Omni-Channel Customer Engagement Article

While many companies today are attempting, at least on the surface, to build a multichannel customer experience for their customers, many of them are not succeeding. To be sure, it’s a big and daunting job that requires the right platform, the right tools, the right workers and the right goals, so it’s not a big surprise that there have been a lot of roadblocks to get over. Many companies are spending too much money and time on building out the wrong channels – ones their customers don’t really care about – and skimping efforts to tie all the channels together into a coherent whole. (Hint: having a lot of channel choices isn’t an achievement if they work in isolation from one another.)

At the same time, some of the same organizations are trying to build out their mobile customer care operations, and there is a curious disconnect between these efforts and attempts to go omni-channel. It’s important to keep in mind that smartphones, which some 85 percent of Americans identify as indispensable to their daily lives, are actually omni-channel tools. Think about it: the smartphone, often considered a single tool, allows users to talk on the phone, email, surf the mobile Web, use mobile apps, chat, text and engage in video. It’s the ultimate omni-channel customer care device, but it’s still being treated like an isolated channel. There is evidence that this approach is harming customer care strategies, according to a recent article by Lucy Holloway writing for Business2Community.

“Many businesses…have been slow to expand their online customer service strategy into mobile platforms, unaware of the impact this could have on customer experience,” wrote Holloway. “Should access to Web self-service not be mobile friendly, live chat not be available on tablets or smartphones and websites not have a dedicated responsive in design for mobile or tablet viewing, customers are likely to get frustrated, give up or resort to more costly channels, such as voice to resolve their query.”

At this point, if they have to abandon an online transaction and call, there’s a good bet that they’ll have to start all over again with the transaction. And that’s a quick and easy way to lose a customer or potential customer for life. Instead, companies should be helping customers get live help if they need it from inside the mobile transaction already in progress. This can be achieved through click-to-call or click-to-chat functions that carry the information from the existing transaction to agents, who can resolve the problem without forcing the customer to start all over again.

Art Rosenberg (News - Alert), writing for No Jitter, calls what companies should be chasing after “UC&C” capabilities, or unified communications and collaboration.

“Highlighting collaboration and information content exchange as supported by persistent multimodal UC offerings is a good thing,” he wrote. “However, organizations also must now include the ability for mobile customers to contact them by flexible click-for-assistance options, including instant messaging, voice, and video, depending on the situation and personal preferences.”

These capabilities will be almost impossible without cloud-delivered communications options. While many contact centers today have at least some of their capabilities in the cloud, this may not be good enough: having some capabilities cloud-based and others premise-based isn’t going to lead to that integrated, multichannel platform that will allow companies to offer 360-degree visibility customer support. It may be an expensive dilemma for many companies. Being left behind with outdated customer support solutions, however, may turn out to be even more expensive.