In recent years, technology has rapidly changed how we interact with businesses. Food delivery services are a great example of this: delivery orders have gone from needing a phone call, to needing you to click some icons on a screen, to needing nothing more than sending an emoji. The efficiency gains are obvious and the demand is there, so more and more businesses are embracing an omni-channel approach; Farid Jarrar, CIO for contact centre outsourcing company Stellar, believes it’s now a “pre-requisite”.
However, just because consumers are adopting a certain technology doesn’t mean that it’s doing good things for them. A report by Shar VanBoskirk at Forrester indicates that digital disruption – the increase in choices being offered to consumers – has added a lot of stress to the decision-making process and made the economic assumption of the rational consumer more perilous than ever; Multitasking is unavoidable in our omni-channel reality — but we aren’t wired for it.”. It’s the paradox of the omni-channel approach: consumers are better equipped to make the ideal choice than ever before, but at the same time they’re less rational than they’ve ever been.
“Customers seek choice, interacting with their preferred organisation using their preferred channel at their preferred time.”
Farid Jarrar, CIO, Stellar
Shar suggests transitioning from one-to-one to one-to-moment marketing: beyond personalising the service a customer receives, businesses should look to orient their marketing efforts around demonstrating your brand’s values at critical points in the customer relationship & decision-making processes. There are two high-level ways of going about this:
Market to your customers at key decision points. Contemporary marketing solutions like Salesforce Marketing Cloud have the ability to create much richer campaigns than previous software packages, allowing you to individually tailor campaigns based on user responses and changes to customer data in business systems. If the most important customer moments identified during the sales process are moments that have corollaries on your CRM platform, then it becomes a much easier proposition to put your brand in front of them when it matters most. Additionally, features like Random Split allow you to introduce an element of randomness to peoples’ journeys; this helps to create the sense of surprise and discovery crucial to moments that matter.
Direct customers towards the channels that best showcase your brand’s identity. A lot of key moments for customers take place when interacting with the business itself, which means that the interaction channel used is going to lay the foundation for how your brand is perceived. This can vary from business to business, however if you’re concerned with lifetime customer value then building a strong relationship through rich interactions becomes very important. Not every industry should model their customer interaction model off what works for food delivery; if your products involve a lot of deliberation then interacting with the customer while they’re deliberating makes a lot of sense.
Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh believes "the telephone is one of the best branding devices out there” because you’re not competing with other devices and services for attention while you’re talking to each other; you get your customer’s undivided attention for the entire call. If you’re a business whose presence is largely online, telephone conversations are the highest quality channel you have in terms of creating lifelong fans of your brand. Zappos certainly believe this; they prominently display their 24/7 customer service number at the top of every webpage.
Contact centre technology has come along in leaps & bounds in recent years, with cloud-based operation and CRM integration fast becoming expected features. The ability to obtain customer data from CRM systems like Salesforce opens up new ways to offer customers great brand experiences. Customers can be preferentially routed to their Salesforce record owner without needing to navigate an IVR, making the process of calling your business identical to that of calling a friend and opening the door to establishing long-lasting, valuable relationships between employees & customers. Post-call surveys allow the contact centre agent to notify the customer about the survey ahead of time, and means that only those who wish to make their voice heard need to listen to it. Survey responses can be made to create cases in Service Cloud, so poor surveys can have SLAs and response measures applied to them automatically.
If the sea of possibilities an omni-channel world provides for consumers is making them less rational, and consumers are just people, and businesses are just groups of people, then maybe in their rush to embrace any & all communication pathways laid out in front of them businesses aren’t acting perfectly rationally either. Focusing on the channels that best convey your comparative advantage in the market will allow you to put your best foot forward when trying to create meaningful moments with consumers.
