The success of your business largely depends on customer satisfaction. So it’s in your best interest to always give your customers the right answers to their questions and to guide them to the most useful, helpful and easy-to-implement solutions. Omnichannel Service Design isn’t as simple as it sounds. Although it is tempting to focus on potential cost savings, a business will benefit more in the long term by building the best customer experience across all channels and touchpoints. That requires courage and vision, a long-term perspective, a holistic approach and a lot of internal collaboration.
Micro customer journeys
To design, measure and analyse your services from the customer’s perspective, it’s important to map their touchpoints with your business. This is best achieved by dividing the customer’s journey into micro journeys. From experience, I know that in almost every interaction there is room for improvement and an opportunity to gain valuable insights.
Omnichannel Service Design has two layers of interaction. The first is when the customer actively contacts your organization via your call centre, online chat, in your high street store, etc and responding optimally. The second, more proactive approach, involves identifying patterns, interactions and frictions in micro journeys and building a better experience for all.
For example, if customers check the price of their subscription or views a rate card on your online customer portal, there’s a good chance they’re considering switching to another supplier. In this situation, there is an opportunity to proactively approach the customer with a positive message, such as offering to check whether their current package still meets their expectations or showing them a better solution within your range of products related to what they have.
Consistent approach
Ideally, Omnichannel Service Design is seamlessly integrated into a Unified Commerce approach. All too often, companies set up a new digital service channel that’s too far removed from their existing call centre and physical contact points. This inevitably results in inconsistency. It’s important to adopt the same unambiguous approach across the board. For example, the staff working on your online chat should not recommend a different product or solution than the staff in your stores. Rather than consider digital as just another channel for customers to engage with your brand, digital capabilities should become central to the customer experience and core to all employees.
Measurement framework
“To measure is to know,” goes the old adage. To facilitate the creation of a consistent customer experience and achieve organizational alignment it’s important to set up a measurement framework that supports omnichannel collaboration. Omnichannel journey metrics support the entire organisation by making it possible to evaluate performance from a customer perspective rather than a channel management perspective. This incentivises teams to collaborate and focus on the customer experience.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) really demonstrates its value within the framework of Omnichannel Service Design. What’s more, it’s often an important condition for organizing service thinking efficiently. Nevertheless, companies sometimes still wrongly view NPS measurement and problem solving as a cost centre. Yes, it will cost you money to implement and yes, the follow-up actions will also require investment. But if you can approach the customer efficiently and thus avoid churn, it quickly becomes a profitable operation.
Overarching KPI’s
KPIs should not be linked purely to financial performance or measured strictly by channel. Reducing the number of customer service telephone lines by 30–40% might be a great cost-saving measure, but is it worth losing customers because they find your business less accessible? It is equally pointless to divert customers from your call centre to digital channels, just to achieve departmental KP’s.
The data dimension of Omnichannel Service Design
As stated earlier, knowledge of your customer is crucial to making Omnichannel Service Design successful. Analyzing general trends is a step in the right direction and allows you to evaluate omnichannel processes and adjust them for the future. To address the customer in a targeted way, real-time insights into individual interactions are needed. If a customer interacts with any touchpoint which indicates dissatisfaction or a search for alternatives, you need to be able to respond immediately. The use of real-time data and propensity scoring, within the limits of GDPR, can really make a difference.
In addition, your ICT architecture must be geared toward seamless customer interactions. Or in order to assist your customers in the best possible way, you should also get the best out of your organization.
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