Seizing the multi-channel opportunity

Building customer loyalty through a properly joined-up channel approach

Customer service operations often struggle with the reality of multi-channel service. It isn’t easy. Done right, however, the benefits can be considerable, with improved first contact resolution, improved customer satisfaction and ultimately increased customer retention.

What’s interesting is that multi-channel itself isn’t a new challenge. While Googling the topic last week, I came across an interesting article titled ‘Why can’t call centres do email?’. It seemed particularly relevant, until we looked again and found that the story was dated September 1997. So here we are, ten years further on, and I suspect that many Customer Service Directors are still trying to tackle this challenge. So how far have we really come?

Some organisations are of course getting it right, but it’s probably fair to say that most companies’ multi-channel service capabilities haven’t kept pace with the growing consumer requirement to contact organisations when and how they want to. Almost half the UK’s consumers now have an expectation of near instant response, irrespective of the channel they’re using.

It’s certainly not smart to ignore this major shift and assume that, just because the majority of your customers still use voice as their primary channel, then that’s the way it’s always going to be. Some organisations already receive over half of their customer contact by email, a trend illustrated by a recent Genesys consumer survey that found that 89 per cent of consumers would like to communicate with the companies they interact with via email.

In addition to email, consumers are also broadening their channel use. According to the same research, 11 per cent of consumers have used web chat to communicate with a contact centre in the last 12 months, 18 per cent have used SMS messaging, while one in four suggested they would like to have the option of using online chat instead of voice. Consumers also clearly have strong views about the channels they use, with four out of five reacting negatively when they feel that companies are pushing them into using self-service systems.

Need for a more joined-up service approach

At a recent Sabio forum for customer service professionals we asked delegates to think about the reality of providing a joined-up customer service. What was clear was that they didn’t see their customers as migrating from one channel to another, instead they were simply extending the number of channels that they used. Customers also didn’t make a straight either/or choice, and the channel they chose was usually dependent on the context – for example, where the customer was, what service they were seeking, or how far into a buying process they were.

So an increasingly important requirement is for organisations to provide consistency across the different channels they offer, whether it’s voice, email, IVR, speech, web or SMS. This means that all of an organisation’s different contact centre systems and processes need to be aligned to help enable a joined-up service culture and deliver a consistent brand experience. A simple test is to ask: “if a customer completes an application on the web and then calls you, can your agent see what the customer has just done?”

While many organisations would answer positively, it’s not always that easy. There might be incompatible back-office systems that make this difficult, or your organisation may have just gone through a merger or acquisition that hadn’t yet been fully realised. However, even though you may have system difficulties, you can be certain that your customer won’t really care – and if they are seriously inconvenienced then there are lots of other places they can go to find a better alternative.

It’s not enough just to offer a multi-channel capability. To really benefit you have to do it well by offering a quality and consistent customer experience across all channels. Technology is an enabler for this, but it’s also essential that you get all your people and processes in place to make multi-channel customer interactions really work for both your customers and your organisation.

From the customer perspective, the whole process has to be convenient, flexible and relatively painless in terms of time and costs. Customers are getting increasingly frustrated by organisations that offer one price on the web, a different price in the contact centre and another price in the store. As consumers we’re not stupid, so we’ll probably find out where the best offer is, but we won’t appreciate having to do all the work to find it. So the smarter organisations have worked out that it makes sense to integrate their web offering with the contact centre and offer the same products, product information and pricing, irrespective of the channel.

This approach works well from the customer perspective, but to ensure true multi-channel success, you’ve also got to align your internal processes. Sometimes a useful first step is to make sure you’ve got all your channels under one director to rule out the chance of internal turf wars! There are other challenges such as integrating the routing of different transaction types, measuring them all as one, providing an integrated contact history across all channels, training your agents to respond appropriately to different channel interactions and providing your multi-channel agents with a single IT desktop that can integrate all their different customer-facing and internal applications.

Where to start?

At Sabio we’re sometimes asked whether it’s better to offer just one channel and handle it well, or should organisations try to offer a more mediocre service level across multiple channels. The simple answer is that neither approach is correct, and if you take either you’re likely not to succeed in the long term. In today’s highly competitive market, organisations need to offer the highest quality service across all their channels. Consumers are smart, so if just one of your channels is poor they will quickly gravitate towards a better quality service provider. And with easy access to all the different price and service comparison websites out there, it’s now really easy for customers to change suppliers.

Organisations need to set the right expectations – if the wait time for an email is going to be two days and not two hours, then say so. It’s better to be consistent and deliver rather than over-service one day and under perform the next. Similarly, if you’re going to offer a callback service, then it has to meet the timescales you promise. If you say you’re going to call back in three hours and you don’t do it until the next day, you may have already lost that customer.

You also need to make sure all your channels are joined-up, helping you to offer a blended service. That means whether your customer chooses to contact you by voice, email, SMS, webchat or by post, you’ll have a single view of that customer with their history and transactions accessible, irrespective of the channel. This can involve a range of technologies and processes, including CRM, Customer Interaction Management, Unified Desktop applications, and developing agent skills to support multiple channels such as email and webchat.

Obviously the right approach is to offer the highest quality service across all your channels, but if you can’t do that then at a minimum you should make sure you’re providing a fully integrated service across phone and email, while you’re working to improve your overall multi-channel offering.

How will you know if you’re getting it right?

If you can get your multi-channel approach right, then there are benefits for both the organisations that implement the solutions and for the customers that use them. Organisations using multi-channel can reduce the cost of customer transactions, particularly with self-service and automation, and multi-channels also help them to cover more of the available market giving a platform for revenue gains and growth.

For customers, a true multi-channel approach gives them more choice and flexibility, offering them the convenience of dealing with an organisation when and how they want to. This is increasingly important in today’s highly competitive market with more demanding consumers!

As contact centres become increasingly important corporate assets, customer service organisations will evolve their disparate contact operations into more unified service centres that can adapt and optimise to deal with incoming customer traffic, internal resources and interaction outcomes. Genesys refers to this vision of improving the strategic role of customer service to drive business value as the ‘Dynamic Contact Centre’.

Quite correctly, it focuses on the need to balance improvements in the customer experience while still driving revenue improvements. If you can get it right by delivering a high quality experience across a properly joined-up customer approach for all customer interactions, then you’re in the right place to create improved customer satisfaction and earn greater customer loyalty.