Get the Balance Right
However, to put the focus solely on the web at the expense of all other channels – often the missing parts of MCC plans – is to run the risk of creating a new environment which suits the business but forgets one thing, who are the users and what is it they want to achieve? If the end customer normally transacts via telephone or is a user of SMS then important avenues are being dismissed which could in their own way offer a rounded and capable solution. So certainly focus on the attributes and capabilities of the web channel, the look and feel of the application you plan to launch but please, please, bear in mind the impacts on other established channels already in use by your customers, and consider carefully the implications of the new channel capabilities you are launching.
For example, often the very predictions of customers ‘switching’ channels without proper communication and incentives fall woefully short of their promise. If no equivalent planning has been made on how to align the two channels, then what inspired thinking will bridge the gap between expectation and reality? In such cases even the fundamentals can be ignored. How will a customer be handled if, in receiving a lack of sufficient clarity during a transaction, they revert back to the voice channel? How will their online history be presented to the agents in the call centre when they do call in? Will those same agents answering the call have any ability to impact on the process? And if not, could that status check be handled better by an automated announcement or better still a proactive contact via outbound dial or SMS? As a rule of thumb it is always better to provide the information a customer seeks proactively then to suffer the higher cost of an inbound voice contact and resulting customer frustration.
These are the issues which must be addressed to get the balance right, and prevent any new MCC initiative falling at the first hurdle. In this way new designs and applications can be more readily integrated into the existing channel hierarchy and prevent the feature rich deployment which, despite showing promise in its inception, proves a costly failure for an organisation who forgot it was the customer themselves they were building it for.
Over the coming months I hope to be able to offer some battle scars and insights and add to the fascinating content already on this blog.
