The Channel Mix

A view on touchpoints of people and organizations

People interact with organizations through channels. So channels have a major impact on those interactions and may strengthen or destroy relationships. Personal liking, choice, convenience, effectiveness, experience, proximity, are all reasons for people to like many different interaction channels when they deal with a particular organization. That is because each kind has its own attributes and features that are only adequate so tome particular sets of requirements and profiles. Technology opened wide the spectrum of new channels cutting distances and profoundly changing concepts we took for granted a few years ago such as presence, immediacy, exposure, mobility, autonomy, self-service, dematerialization.

Not so long ago, when people wanted to interact with any company or government agency, most probably that was done in person, in their offices. Correspondence, phone calls, faxes and telexes complemented the presential channel in a heavily manual way. New networks, new devices, new concepts and new behaviors forced the change of all that. First we’ve seen call centers pop-up all over the planet, then the Web exploded into our lives and smartphones took it everywhere, with cameras, GPS, social media and nice apps. Today’s channels are so diverse that it is difficult to put on the same stage, a department store and an ecommerce operation, the first with its buildings and departments, its staff and style, smells and sounds, and the latter with its portals made for promoting and selling their catalogs and with its support from contact centers with emails, text, IMs and VoIP calls. Two very different beasts but they can both sell the same products.

Organizations can access today a whole range of channels that span from the traditional high street stores, malls, service desks, nomad salespeople, call centers, IVRs, web portals, mobile apps, kiosks, ATMs and vending machines, toll systems, messaging systems (email, text, IM, fax), social media and many others. To make sense out of this and simplify our approach to channels, we must cluster them in to some categories: Some are Self-service oriented (a web portal is basically self-service, although human agents can participate in a customer process) others are attended by human agents (a call center tends to be attended by human agents, although some calls or parts of calls can be processed by IVR or other voice processing gear); some sit waiting for people to come in, the Inbound kind (stores are inbound, even if they grab customers from the street and sell them stuff) others make lists of clients and then reach them actively to sell, promote, inform, poll… this is the Outbound kind (telemarketing rings bells); some are clearly service channels, others are sales channels and others marketing channels.

The big problem with channels is to sort out the big matrixes that we obtain if we rank channels against client profiles, or against product and services (offer, catalog), or against function (some channels are totally inadequate to deal with simple functions such as payments, or complaints). Things can be even worse, as during a business process the appropriate channel can vary. Remember those situations when you had to go first to the shop to enroll or get some gear and then all your relationship was done online.

Let’s identify the primary high level functions that happen in a channel, independently of the media used by the channel for the interaction between people and the organization (physical store/office, telephony, web, messaging, and others).

When you get, for instance, in a local store or in the passport issuing agency, interaction starts immediately as you enter, with all the flashed information you get from them: scenery, layout, visual impact, billboards, sounds, screens, smell, lights, textures, colors, uniforms. This is the “Welcome” phase that all channels (physical or online, self-service or human attended) go through. Then you may find the reception desk and get directions to the department you want. In this “Routing” phase, sometimes other activities may happen, such as check-in and identity verification, subject identification (to decide where should you go), queueing and contention (to direct you to specialized service or to optimize capacity and flow), information preparation (to make sure that the correct info is there when you get to attended). If in this phase you find out that you ran out of patience to wait in the queue, you can go instead to the self-service booth and help yourself, if that is ok for you. But most people prefer to be attended by a human. So, after Routing we go to the store’s counter or to the service desk. This is the “Interaction” phase all channels are made for, that is, when the traditional sales, services and marketing business processes get into play and the customer or citizen is served: the store sells you and promotes their products and the passport agency issues and delivers your passport and informs you of the new security features. Interaction may include other activities, as well, such as payments, enrolment, digitalization, document issuance, complaints, and many others. Interactions, campaigns, client knowledge and trust are the key ingredients for the “Relation” processes, sometimes neglected in some channels but fundamental to all organizations.

Channel flow 

So the panorama of having the correct mix of channels, with the correct bandwidth and functionality can be daunting. And experience has shown that, sooner than later, multiple channels need to be integrated either to improve the client experience (isn’t it nice to start something at the store and be able to finish it online without having to start all over again? Let’s call this “Interaction Integration”) or to improve the consistency and comprehensive view of the client by the organization, independently of the channel used (remember, this is a people centric approach and organizations need to know their clients. I call this “Relationship Integration”). So, channels can be integrated upstream, at the Relational level, where CRM platforms play the key role of aggregating, for each client, its interactions done in different channels triggering the appropriate transactions and business processes in the organization’s core platforms and keeping an end-to-end registry. When channels are integrated downstream, at the Interaction level, a universal queue of client interaction is processed and routed to the correct agent (human or automated) with the correct context (client, process, activity, status). This is the approach followed by some contact centers and other business process management platforms and can coexist with the upstream relational integration.

Channels deal with lots of supporting information: marketing information, catalog information, product and service description, pricing, procedures, conditions and rules, service levels, contracts, FAQs, support information, etc. Lots of content that need to be managed and maintained updated and synchronous among all channels. This is one of the critical failure causes for many multichannel approaches: what you read in the store does not match what is on the portal and what the call center agent is spelling… Business content is critical and demands to be addressed by a serious editorial process, typically performed by the marketing department, with the content management tools and processes on board.

Measuring and analyzing all key activities in a channel is fundamental to improve quality, performance and efficiency in any channel used by the organization. Waiting time, resolution time, perceived quality, perceived client experience, cost per interaction, and many other indicators are collected all the time and compared to benchmarks. This is where most of wrong doings are done: organizations compare themselves with other organizations and differentiation slowly dilutes. The main reason for that lays on the fact that all that “Interaction Measure” needs to be cross with “Relational Measurement”. The latter captures all the key indicators of the relational processes (what’s the nature and strength of the relationship, its key attributes, its frequencies and intensities, the people and profiles involved), which is a much more difficult analytic exercise that implies a great knowledge of the business model involved. When not done well, channel governance is only tied to capacity planning and interaction efficiency… and client relationship is simply ignored.