In the 4th of our Omni-channel Series of blogs we look at why your omni-channel experience might be failing. It’s likely that you will be receiving customer feedback through a growing number of different channels such as surveys, customer conversations from interactions, or insights from customer actions – or how Garter describe it: Direct, Indirect and Inferred customer feedback. But as you try and provide a customer experience that operates consistently and efficiently across all channels there are some common barriers that might be getting in the way of success.
No empowered CX leader
Only 30% of organisations have an executive on the board representing CX. We think this is very low as we believe not having a single owner has a high risk of creating channel silos.
For example, we quite often see web self-service being owned by somebody different to telephony and customer service, with different agendas and different objectives. And that can lead to some friction.
Paradoxically, 9 out of 10 organisations see customer experience as a competitive differentiator. But if only 30% have an executive responsible for CX on the board, how are they going to deliver great customer experience with a silo channel approach? There’s certainly a high risk of failure there.
Furthermore, probably less than half of the 30% may not be empowered CX leaders. In other words, even if there’s someone responsible for CX, actually having the capability to affect cross functional change is easier said than done – some boards are just more receptive to empowering individuals. Consider whether your CX leader is as empowered as they could be.
Channel failure driving interactions
We found that 40-70% of interactions were driven from some sort of failure in the originating channel. In particular, 25-40% was driven from web self-service. This means customers have tried a cheap service channel in the first instance and then ended up switching to a more expensive channel to get their query resolved…that’s a massive amount of unnecessary demand and cost.
Although many organisations acting on the drivers of failure demand have delivered operational savings of around 11-20% this is still way below expectations and there is plenty of opportunity to improve, particularly if up to 70% of contact is waste!
Channels are not connected
Only 8.4% of organisations have every channel connected. For the other 92%, this is inevitably going to lead to friction because they’re not aligned. That runs the risk of some customer dissatisfaction and so we’re seeing an increasing number of organisations who are actively working towards a truly connected channel strategy.