When it comes to actually enhancing the customer experience, despite major breakthroughs in customer interaction technology, realities are that all of the research is still shows that many if not most companies are falling short, and forget about exceeding, customer expectations. In fact, a case can be made that as we move to a world where customers interaction platforms of choice are their personal devices, i.e., no long their PCs, laptops and fixed line phones, the explosion of option in how they wish to interact has made providing consistently great experiences regardless of channel more complex rather than simple.

Customers can now literally and figuratively channel hop. They have the ability to start an interaction with an organization in one modality—email, mobile call, SMS, live support and increasingly even across emerging Internet of Things (IoT) devices—and end it on another. In fact, a single “session” can involve use of multiple channels as customers look to have questions answered, problems solved and hopefully purchase things. 

The challenge is that while your organization may have recognized the need to be “multi-channel” or “omni-channel” (depending on which description you like) in terms of covering all of the ways your customer would like to interact, whether you are using this maze of touchpoints and the information generation to make not just your customers’ lives easier and them happier, but also that of your frontline people as well, remains a challenge to say the least. 

Providing compelling customer experiences is about the optimization of the engagement process.  Customers obviously want what they have always wanted, i.e., real-time, context-driven (to avoid repetition), personalized interaction and quicker and satisfactory resolution. This is using a broadly defined term for resolution as in essence they got what they came for, were delighted and will return to you for more. 

What your organization wants is the ability to use all of the information it has. Interestingly, much of this information despite the industry monikers about multi and omni has been siloed even as the number of channels/touchpoints have exploded. The objective is to assure that the customer is engaged by the right people, with the right tools, on the best channel for that user with as much information as possible (aka context) to provide outcomes that strive to exceed expectations.  

In short, the goal is to make the complex simple. It is to make engagement as “frictionless,” delightful and productive as possible for all concerned.  However, to say the least “it is complicated!”

The good news is that it does not have to be.  Getting through the maze can be made easy.  In fact, you are invited to participate real-time on the webinar, How to Capture Key Customer Moments and Navigate Effortless Interaction and Desired Outcomes. To be held Thursday, October 29, 2015 01:00 PM EDT / 10:00 AM PDT, join me and Monique Bozeman, Director of Product Marketing, and Wayne Bevan, Director of Product Management, Virtual Hold Technology (News - Alert) (VHT), as we discuss the challenges of using better information and navigation to improve customer engagements.

Topics to be included are:

• Real-time and historical event capture
• Analysis of customer specific events
• How the VHT Navigator—scalable, agnostic, software solution that can tie multichannel silos together—identifies opportunities and triggers next right actions to deliver to customers

Having multiple touchpoints and information generating sources is the foundation to creating great customer experiences but the trick is to avoid the trap of making multi-channel a checklist item where each channel and the information it contains is not optimized for getting to delighted quickly.  Navigation is a key ingredient for moving the yardsticks on all of you key performance indicators (KPIs).