The why and how of achieving truly unified and multi channel communication

Everyone is talking about being able to communicate with your customers in an omni or multi-channel world. A lot of you are probably doing multi-channel already (Albeit in a less than efficient manner). All this has come about due to the truly multi-channel world that we live in. The evolution from in-person face to face then to voice contact via phone calls, to email, to web, to web chat, to social media, to SMS and other messaging platforms. Add to this the customers evolution who now not only expects to be able to reach out to you via the most convenient channel, but also then expects that you and your agent knows exactly who they are and deliver customized and tailored service as a base standard of service.

The days of of the call center are gone and we are now looking at the contact center. This contact center must be able to hold conversations (A key theme) across channels, and across the customers life cycle.

This series of blogs is going to explore the promised land of why this is necessary and how you can go about achieving this. But before ping into how, it is first important to establish the why.

Why?

Customers are spoiled for choice. Doesn’t matter how big or small you are. Whether you’re a recognized or brand or not. There are enough choices available to your existing or potential customer. In a study done by a company 94% of customers are willing to switch if they don’t get good customer service and 84% feel that good customer service means that they should be able to reach you in any channel they feel is most comfortable to them.

But you don’t need studies to tell you this. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that shows that brands can be created and destroyed by customers on social media. They like they say good things about you, they don’t they say bad things. You need to be able to respond to them on social media, and more importantly before they get to the point of commenting on social media (unless it’s good things of course).

Let’s look at the typical customer journey from cradle to grave. Awareness….So much of it is out of your control, but what is under your control, you have a …what is very strongly under your control is their interactions at the most critical points, becoming a customer, and staying a customer. And these points are controlled directly with human interactions that people in your company have with them. Customer Journey, Customer Success, Service.

Here’s what typically happens in those scenarios. Your marketing team is using several different marketing tools to reach out to your customers. Each marketing tool is good for 1 channel. Email blasts from mail chimp, social media from hubspot, XYZ for web tracking. If you’re lucky and have spent a lot of time, somehow when one of these customers responds to you, you’ve captured it in your CRM…and trust me that requires a lot of work to get right because of the coordination between your web team, your sales team, the crm people, the integrators and 15 other people. That’s not the end. Now that someone has managed to reach you, your qualification or sales team has to reach out to them. They reach out by sending a personal email, or maybe a drip marketing system you’ve got in place or some plugin you’ve added to your CRM, creating yet another break in the traceability of your marketing efforts. Now they make a call, and MANUALLY are supposed to enter details into your CRM or lead tracking system. As managers we know how painful that is to sales people and how quickly all you’re doing is chasing up on people not following process that you’ve spent so much time defining. Let’s fast forward and hope that the prospect has converted to a customer, and now is requesting support from some you. Your ticketing system and thus agents have no idea what the original customer success parameter was for this customer. Customer has to spend all the time in explaining what they want and how they want it. To top it all off….let’s say that you’ve reached the promised land of getting visibility from cradle to date or grave for a customer and all your touch points. You’ve now created a system that is extremely hard to manage, requires a lot of thought for any changes and is extremely brittle, so when you’re facing a forced upgrade from your phone system vendor a 5 person team and countless hours have to be dedicated to make that change happen.

You’re focusing on spending time on building systems and not on customers.

Tools should not be a hindrance to great customer service. Tools should not be a hindrance to managers and to agents. You can have the best intentioned managers and agents with great training, but if you give them a hammer instead of a drill they’re not going to be successful in making your customer and you successful.

We have studied this problem thoroughly for many years and have taken the view that your traditional CRM is a hammer. Because it was designed when communications were not as varied and integrating even voice was extremely difficult and expensive. CRM’s have a data first approach and suffer from getting people to enter data from communications that are the actual key to making sales and support interactions successful. Aavaz has taken a Communication first approach. With this approach the data is automatically captured as all communications are happening through the CRM and thus data is being captured by default. Now your people are adding flesh to the communications data, and not the meta data like when it happened, what was the outcome. In fact because that is being captured automatically, your agents are now compelled into adding (efficiently) the colour that is really helping the customer and your business.

DIAGRAM

We said let’s do a true tool and in that communications first approach we discovered that it was all about your conversation with your customers that makes things work. Conversations that are great in todays world require a multi-channel approach with the ability to create a context for the various conversations that you have with your customers over time. We know that contact with your customers is where the rubber meets the road. Good contact works, let’s not be afraid of it, let’s encourage it from our customers.

This series describes our journey to our product that is working for us. I know we’re supposed to write this in a neutral way, but I can’t be neutral on what we’ve built and am eager to share the problems, the insights and the solution that we’ve come up with. The solution truly gives me goose bumps.

This series will give you insights into:

* Our journey, and how we ate our own dog food

* Truly integrated marketing, digital and traditional

* Sales as the key pivot point in setting up your customers success

* Support that makes customers happy and coming back for more (Upselling, remarketing)

* And The Unified Difference – It doesn’t work if it’s not unified