Omni-channel is Seamless Customer Engagement

Thought Leadership Article

Nancy Jamison, Principal Analyst, Customer Contact, Information & Communications Technologies, Frost & Sullivan

Sponsored by

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contents

The Vision of Omni-channel Customer Engagement ............................................................... 3

Disconnect between the Vision and Reality ............................................................................... 3

Hope is on the Horizon ................................................................................................................ 4

Don’t Forget the Data .................................................................................................................. 5

Final Word ..................................................................................................................................... 5

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Omni-channel is Seamless Customer Engagement

All rights reserved © 2015 Frost & Sullivan

The Vision of omni-channel cusTomer engagemenT

Borrowed from the retail sector, the term omni-channel, when applied to customer service, is all about seamless customer engagement. Frost & Sullivan started espousing this concept in 2012 and it caught on like wildfire. The retail sector, which was born out of brick and mortar, was flung into addressing emerging channels as soon as the first e-commerce site popped up. And as pressure increased from online sales, the greater the push became to connect stores and branches to other customer channels, encouraged further by the increasing mobility of modern consumers. Retail had to change to fend off new market entrants and adjust to changes in consumer habits and preferences. Other industries soon followed.

The concept behind omni-channel is seamless customer engagement and a cohesive or frictionless Customer Experience. With true omni-channel engagement, data, moving from the smallest event, such as a data entry, to a transaction, multiplied into an interaction, are all combined to form a customer journey that is fluid and not fractured. Thus, no matter which channel a customer chooses to start the journey on, or whether they channel hop, or even stop and re-engage later, all data associated with their journey moves with them and is available on all other channels. Indeed, Frost & Sullivan research shows that consumers often will engage on more than one channel at a time.

While the term may have originated in retail, the omni-channel concept is certainly not relegated to retail alone, but applies to all industries. The purpose behind omni-channel is to improve the Customer Experience by eliminating breakpoints between channels, making interaction data and history available on all channels, and using analytics to continuously improve the experience. In all, whether it’s one journey or multiple journeys across a long-term customer relationship, all resulting data is available and applied to create an omni-channel engagement.

DisconnecT beTween The Vision anD realiTy

However, while improving the Customer Experience has been a stated imperative for many, for years now, delivering true omni-channel has not been as easy or as common as the industry has hoped. The irony here is that the movement to omni-channel has been hampered by the success of omni-channel’s precursor— multi-channel. This decade-old drive to enable “any time, any place, anywhere” access to businesses was born out of the same desire to improve the Customer Experience and cater to customer needs, but was achieved through myriad approaches that created numerous issues.

Some channels were the result of the natural evolution of the contact center, while others were developed in adjacent areas of the business and then tacked on. For instance, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), the first channel added after direct access to an agent, was designed with the contact center in mind, and indeed became the unofficial “front door” to the contact center. Similarly, outbound dialing was designed to take advantage of existing contact center technology and later improved upon to deliver proactive customer care. However, other channels, such as email, SMS, chat and the Web, emerged in other areas of the business first and then were adapted as contact center channels later. Finally, the most recent additions—mobile and social—were a direct result of the change in consumers themselves, and were championed in and outside the contact center. However, the increasing love for mobile devices, coupled with the rampant use of social media, has driven the industry to develop mobile and social customer care-specific solutions as well.

But there is a disconnect between the reality of multi-channel and the vision of omni-channel. The reality is that we are still trapped in a multi-channel world, replete with silos of data that aren’t linked together, and in

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an amazing amount of cases, not used. Consider that there are four decades of legacy premise-based contact center hardware and software in existence, all with numerous releases and varying upgrade requirements, creating the situation that:

• Some solution providers have purpose-built applications to seamlessly pass data from one application/system to another and some not, while others have “integrated best-of-breed” point solutions, with varying levels of integration.

• Each channel has the potential to have its own data storage, analytics and reporting, creating silos of data that are not easily linked together.

• Channel origination and ownership often start in different parts of the business, such as social media launched from within marketing, rather than in the contact center, typically without an overarching multi-/omni-channel strategy backed by cross-organizational support.

Perhaps the single event that resonates the most with consumers when it comes to a breakdown in a customer journey is when a customer inputs data into an IVR and is asked for the same data if they transfer to an agent. This inability to access data from back-end systems adds greatly to customer discontent. So, if simple computer telephony integration (CTI) is still not in widespread use 25 years after its invention, how are we to seamlessly integrate all interaction channels?

The result is that despite hammering on the delivery of multi-channel and buying the dream of omni-channel, there is a gap between strategic service goals and customer perception. For instance, Dimension Data’s 2015 Customer Benchmark Study reported that despite 75% of survey respondents saying that customer service is a competitive differentiator, customer satisfaction has reached its lowest level since 2011 and has dropped for the fourth consecutive year. According to the report, a key part of measuring this is the increased use of metrics outside the contact center, citing “the use of NPS has risen 48.0% (to 37.3%) and Customer Effort Score (CES) is up 173.7% (to 20.8%).”

hope is on The horizon

Despite roadblocks in moving the needle on customer satisfaction, hope is on the horizon. Omni-channel customer engagement resulting in a stellar Customer Experience is available through a combination of organizational prowess, application integration, and the secret sauce of analytics. To deliver on this promise, companies need to:

• Engage a C-level executive to champion the Customer Experience.

• Create a strategic plan that envelopes cross-functional/organization responsibilities for customer contact channel tie in.

• Investigate analytics applications that can tie together disparate silos, as well as business process applications.

• Make use of related business applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), as well as Big Data to enrich information available to understand and improve upon customer service operations.

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Omni-channel is Seamless Customer Engagement

All rights reserved © 2015 Frost & Sullivan

• Investigate the cloud. The cloud can foster a more seamless experience, easier application integration, and the ability to add channels without capital equipment expenditures and expensive IT resources.

• Determine the business reason for the addition of any new channel and focus on a user-centric business outcome, by customer segment, rather than one just tied to cost.

• Create a clear strategy for delivering and utilizing customer information and data in real time.

Also consider that you are only as good as your worst channel. It is critical to consider that even those channels that are slowly lessening in use, such as IVR, are still a piece of the overall omni-channel experience and represent a company’s brand image. If one is left out, the brand suffers. Upgrading or replacing these components is a crucial part of an omni-channel strategy. This also provides the opportunity to add functionality that can improve the overall Customer Experience as well. For instance, incorporating callback capabilities for IVR and mobile customer care; introducing Web chat with advanced functionality, such as predictive, persistent and proactive chat capabilities; or adding virtual assistants can add significant value to a customer journey.

Don’T forgeT The DaTa

Despite the fact that reporting and analytics has been the focus of each channel as it was individually developed, oftentimes the data isn’t used effectively. Reports are generated independently and not part of an overall picture. Our research has concluded that due to the historical bias toward considering contact centers as cost centers and not customer engagement hubs, agent performance analytics has gotten the most use, with customer interaction analytics and Voice of the Customer initiatives of lesser use. While of great value, analytics shouldn’t stop with the agent. Customer Experience teams should harness historical and real-time analytics on all customer interactions to get a holistic view of the entire customer engagement picture, combine this with other business metrics, culled from adjacent applications, and create a continuous feedback loop for improvement. For example, are sales conversion rates stronger over the telephone, can improving automated self-service reduce costs and increase sales, or are speech analytics uncovering back-office problems that are affecting customer satisfaction?

final worD

Many organizations have and are achieving omni-channel excellence, but considering the roadblocks involved, it is definitely “a process.” Strategically, the days of the voice-centric contact center are over. In order to survive in this hypercompetitive market, contact centers not only must add on the digital channels customers crave, but provide assisted digital service and automated self-service, cohesively connected to all other channels and business insights.

The rise of the Chief Customer Experience Office and other roles driving a closed-loop, user-centric strategy is also crucial to the success of delivering on the omni-channel vision of customer engagement. In the end, with a cross-organizational focus on removing frustrating silos and improving cross-channel experiences, not only will customer satisfaction levels rise, but the ever-present goal of cost reduction will be achieved as well.

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