ SmartPATH™ solution, for example, agentic AI-empowered workflows can gauge customer sentiment during two-way text messaging and adjust interactions in real time. 

Want to take a deeper dive into all things omnichannel? We’ve got you covered—our “Ultimate Guide to Omnichannel Orchestration” provides a comprehensive manual for creating and delivering personalized journeys that keep customers engaged and interactions moving forward. Check it out now.

Frequently Asked Questions

1) Where should companies start if they’re just beginning their omnichannel journey?

Start small by selecting a single workflow or journey to improve, rather than trying to transform everything at once. Focus on automating repetitive tasks, centralizing templates for consistency, and testing how different channels integrate with one another.

This phased approach builds quick wins and creates a strong foundation you can scale—expanding into multiple campaigns or business units and layering in AI decisioning for sentiment analysis and smarter routing across channels. Over time, AI can make it far easier to scale these personalized, automated, and secure experiences across the enterprise—faster and more efficiently than human teams alone could achieve.

2) What role does AI play in improving the omnichannel experience?

AI is rapidly becoming a critical driver of enhancements in the omnichannel experience. Beyond traditional automation—also a key component of omnichannel orchestration—AI can help perceive customer sentiment through various data inputs, independently adapt communications based on customer behavior, and learn continuously from outcomes and feedback. It can also understand natural questions, interpret intent, and determine the most effective response or next step in the journey. By increasing personalization and reacting to customer behaviors at scale, AI is powering the next generation of omnichannel customer experience.

3) How can Smart Communications help organizations improve their omnichannel strategy?

SmartPATH™ brings omnichannel orchestration to the Conversation Cloud™ platform, purpose-built to manage mission-critical, regulated communications across every channel. With intelligent decisioning, AI agent-enabled workflows, and real-time analytics, SmartPATH keeps conversations connected and customers engaged—whether through email, SMS, WhatsApp, RCS, or traditional print failover when digital delivery isn’t possible. (Related reading: “4 Ways SmartPATH Helps Unlock the Power of Omnichannel Orchestration.”)

Its low-code orchestration canvas empowers business users to design and adapt workflows quickly, while enterprise-grade compliance ensures regulatory alignment at every step. By unifying channels, automating manual tasks, and delivering personalized interactions at scale, SmartPATH reduces costs, accelerates digital transformation, and drives more consistent outcomes for customers and enterprises alike.