Fiction or real life?
Your phone rings. You often don’t pick up because you are bored of all the telemarketing. But this time, you’re not quite sure why, you do respond. In fact, you even listen to what the caller has to say, because she speaks to you as if she actually knew you, and knows how to grab your attention. At the end of the call, you give her your e-mail and home address so she can send you more info!
After a while, you get her e-mail and you look it over quickly. A few days later, after you have forgotten all about the call and e-mail, you receive a box in the mail.
It contains a gift: you remember the marketing rep mentioned it over the phone, and in her e-mail she said she would send it.
You like the gift. So you decide to check out the website printed on the box. At the same time, you use your favorite social networking site to find out what people know about this company and its products. You find some positive comments. On various forums, you see people are giving this company rave reviews.
So you go to the point of sale recommended on the gift box and the website. When you get there, you get a sense they have been waiting for you. The service they provide is excellent, and they already know the information provided earlier: you don’t have to give it out again. When you leave, you feel happy to have made such a smart buy.
Days later, you get a new e-mail telling you when you will receive your product at your home, just as you had been informed at the store.
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The delivery date draws near. You receive a text message confirming the delivery time. However, you have to go out to deal with an emergency, so you text them back and ask them to come by at another time. You get an immediate confirmation that your goods will be delivered at the new time you specified.
Back home, you receive your purchase at the scheduled time. It includes a welcome package explaining what the product is and how to use it. The welcome brochure also states the name of the person in charge of customer service for you, and the various ways you can contact them for any query or problem you may have later on: direct line telephone number, personal e-mail, cell phone number and social network accounts. Also included are the data for access to a private website exclusively set up for you and the closest customer service points you can approach if you have any issues.
Weeks go by. Then, just before receiving your first bill, you are e-mailed a video that explains in detail how your bill is structured so you know what to expect when you receive it. You are amazed at their efficiency.
Months go by, and everything goes smoothly…
Customer experience in a multichannel environment
As a customer, does this story sound unreal to you? Shouldn’t it always be this way? What if I told you that the person in the story bought insurance? Or a telecommunications product? Or could it be a subscription to a pay-TV channel?
In the end, it doesn’t matter which product or service was involved, don’t you think?
It has long been said that the customer is the focus of a business organization;
the customer is the key element; we need to be customer-oriented; the customer is king. Well, the customer may be king, but it sometimes seems his “court” doesn’t know how to deal with him. Every time he calls, we ask him to confirm data he already gave us on some earlier occasion. At our point of sale, our staff keeps changing. When he visits our website, we bother him with the same advertising he would get if he weren’t a customer at all. On social networks we don’t know if he is already a customer or just a fan.
As already seen in other chapters of this book, the critical point of the customer experience is the “moment of truth.” This is when we really need to prove ourselves
as a business by providing our customer with a meaningful experience. So far, we have looked at what we need to do to create experience in each channel where we have contact with or relate to our customers. But it is not enough to provide an excellent experience in just one channel. We need to offer just as good an experience on every channel we make available to our customers. And that is what we might call a multichannel experience.
We must be aware that for our customers our company is the same thing regardless of the channel they use, and that their experience with our brand is shaped by the whole story of their dealings with us.
Multichannel strategy, or “lotsa-channels”?
Recently, a banking executive told me about his bank’s strategy of offering multiple channels for interacting with customers. But he said that they were privately not calling it “multichannel,” but “lotsa-channels.”
While it was true that a customer now had the whole range of communication and operational channels by which to interact with the bank (telephone, physical branch office, ATMs, website, electronic banking, cell phone banking, etc.), the bank had very little information about what the customer was doing across channels overall. This means that sales opportunities pass us by, and the experience we provide customers is not as good as it should be. For example, when our customer walks into a branch office we are unaware of the fact that she has had trouble with an ATM, or that she has already checked out a given product on our website, and so we need to ask her about things she’s already told us elsewhere.
We need to be harshly self-critical. Do we really have a multichannel strategy, or is it just a “lotsa-channels” strategy? Is each channel blind to the information being handled by the channel right next to it?
But the fact is that there has been a very rapid shift from “mono-channel” to
“multichannel.” Formerly, a company had just the one sales or contact channel to communicate with the customer, such as a store, a salesperson, or a telephone number. But the possibilities available today have widened dramatically on the back of technological development.
So, although an increasing number of companies enable their customers to
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step they have yet to take in any seriousness. There must be genuine integration of data across channels. Ultimately, multichannel contacts can be exploited to enhance earnings and customer experience.
A multichannel strategy lies at the crossroads of two main vectors: the sales process and customer experience.
This paradigm shift means that channel management must go beyond the sales vector and embrace all points of contact with the customer. If we redesign our point of sale or send an e-mail newsletter, does that represent a sales initiative, or is it just contact with the customer? And what does it mean when someone follows us on a social network?
For present purposes, we shall view a company’s channels as the network whereby it “connects” with its customers, whether it does so more in the way of communication or contact than of an attempted sale. Long gone are the days when a company launched a product and its marketing department was ordered to push it hard to make customers buy it. Now it is a matter of placing the customer at the center of our strategy, listening to her and partnering her to create a memorable experience, so that she will buy from us, make repeat purchases, wish to stay with us and refer us to other people.
Types of channels
Channels can be classified into the following types, in simplified form:
Direct channels: The organization reaches the end customer directly, with nobody in between. These channels encompass the sales network, own points of sale, call centers and contact centers, and so forth. Examples include a bank selling its products via its branch network, or an insurance company calling us at home to sell a policy.
Indirect channels: A third party is involved. For example, a hotel selling room bookings through a travel agent or a company building a network of agents to offer its products.
New channels: This category embraces channels based on new technologies (mainly the Internet) as a means to reach customers.
New channels can also be direct, such as when we visit a hotel’s website to book a room.
Or they can be indirect, such as when we book a room using an online travel portal.
This channel type includes e-mail, such as when an offer reaches us encouraging us to make a purchase on promotional terms, text messages sent to our cell phone to tell us that we can buy goods at a store and defer payment by using a credit card, or interactive television, where we can buy pay-per-view sports events.
Rather than think of each channel individually, we should regard them all as part of an overall strategy that inter-relates all contact with our customers.
It is from this perspective that the concept of multichannel interaction should be viewed.
Multichannel customer strategy
As mentioned earlier, channel strategy overlaps with customer strategy, which lies at the base of our entire marketing strategy. We should design and dimension our channel model in accordance with the specific market, situation and target customer we are addressing, and even tailor our approach to the use that our customers make of each channel at each step of the buying process, such as in the following example:
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Table: example of segmented purchase process in a multichannel environment In addition to the channels available to us - which increase from day to day, and among which we must begin to choose - we need to bear in mind that our customers’ socializing and buying behavior also changes over time.
We should analyze all our channels using a DADOS matrix:
Table: Objectives of an optimal channel strategy. Source: Tatum
How to set in motion our multichannel strategy in three steps We should follow these steps:
• Analyzing and diagnosing:
» Research moments of truth for each channel and each customer type.
» Audit and diagnose in depth the strengths and weaknesses of the channels available to us in order to create plans for improvement;
identify the opportunities and threats exhibited by new channels we are not presently using.
» Ascertain which types of customer are using which channels most intensely, and which channels are used most at each given step of the buying process. This enables us to prioritize which channels to emphasize (including in budgetary terms) when managing our customers’ experience.
» Research the channel strategies deployed by our competitors and market leaders to identify the best practices.
• Design:
» Configure our combination of channels on the basis of the selec-tion of the most suitable with reference to our priorities and our overall strategy: markets/areas/segments; direct/indirect/offline/
online, etc.
» Design the right channel model for our various target audiences and segments: consumers, businesses, etc.
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» Identify priorities for locating points of sale: openings/closings/
transfers based on market potential and specified goals.
» Design customers’ flow of contacts with our company, and our contacts with customers, bearing in mind all possible channel combinations.
» Identify how best to improve experience at moments of truth in each of the channels in combination.
• Implementing
» In partnership with the various departments and areas involved, set in motion the elements specified at the design phase.
» Motivate, incentivize and enhance the loyalty of our customers in the use of the channels we are most interested in bolstering.
» Establish a single customer management methodology at various different levels using the tools available to the company (genera-lly CRM).
Conclusions
To find our way across the multichannel landscape, we need to keep an eye on the essentials. Our goal is to place customers at the center of our strategy and, based on their behavior, decide how we can give them a meaningful experience in each channel.
If companies really are aware of how important customers are, why is it so difficult to give them what they want using the channel most convenient to them?
The technology is out there. So is the knowledge of what customers want. So let’s work towards giving our customers “experiences to shout about.”
References
Rivero Duque, F., 2009. Nuevos tiempos: nuevos canales y oportunidades de venta. Harvard Deusto Marketing & Ventas. Ediciones Deusto