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.

Comments

[Paul Brown]

Sales Managers have a wide variety of responsibilities in today's competitive landscape that they are faced with. This certainly makes finding the time for sales management and sales planning a challenge. In sales management we know the importance of executing sales with a sales plan. To ensure the passing of this skill to sales reps, we need to teach them to create a successful sales plan and execution strategy. Since time is limited, using sales templates and tools will help to maximize the interaction with Sales Reps to get the most measurable performance gains for the time spent.

[Paul Blunden]

We (Foviance) just conducted some multi-channel research taking a typical user journey from online to call centre. We ran the research first in January 08 with 25 retailers and ran it again last week for Travel businesses. The similarities are already apparent - even though the final analysis is not complete. Organisations simply do not think of the brand experience or user experience holistically. One day they will pay for these mistakes.