Go BackMeeting the multi-channel challenge - delivering the channel choice that customers increasingly require
Helen Murray, Director of Consulting at Verint Consulting explains how organisations can ride the 'channel shift' www.verintconsulting.com
When it comes to discussing the role that multi-channel should play in an organisation's customer strategy, two questions always come up:
Q1: Will the calls answered by live agents always be the customer's preferred means of contact?
and
Q2: If we choose to provide service by other channels, will this be perceived as a trade-off with customer service quality compromised in the interest of cost savings?
A: Although seemingly reasonable questions, our experience is that these assumptions are both false and dangerous. By failing to embrace multi-channel service provision, companies risk alienating their existing customers, missing future sales, and limiting their service horizons.
If the adoption of new channels is a compromise, it's one no sensible organisation would ever be prepared to make. There's an increasing body of research which suggests that 'good service' has a greater impact on customer loyalty than a superior product or a competitive price; and that customers are more likely to be influenced - for good or ill - by the direct, personal interactions they have with the organisations that serve them than by the marketing efforts designed to seduce them.
Q. Do customers really want all this channel choice?
A: Yes - and there's further evidence to suggest that today's customers consider channel choice to be a vital component of any good service strategy. They relish and expect to have choices about how and when they make contact, and will make those choices according to a number of criteria including location, time of day and the type of help they need.
If you're in your office looking for the time of the next train you'll likely go to the National Rail Enquiries website to find it. If you're in the back of a taxi on your way to the station, you'll probably call their speech automated TrainTracker service from your mobile. If you're planning a complicated rail-tour holiday, with several changes and overnight stops, you might prefer to talk through your options with a contact centre agent. All three are valid options, ideal for different times and tasks, and National Rail Enquiries' customer service offering would be weakened if any of them were absent.
Today's customers judge the quality of an organisation's customer service on the basis of availability, choice and the speed at which they can get their issue resolved or transaction completed. According to a recent Genesys report, they are "comfortable with and impressed by" multi-channel access options. They simply want the best route to a solution, on their terms.
Q. Should I trust new service channels with more complex interactions?
A: There's no question that the traditional contact centre agent is an expensive service option to retain. The average cost of handling a telephone enquiry is around £6.50, while an email costs only £3 and a typical cost-per-interaction via an automated self service channel is around £1 or less.
Given that virtually any transaction is cheaper to complete via an electronic rather than a human channel, it makes obvious sense to encourage as many straightforward, low value transactions onto electronic channels as possible, reserving expensive contact centre agent resources for more complex interactions or those where the ability for human interjection - to cross-sell a new product or service, for example, or to actively combat a possible defection - is highest.
The challenge for today's organisations, then, is complicated but compelling. First, they must understand their customers' expectations for service availability and performance. However, they must also evaluate the cost of each channel deployment in light of the opportunity for business value that could be derived from the interactions it will carry. If this is to be achieved, the data analyst's arts of customer intelligence and market segmentation must move beyond the marketing department and be applied to the operation itself.
In a recent engagement we were able to help Virgin Money review the way it dealt with clients requesting significant cash withdrawals or account closures. Our aim was to understand and prevent the reasons for customer churn, and then take action to prevent it. In doing so we helped Virgin Money maintain significant funds under management that they considered to be 'at risk'. In a six-month period the company was able to retain business in 10% of cases where clients had requested withdrawals. This would, clearly, not have been possible if the withdrawal procedure was fully automated and there was no opportunity for the agent to intervene or influence the customer's decision.
All organisations have to deal with these kind of calls - the trick is to identify them and plan accordingly.
Q. So what kinds of contacts benefit most from human contact?
A: You should keep human contact when:
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Interaction complexity is significant, eg, within bespoke banking or medical environments
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Activity may signal defection - eg, large cash withdrawals, account closures in financial services
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Emotional content is high - eg, life insurance claims
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When the service includes a consultative aspect - eg, luxury holiday planning
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And where personal service is a key brand differentiator within premium propositions
Q. How can I make the customer experience consistent across channels?
A: It seems certain, then, that a multi-channel strategy is a pre-requisite for customer service success in today's society. Furthermore, it is evidently possible to encourage customers to use particular channels for particular objectives. The remaining challenge is to deploy channels with a degree of interconnectedness that will guarantee a consistent experience for the customer across channels.
Customers will be slow to forgive any provider that's unable to make connections between the interactions they make on line, via the contact centre, by email or even by traditional post. This necessitates that all customer interactions must be centrally captured and made available to every channel. Email confirmation of web-based customer orders, or prompt postal fulfilment of an online brochure request are obvious examples of functionally joined up behaviour. However, the point at which interconnectedness is hardest to achieve - and most painful when absent - is when a customer speaks to an agent. For those interactions, agents need to be forearmed with information about all recent interactions that customers have had - across all channels.
This calls for a level of synchronicity between technology applications and marketing skill that few companies have yet achieved. The ability to gather information in customer databases is the starting point and depends purely upon the application of the right IT systems. The ability to organise it efficiently and access it intelligently in ways that enable relevant service to be offered and cross sell opportunities grasped calls for significant marketing input and skills.
The credit card giant Capital One scores highly in this regard, successfully collating customer information and making it universally accessible so that the service experience is seamless across channels. Perhaps more importantly, they've developed the means to interrogate that customer information intelligently and use it to develop individually targeted sales propositions that can be delivered direct to the customer over a range of channels.
When, for example, a customer calls to check their credit balance, or conduct some other routine transaction, Capital One's systems get to work. First they identify the caller and make the relevant customer information available to the person who'll take the call. More importantly though, it uses sophisticated data analysis systems to interrogate the exhaustive information held about the whole customer base and uses that to predict the products or services that this particular customer - with their particular track record and profile - might be likely to buy. The agent is then prompted to make a cross sell offer with the confidence that the chances of success are high.
Q. What impact will a multi-channel strategy have on my brand?
A: Consistency isn't all about information. It's also about the brand and the way it's presented in the multi-channel environment. We've already indicated that high customer experience quality is a valuable source of differentiation that companies are keen to exploit. In our view the customer experience is most impactful when it reflects, rather than contradicts, the organisation's brand values.
That means not only that 'look and feel' must be consistent across visual channels - printed materials, written communication and web - but that the language and stylistic approach used must be the same across all verbal (live agent or automated) and non-verbal channels. If marketers, rather than customer service managers, are custodians of the brand, their involvement in planning and delivery is a pre-requisite for success. We've demonstrated through work with numerous clients, including Virgin, Abbey, BSkyB, Toyota and Nectar, that brand values can be translated into conversational behaviours that can be implemented in the contact centre. The same linguistic styles and approaches can also be used in automated speech services and in written communication.
Q. So how can I measure if multi-channel is working for my organisation?
A: It's fairly easy to track the relative monetary value of each channel on the basis of cost per transaction; lower in all electronic channels than in the live agent contact centre environment.
The rewards will be greatest if the introduction of cheaper service channels sees calls to the contact centre decrease. When a new channel is introduced, the first and most obvious success measure is adoption - do customers use it and do they come back for more?
Measuring long-term success is more challenging. You can judge your channel strategy successful if, in its whole and its component parts, it delivers a long-term increase in customer transactions and a boost in loyalty as service costs decrease.
Alternative channels have a contribution to make on both sides of the financial scale - reducing cost to serve and improving revenue performance.
