I’m going to predict that one of the most exciting areas in customer experience over the next decade will be cross-channel service continuity.
A few forward-thinking companies are starting to pay attention to this, but it’s mostly off the radar right now. It’s so far off the radar that it doesn’t even have a snappy name or acronym yet (CCSC, anyone?). But it’s exciting because the early evidence is that this is one of the most powerful ways to improve the overall customer experience in many big organizations.
So what the heck am I talking about? In concept, the idea is simple: when a customer contacts a customer more than once about some issue, the company treats those contacts as part of the same experience. Even if the contacts are through different channels.
This makes perfect sense, since to the customer those multiple contacts are all part of the same experience. But nearly every large company has them siloed off into different parts of the organization which don’t talk to each other. Often, they can’t talk to each other even if they want to.
And that’s what makes CCSC (I really need a better name!) hard: there’s a lot of infrastructure which needs to be in place to make it work. The call center needs to know that you just visited the website, and vice-versa. Building this technology will keep companies like IBM, Accenture, and a host of new startups very happy for a long time.
But at SpeechTEK last month, USAA and Nuance presented the results of exactly this sort of initiative. Here’s the session description:
Consider Becky, a USAA member who is looking at homeowner’s insurance options online, but has a question and decides to call. After she authenticates, the IVR notes that Becky was logged into the website and asks if she is calling for a homeowner’s insurance quote. Becky happily confirms that is indeed her intention. Many businesses see such proactive, cross-channel scenarios as a pipe dream, but this presentation reviews the quantitative and qualitative methods used to understand customer cross-channel behavior and create user interface designs that support them.
In the SpeechTEK session, USAA shared that this simple piece of cross-channel service continuity–routing the customer straight to the right department based on a recent online experience–had a powerful effect on customer satisfaction and other key metrics. Imagine what we could do with true service continuity, where the customer would not only be routed to the right department but could also resume the same transaction.
This is consistent with research that we published a couple years ago where we found that service continuity across multiple calls to a call center completely eliminated the dissatisfaction normally associated with having to call more than once. In other words, customers didn’t mind having to make more than one call, as long as they didn’t have to start over (see page 4 of this report).
In my view, the almost complete isolation of most customer service channels from each other is one of the most badly broken pieces of the customer experience at many large companies. But that means it’s also one of the biggest opportunities to generally improve customer experiences.
And that’s why CCSC (ugh, that name!) is likely to be one of the hottest ideas in customer experience in years to come.
