The OmniChannel Evolution and What the Future Holds
How to take best advantage of new technology in your business.
Most of us still remember when customer service mostly happened by telephone or in in-house service stations. As consumers, the demise of that era is celebrated.
Today we have a wide range of communication options to interact with businesses: WhatsApp, email, Facebook, and yes, even the telephone. It has never been easier to get in touch with a service professional. This is great news for the consumer.
But for companies, things don’t look quite the same. A few decades ago, providing customer service was straightforward. The choices were telephone based customer service hubs and maybe an in-house service center. But then, technology happened. The internet, smartphones, instant chat applications, social media channels – all these methods of communication put power into the hands of the consumer. Companies simply did not have the tools to interact with clients on all these channels and were not able to take advantage of them. However, an unsatisfied customer could create long-living negative publicity for a company with a single click. Companies understood that they needed to make a shift, and fast.
The distant past: multi-channel. Many channels, a lot of work.
Companies began to make themselves present on all these new digital channels. But the number of channels on which clients could reach service providers began to grow before there was an infrastructure for companies to manage these channels. This was the beginning of the multi-channel era: many channels and a lot of work. A mail query? It must be read in the mail application. Telephone call? Answered by a service agent. Each type of communication merited its own infrastructure, such that there were unique infrastructures for faxes, letters and more. And to add to this mess: sales channels and service channels were similarly separated.
This, of course, created a great deal of difficulty for organizations, especially larger ones. Yet, the struggle of managing multi-channel interactions was transparent to consumers, who, as far as they were concerned, were speaking to the representatives of one and the same company. They could not understand why different queries received different results, and they were left less than enamored with these interactions – and the companies.
The beginning of a revolution: cross-channel. Collaboration across channels.
In tackling this problem, information-sharing platforms were implemented. A client spoke to the representative in a store? That information would be accessible to a telephone representative who communicates with this same client a week later. This was the beginning of a real technological revolution that enabled a focus on the client and on his or her experience.
While cross-channel meant that the company could begin to compile the story of a customer’s journey, the plethora of tools was still unwieldy for the service provider to manage. Information was shared, but some of the story still got lost. There was no overall “brain” managing the entire database of information from one location. And without a complete story, it is difficult to provide the customer with an optimum experience.
Putting the customer at the center: Omni channel. Many channels - one story.
Today we’ve arrived at the omni channel era. Organizations that have already upgraded to omni channel can see every customer request in one place, and can interact with clients in a unified way, under the auspices of one, unified ‘brain’. A client spoke to you by chat? You can ask him to send a picture by WhatsApp – and the service agent will manage all of this from one interface. Facebook talkback? That can also be managed as part of the same request, if relevant.
In the omni channel era, the platform is less important than the maintenance of the client story. And the best part is that the tools built to service omni channel take for granted that new communication tools will be born every year; therefore infrastructure needs to be flexible enough to provide service every place a client may be.
The future is the real story: Channeless - identical service everywhere.
If clients don’t differentiate between different channels on which they communicate, why should a business provide a different experience on each channel? The next technological challenge is to allow identical service regardless of where an interaction originated. Take, for example, chatbots that provide service without human interaction. Today, they can be found on specific channels like Facebook and chat on your site.
In the future, however, service platforms will be able to provide the same service experience without the customer noticing that behind the scenes he or she is being passed on from one channel to another. Elad’s SimpleChat already enables this type of interaction; it allows you to provide clients with a chatbot experience when more efficient, and a human one, when required. The communication is seamlessly passed between the two behind the scenes. If the bot can’t answer a question, a human can come in to assist, regardless of where the original question was asked.