Stoffer's Soapbox

The Multichannel Customer Experience (Part 2)

If for-profit education companies and other companies focused on outbound consultative sales are going to pay more than lip service to interacting with potential customers via multiple channels, we'll first need to get our 3rd party lead vendors on board. For online education companies, insurers and financial services companies a good number (if not majority) of leads come from 3rd party online lead vendors like Quinstreet, LowerMyBills and Advertising.com.  There are several ways to generate these Internet leads but a typical process might be as follows: 

1. Lead vendor buys a keyword, say "online debt consolidation" and drives customers to a portal like lowermybills.com
2. Customer has to enter a lot of personal information including email and phone number
3. Lead vendor delivers leads to its client companies and receives a price per lead

This process only captures a fraction of potential customers. What if I am someone who doesn't want to give my personal information to a stranger? What if I don't want to get "spam" calls and emails? What if I want to use another channel - chat; eStara (where I enter my phone number to receive an automated call); SMS or send an email. You just can't do it now with many vendors (see LowerMyBills screenshot below).

Lead vendors now charge companies like AllState or UOPX on cost per lead generated through the type of lead form pictured below - but this has to change and become cost per action, depending on the action taken. For example, cost per traditional lead form, cost per chat, cost per eStara, cost per SMS. The traditional lead form is easy to track but it's harder to quantify these added channels. However, ultimately you could measure conversion rate off any of them and work backward to get to pricing. This is increasingly important as Generation Y becomes  the newest wave of consumers. As I wrote in my blog post Gen Y and the Changing Contact Center,  "As Gen-Y (12-29 year olds) becomes the next generation of consumers, these industries' strategies will need to change. Gen-Y uses the full gamut of multimedia tools to communicate - they will demand their product information via live chat, company/customer blogs, SMS, podcasts and social networking sites like MySpace. They do not want to fill out a form and wait for a call - Gen-Y wants many ways to access information and companies can no longer approach the customer acquisition process on their own terms."

The Multi-Channel Customer Experience

There was an interesting post from the eStara blog topically about finding the best contact center technology. However, I found eStara's emphasis to be spot on: "Organizations need to think beyond whether or not customers are having a good call center experience, or a good Web site experience, and worry about whether customers are having a good brand experience. Nothing is more frustrating to a customer than investing time and effort online and then having to transition to a phone call and “start all over again.” The best contact center technologies are those that provide a seamless cross-channel experience and offer a continuity of experience for the customer."

In the for-profit education industry, the emphasis has shifted toward reaching the potential student when they want, where they want and through whichever channel they want. The next step is, as eStara states above, putting the systems in place to give emloyees a single view of the customer. That way, employees can view a history of every contact a student or potential student has had with the school, can avoid having to recollect information and can work to optimize the customer experience each and every time.

2020 Graduation Speech: Predicting How Technology May Evolve

People with a vision for the future are not limited to tech company executives and venture capitalists. Fortunately, the web enables visionaries from many walks of life to share their vision with the world. One of these visionaries is Karl Fisch, who works as head of IT for a high school in the Denver suburbs. Fisch has an award winning blog, titled The Fischbowl, and has a number of multimedia presentations - my favorite of which is 2020 Vision - which is a mock high school graduation speech from the year 2020. Hope everyone enjoys!

Future of online advertising

Check out this incredible research report from PiperJaffray on the future of online advertising. Great that they would share this 400+ page book with the general public.

I'm only 10% of the way through, but what is most interesting to me is how, for the top 100 sites on the web, users spent 31% of their minutes online on user-driven sites such as YouTube and MySpace in Oct. 2006. This was up from only 3% in April 2005.

Companies are just beginning to adapt to this user-generated world - and I will be curious to continue to look at how trailblazing companies use the trend toward user-generated content to enahance their branding and lead generation efforts.