Creating a Seamless Multichannel Experience for Consumers

A Conversation with John Ragsdale, Vice President of Research,SSPA

Increasingly, customer-centric organizations are realizing that creating a seamless multichannel experience for consumers is key to generating sales and increasing customer loyalty.

eStara recently spoke with John Ragsdale, Vice President of Research at the Service & Support Professionals Association and former senior analyst at Forrester Research, to get his perspective and learn best practices on implementing self-service, click to chat and click to call tools. Mr. Ragsdale's current research focus is on CRM and eService, including multi-channel service, email response, web collaboration, knowledgebases, self-service, quality monitoring, offer management, and other ancillary areas.

eStara: In your previous research with Forrester Research, you’ve noted that “While companies are investing more in overall Web site design and usability to better establish their online brand identity, the section of the Web site that is devoted to customer self-service may be stuck in a time warp with clunky tools that ultimately don't solve problems very well.” What do you feel are some of the major problems with current self-service offerings?

JR: This is a very hot topic at the SSPA as well. More companies are using service as a differentiator, and the Web self-service site is a very public indicator of how dedicated a company is to delivering excellent service. There are two main categories of issues with many self-service sites: functional breadth/depth and overall look and feel.

On the functional breadth and depth side, many companies have older versions of self-service with poor searching capabilities, and often limited avenues to finding the right answer instead of multiple search and diagnostic approaches to fit the needs of the largest possible audience. Customers are offered a list of FAQs, which never fit their current problem, and searching for a solution spits back a laundry list of unrelated knowledgebase content, and sometimes even text matching entries from company press releases and product catalogs—none of which help the customer. This sort of poor experience just trains customers to call the tech support line for all future problems.

I think the one of biggest challenges to differentiating with self-service comes from using hosted self-service software which doesn’t allow UI customization so your self-service site looks exactly like every other company using the same hosted vendor—big mistake. If the self-service site has a completely different look and feel to the rest of the corporate website, it sends a message that service is not a core focus for the company, and service options are perceived as an afterthought.

eStara: How can solutions like Click to Chat and Click to Call help resolve some of these issues?

JR: As I just outlined in some SSPA research, click to call or click to chat enables a seamless transition from unassisted to assisted service. Not only does it give online customers an ‘out’ if they are struggling, but using rules you can proactively prompt both customers shopping at an online site (“You appear to be stuck deciding on a printer, would you like to speak with an agent?”) and those performing web self-service (“You appear to be struggling to find the right answer in our online knowledgebase, would you like to speak with a technical support agent?”), providing an excellent customer experience. This is a great way of providing a means of escalation to the customer while keeping them in their preferred channel: the web.

eStara: I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of “right channeling.” What are some situations where you feel customers would be better served by Click to Call versus Chat or self-service tools?

JR: Right channeling is about serving each customer using the most appropriate and cost effective channel. In this sense, ‘appropriate’ usually means making sure your most valued customers receive priority treatment—routed to a senior tech, pushed to the front of a call queue, etc. When your customers are online, however, they are all using the same set of self-service tools, but you can certainly present the more valuable customers with a click to call option, and/or give them a proactive prompt for live assistance. While no company wants to talk about their strategy for dealing with lower value customers, obviously encouraging them to perform self-service before making assisted service available makes sense, and perhaps their path to assisted service is by email or chat, not click to call.

eStara: Do you feel that organizations are doing enough to share information across channels?

JR: I’m not going to say that spending more money will solve the multi-channel/omni-channel issue, but at least companies should spend their money more wisely. It frustrates me when I speak with companies shopping for technology for a single customer channel, which will have little or no integration to other channels: different knowledgebases, different customer records, different agents with different training programs. Customers don’t view a company as segmented into channels; they expect the identical service experience whether by phone, email, chat, Web self-service, etc. And with surveys showing more customers making use of more channels, we have a new era of what I call ‘channel agnostic’ customers, who make use of every channel and notice when you don’t treat all interactions the same.

I know there are roadblocks to success here. One catalog retailer told me their phone agents can see all email and Web interactions, but email agents can’t see phone or online interactions because it would mean paying for a $3,000 CRM license for each of email agent to access the customer “360 degree view.” Offering consistent service across channels should be a goal for all companies, and the bottom line recommendation is: as you replace older single channel products, begin migrating to a single vendor offering a multi-channel platform. Through internal development and strategic acquisitions, the suite vendors offer the same level of functionality as the point players, so buying ‘best of breed’ no longer means buying one-off products and manually integrating them all.

eStara: What are some of the underlying business issues that companies should consider before investing in sales and support technology, like Click to Call and Click to Chat?

JR: The number one issue, actually the only issue I’ve heard discussed by members repeatedly, is that offering immediate access to an agent via the Web can play hell with staffing. Online shopping and self-service volume doesn’t necessarily adhere to contact center/tech support historical volume peaks and valleys, and companies find offering click to call/chat can dramatically affect service levels. I think it is critical that these options have granular enough controls that they can be enabled/disabled as needed, and only offered to select customers (premiere or high value) if necessary. This puts another ‘volume’ knob in the hands of contact center management to slow the flow during busy times, and to fill in the gap during lulls.