Customers are raising the bar for service experience across channels — are marketers doing the same?
We know that today’s customers want many things, among them – complete control over the relationship they have with brands and companies; the improved ability to communicate with friends and other consumers on their brand experiences; and the expressed ability to control their privacy fiercely.
Given these new demands by customers, marketers need to take a hard look at the customer experience across channels and be sure they are raising the bar to meet customer expectations, or they will be left behind.
The days of maintaining a basic customer preference center are over. Asking customers how they want to be communicated with (via email, twitter, phone, direct mail. etc.) has quickly evolved from a preference center, past a contact center designating channel and desired frequency, to a full service customer communication center. The Center needs to capture customer profile info (email address, twitter handle, phone numbers), preference of channel, frequency requests, but most importantly interaction tracking and event management. A full service customer communication center should then trigger events to deliver information that is relevant, timely, and through the right channel requested by the customer. 
Actions speak louder than words, so tracking actual customer interaction and analyzing the results is key to improving the customer experience.
What to Do:
1. Create a roadmap for the customer experience across all departments, products and brands.
2. Evaluate your technology to understand if the tracking and analytic firepower to implement a customer communication center is available and scalable
3. Check your staffing – having the staff to answer direct Twitter messages from customers takes people. Customers expect direct response even from social media channels.
4. Keep you Customer Value metric at the forefront of your decision-making. Enhancing the customer experience for your most valued customers – not the bottom deciles should drive all initiatives.
What Not to Do:
1. Ask your customers how they want to experience your brand/company and then don’t act on it. If you are not going to act on their preferences – don’t ask.
2. Develop a customer communication center in a silo of one brand or one channel. If you don’t have full buy-in across the enterprise the experience will not be seamless.
3. Ignore your customer segmentation that has worked for you.
The next generation of customers expect this level of service, coordination and seamless execution across channels. If companies aren’t thinking about a full service customer communication center now, they are probably already far, far behind.
