Customer Service: Omnichannel Tech Isn’t a Quick Solution

by varsha04:500 Comments

Companies often see choice as a virtue. Giving customers more options – managers and marketing departments might reason – means more happy customers.

But choice isn’t always a good thing. In B2B sales, customers now often feel overwhelmed by the myriad decisions they have to make before they get round to actually purchasing something on behalf of their company. And this uncertainty can be just as powerful when it comes to customer service too. Customer service teams have felt pressure to add more and more channels for contacting a company in recent years and, while this has led to customers having more options, the proliferation of channels has created new problems.

In this “multichannel” world, customers often complain that customer service reps don’t know what they’ve done before, that they’re more uncertain about resolving whatever issue they are contacting the company about, and that they constantly have to repeat themselves (see chart 1).

Nearly half of customers (48%), in fact, report having to repeat information in their last customer service interaction while 38% reported having to switch channels to resolve their request, according to CEB data. This markedly increases the overall effort that customers have to put into dealing with a company, and is – as a result – highly likely to make them less loyal.

Omnichannel Technology

Some customer service teams have come to see the answer to all this effort is an investment in “omnichannel” technology and its promise of integrating data across channels (see chart 1).

They imagine customers being able to switch from social media to phone or from e-mail to web chat while still speaking to the same agent, or having the new agent automatically know about prior steps the customer took. Sales reps at firms offering this omnichannel tech like put forward a number of benefits, including:

  1. That the customer feels well-informed.
  2. That customer information is saved to avoid anyone repeating themselves.
  3. That the customer feels like the company knows them well.
  4. That the customer can contact the same agent as the last time.
  5. That the company informs customer about each step taken.
  6. That the company alerts the customer about the status of the issue they are trying to resolve.

The multichannel and omnichannel approach

Chart 1: The multichannel and omnichannel approach  Source: CEB analysis

Don’t Believe the Hype

While the benefits of all this omnichannel tech promised by vendors can certainly sound appealing, they don’t provide the whole story. For one, omnichannel tech might be seen as a heavy investment by many companies. While it can cost anywhere between $10 million and $80 million, there’s no certainty about the return on investment of all that money.

All this new hardware also requires a heavy time investment from a lot of employees. Installing the system, training staff on it, ensuring cross-functional alignment, and other requirements take at least two to three years.

But this doesn’t mean that companies should necessarily abandon omnichannel altogether. Far from it, in fact – as long as customer service teams see the investment as a long-term process. They should begin the process by ascertaining which omnichannel benefits matter most to customers to see if there are any steps that can be taken in the short-term.

And there are two benefits of omnichannel that do not require heavy financial or time investments to implement. By being transparent (keeping customers well-informed about the resolution process, including the time required to resolve) and providing good communication (alerting customers about updates and any future problems), companies can avoid a costly investment while having a bigger impact on customer effort than any of the other benefits conferred by omnichannel.



0 Comments