Once operationalised, it becomes the way in which brands track the evolving behaviours of their five generations of customers (or whatever customer personas make most sense), manage the quality of their service journeys and enable a contact mix that supports the spectrum of customer behaviour. Here are some practical tips and design principles to help get value from using this way of planning.
Generational preferences
The goal here is to maintain an up-to-date picture of your customers’ evolving communication preferences. This is used to inform your contact mix. In practice, this can be achieved by tapping into in-house Voice of Customer (VoC) capability combined with public domain research on national communication trends.
Use VoC to ask customers for their interaction preferences and capture them in CRM so they can be referenced at the initial point of contact. It is even better to ask for their channel choice in relation to actual service interactions e.g. paying a bill, making a complaint, seeking advice, receiving updates, since they will vary.
Public domain data can be sourced from government sources such as OFCOM in the UK which publishes their annual review of communication behaviour. They analyse by age and socio-demographic and show trends over time. Sometimes research firms, vendors or agencies will publish their own reports which can be valuable supplements to help build a picture of key behaviours and trends. Find your own local versions.
Whatever you end up using as input, you should aim to summarise it as a set of customer personas which describe generational preferences for engaging with you whether service-specific or more general. Here are a couple of summarised personas for guidance.
Progressives
Expect personalised self-service/proactive with escalation to live assistance as needed. Willing to trade personal data in return. Primary device is smartphone. Preferred channel is messaging. No email.
Conservatives
Prefers to sort issues out with human assistance. Either voice or text is OK. Email still acceptable. Appreciates relevant proactive communication. Personalised service is optional but wants control over how data is used.
Customer Journeys
Journey mapping is now more common. The most advanced contact centre cultures will be using localised versions to guide their quality assurance programmes and VoC. Visually rich maps provide an excellent opportunity to explore functional and emotive needs. As mentioned earlier, this helps identify when live assistance is most likely to be expected.
Advanced users of the omni-channel framework will be able to recognise and respond to the unique demands of separate service journeys. For instance, it is not difficult to imagine the differences between on-boarding, progress checking and pursuing a complaint in terms of the mix of functional and emotive expectations. As with generational preferences, there will be some evolution over time in terms of accepted resolution channels. These will need to be tracked and responded to.
Another benefit of journey mapping is that habitual inside-out views of organisational processes are refreshed through the lens of what matters to the customer. It is common to discover that customers are often subjected to high effort as part of ‘getting what they came for’.
Hopefully these journeys are recognised as such and redesigned to become simple and low effort. However, some will remain on the digital transformation ‘to-do’ list. These need to be recognised as complex and potentially emotive for customers. This is an important consideration in the light of what can be then shortlisted for self-service. As a design principle, only attempt to hand over simple, low effort tasks to customers as self-service. Otherwise, expect a high degree of escalation din response to the difficulties encountered.
Contact Options
Understanding journeys and preferences sets the scene for offering the appropriate contact mix. This spans modalities (video-voice-text) and channels (live assistance-self-service-proactive service).
Modern contact centre infrastructure knits these together with unified queuing and single desktop which orchestrates customer interactions together with any required workflow and data. The net result for both customer and advisor should be an informed, low effort conversation which enables the advisor to concentrate on delivering the customer’s functional and emotive expectations.
The need for this functionality shows up at several key points in journeys. Nailing them is the hallmark of a competent contact strategy.
- Context and intent are maintained across time, modalities, and channels. This means that a customer only needs to explain once (intent) which together with context (anything relevant from their CRM record), is then used for triaging, routing and personalising the engagement until their need is fulfilled. Typical points of failure are multiple requests for ID&V (identification and verification) and a customer experience of needing to ‘start from zero’ whenever a new advisor becomes involved.
- The same capability is required in escalation. Traditionally, the direction of travel flows from self-service or proactive messaging into a request for live assistance. In these instances, make sure interaction history arrives on the advisor desktop at the same time the customer request is posted into their inbox as a prioritised queue.
- In the future, escalation is likely to become a more fluid two-way exchange as virtual assistance grows in popularity and capability. Customers will get used to ongoing teamwork between human and virtual assistants based on ‘best fit’. This interplay will be made available across the whole customer lifecycle (marketing-sales-service). This is yet to be commonplace but is a logical extension of today’s capabilities.
- The need for consistency also extends to service level agreement (speed of response) as a customer moves across modalities. Why should they expect to wait three times as long for your response based on the channel they have used?
- Likewise, mystery shopper research shows that it remains common for customers to receive different advice based on their chosen channel. Inconsistent knowledge management will only become more pronounced as more channels come on stream. As a matter of principle, channels multiply and seldom die. That’s because they are customer chosen.
The other hallmark of an effective contact strategy is optimised use of modalities and channels. When this is achieved, customers should enjoy an improved experience which they stick with. The brand then benefits from both reduced service costs and the positive commercial behaviours that flow from high NPS (net promoter score) - or equivalent customer metric. Research from Forrester and the Bruce Temkin Group consistently show that much of that positive customer score is based on providing them with the most direct path to ‘getting what they came for’. Put another way, is live assistance being used optimally? Remember that from the customer’s point of view, the price of access to human assistance is a queue. This absorbs precious time. Equally some modalities absorb full attention (phone) while other channels such as messaging offer asynchronous interaction. Which is the most worthwhile investment? Let customers decide. From a service design perspective, the principles we talked about are a solid way of estimating demand for each interaction option.
In Conclusion
Brands cannot avoid their customers’ expectation for choice in how they engage. Brands can however turn it to their advantage by shrinking use of live assistance in favour of lower cost self-service and proactive service. The current rise in AI powered solutions provides strong assurance that these new options will only grow in popularity. This will progressively free up advisors to be used correctly for the interactions that really matter.
However, this requires deep, up-to-date insight into what your customers expect, ideally within the context of each distinct journey. Some of those expectations will be common across generations. Some unique.
Technology enables you to support this game plan. Solutions that are designed to work as a single ecosystem become essential. Investing in the right generation of capability therefore matters. Following the advice in this whitepaper provides a solid foundation for becoming a successful omni-channel brand.
We wish you every success in rising to that challenge.
