The 4 Things You Should Do (And the 4 You Should Avoid) When Delivering Omni-Channel Customer Support

In our last blog, we disclosed the 8 key questions that mid-market should ask when picking a services partner.

Just as important these days is finding the best way to meet the needs of ever-demanding customers looking for answers in the fastest possible time with the least amount of effort.

No one likes wasting their time and/or money.

A recent survey showed that 93% of business managers recognize that failing to provide a holistic, personalized, proactive customer experience could lead to lost customers, missed sales opportunities, lower revenue, and reduced loyalty.

The Harvard Business Review article, “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers“–based on a survey of 75,000 customer interactions–identified five loyalty-building tactics:

1. Reduce the need for repeat calls by anticipating and dealing with related downstream issues.


2. Arm reps to address the emotional side of customer interactions.


3. Minimize the need for customers to switch service channels.


4. Elicit and use feedback from disgruntled or struggling customers.


5. Focus on problem solving, not speed.

The same article goes on to state that “most customers encounter loyalty-eroding problems when they engage with customer service,” including these reported issues:

• 56% of those surveyed said that they have to re-explain an issue,


• 57% had to switch from the Web to the phone,


• 59% expended moderate-to-high effort to resolve an issue,


• 59% were transferred, and


• 62% repeatedly contacted the company to resolve an issue.

So what can IT managers do to help overcome these obstacles aggravating customers, while coming up with cost-effective solutions? Let’s take a look back at our December 2013 white paper, The Top 7 Communications Trends for 2014:

Businesses everywhere are experimenting with different communication modes for customer support. Voice alone is often inadequate; voice-plus-Web is only marginally better; so voice-plus-Web-plus-chat-plus-video can put customers and support resources on the same page.

However, businesses deploying multiple modes will need to monitor and measure customer experience to determine when switching across modes becomes frustrating for customers – recent research indicates customer effort is becoming as important as customer satisfaction. With this realization, companies will seek help to orchestrate their different modes and to coordinate contextual information and analytics capabilities so they can monitor and measure customer effort.

Consider these 4 DOs and 4 DON’Ts around minimizing customer effort in a multichannel support environment:

• DO minimize clicks: An extra click or two to test microphone and headset compatibility before an audio or video conversation can be the difference between 10% and 90% customer effort


• DO go mobile! The customer is not chained to the desktop anymore. With the huge growth and proliferation of mobile devices, the channel and the interaction can vary significantly depending on location. Consider mobility when designing the omnichannel experience. Quick interactions are necessary. Develop a mobile application!


• DO decide if multitasking is needed: Some channels enable agent multitasking better than others. Chat is great for multitasking the video environment is not. One bad customer support experience can destroy personal brand equity and the customer relationship.


• DO know your customer’s preferences, by industry or personal attributes: Some industries lean more toward specific channel communication preferences–high tech companies may gravitate to video while traditional manufacturing may want the asynchronicity of chat. While Baby Boomers still prefer phone and in-person contact, Generation X has shifted from the phone to e-mail and text while Generation Y turns to video and text as the first channel of communication.

For every DO, there are DON’Ts that should not be avoided:

• DON’T underestimate today’s customer! Empowered and fluent in a variety of technologies, today’s customer is more interactive, collaborative, knowledgeable, and time-sensitive than ever before. Make sure your channels can match your ever-demanding customer’s needs.


• DON’T let your support personnel become complacent: Forever challenge your support agents to keep them on their toes. Are support agents answering the same questions over and over again? A survey of 3,000 agents at Avaya found that 85% of the time spent by agents was answering the same questions over and over again. At most, the agents said that they tackled new problems only 10-15% of the time. Avaya changed the paradigm by using applications that are much better than people at serving up existing solutions and then challenging the humans to solve new problems 85%+ of the time.


• DON’T assume that the customer knows your business: Develop channels with the novice customer in mind. Setting up a site assuming they know your business only creates friction for the customer. Avoid acronyms. Not all acronyms or customers are the same. While speaking to the lowest common denominator, enable power users and developers alike to quickly scale, while allowing others to stay with the most basic of information.


• DON’T let your support agents be knowledge consumers, make them be knowledge generators: Agents should be trained and incentivized to publish their findings to the Web for all other customers to see in 30 minutes or less.

If you follow these points, you can hit the sweet spot where speed, efficiency and satisfied customers meet.

DO shoot for that target.

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