The Retail Omnichannel Has Been With Us For Years, But Retailers Still Fail

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania recently published a paper in their Knowledge @ Wharton journal focused on the failure of retailers to adopt a omnichannel service style even though the benefits of doing so have been clear for at least six years.

Wharton researchers believe that many retailers are finding it extremely hard to deliver a true omnichannel experience that approaches what customers expect so they prefer to hide their failings or just rename the strategy.

In the Wharton paper Beth Ann Kaminkow, former executive vice president of the Westfield shopping centre company and currently COO of Wearable Experiments, a wearable technology firm, said: “We’re a long way off” from a true omnichannel experience.” Kaminkow added: “There’s still distance; it’s way off in the future. That’s why people prefer to rename it or not talk about it.”

What is the problem that Wharton is identifying?

The paper suggests that retailers selling shoes is a good place to start. Walk into a shoe store today and the experience is almost exactly the same as you might have known 20 or 30 years ago - before the Internet and social networks. Before all the multiple information channels we now have, you walked in the store, tried on a pair of shoes and bought them if they felt OK. In 2016 this is still how most people buy shoes.

Wharton identifies three areas that are blocking true omnichannel adoption:

1. Integration of the front-end and back-end; it’s hard to create a complete picture of your stock and supply chain and most retailers manage by carrying more stock than they need. It’s expensive to improve this, but essential if online is to be blended with the physical retail store.

2. Finding the right expertise; most tech and CRM or supply chain experts are involved in technology companies, not retailers. Many retailers struggle to hire the right skills and find that contracting expertise is expensive.

3. No industry collaboration; in some areas of retail it might be beneficial for all competing retailers to work together to improve their area of the market, but there is very little collaboration and just a strong sense of competition between brands.

I thought that there was a particularly important comment within the Wharton paper where it asks the question, if we were building this retailer from the ground up today then how would the online service work and what would customers really want from a physical store? It’s a good question because it is clear that customers want both, but in an omnichannel world the purpose of the physical store may no longer be just for sales alone.

The Wharton paper is a fascinating exploration of the retail omnichannel and how some retailers might need to just create a new ‘blank slate’ strategy if they want to succeed in future. You can read the complete paper on Knowledge @ Wharton here

by Webhelp

Changing The Retail Banking Customer Experience

Retail Customer Experience magazine recently featured an interesting interview with Alice Milligan, Chief Customer and Digital Experience Officer at banking giant Citi.

Given the current rapid change in the financial service sector, it’s fascinating to see where big banks are focusing effort.

With Citi there are clearly three main areas:

• Better understanding the customer journey
• Removing hurdles that customers find when doing business with Citi
• Enhancing the mobile experience

Milligan notes that the customer journey cannot be predicted. Even if you offer every service online or on a mobile, there is a tendency for customers to hop around various channels because they use what is convenient at the time. If a customer is at home in front of their laptop then they might use a different channel to when they are on a bus on the way to work.

One striking example is that customers will use electronic online tools to make a payment, but will call the bank a day later to check that what they did online the previous day actually worked. Perhaps this behaviour still remains from when payments were more manual and required a visit to the branch, but if this is how customers behave then the customer journey needs to acknowledge it.

Milligan noted that once the customer journey is simplified and customer interaction is facilitated across various channels on a 24/7 basis then the next big hurdle is to make service more personal. Using data in the right way at the right time can give customers a better experience and can be advantageous for the bank as products can be placed in front of the customer just when they are interested in making a purchase.

Looking ahead to priorities in the remainder of 2016 and 2017 Milligan said that mobile is the focus:

“This year, we are launching a number of enhancements to our mobile app, with the goal of expanding the functionality and utility of the app by delivering new and innovative features. Citi offers a number of exclusive benefits to our card members, which is our way of thanking them for their loyalty to us, and we want to ensure these are available cross-channel.”

It’s important to note that a banking group the size of Citi is entirely focused on making the mobile experience better for customers. This clearly shows that they are aware of the threat from young start-ups offering banking services that only exist as apps – and are extremely easy to use.

Milligan notes that existing loyalty schemes don’t really work across all channels, but this is being rectified so Citi customers will be rewarded for loyalty however they interact with the company.

The 2-part interview is an interesting insight into customer experience strategy in a large financial service company and I think that it underlines how fast this industry is changing. Banks are shifting very quickly to be focused on the mobile interaction with customers and this focus will take place over the next two years, not ten. It doesn’t look good for the future of bank branches, but if the customer journey measurement shows that most people prefer a mobile experience now then the banks are giving people more of what they want.

by Webhelp

How Can You Measure Self-Serving Customers?

In my last blog I talked about how customers are actively choosing to help themselves before calling a customer service channel for help. It’s a natural change in the way people look for help and smart companies are ensuring that when customers attempt to look for support information on products they actually find what they are looking for.

But how does this change the existing support channels?

To start with, it is likely that more trivial questions are being answered via self-service more often. This should allow the contact centre team to assume that customers coming through to them have more detailed questions and that the customer has usually tried to resolve the problem first.

This is an important point to remember, as the customer may in fact be frustrated that they could not find the information the needed. The customer needs to be treated with even more respect than usual as the typical ‘have you tried resetting it’ type of question might offend them – especially if they have just spent an hour scouring the Internet for advice only to end up calling your helpline.

More complex enquiries becoming more common is great news for contact centre teams as it means they get more interesting problems to deal with. However, this will usually mean that advisors need to spend more time with customers. This can affect how you traditionally measure the performance of the contact centre so it is likely that as more customers engage in self-service you will need to review your metrics.

In addition to advisor interactions taking longer there is also the opportunity to spend time helping the customer know how better to search for help in future, especially if a customer has only called because of a fruitless hour searching for help online. Helping customers to help themselves better can defuse a tense situation with a frustrated customer on a call and ensure that they don’t need to call in future.

This can exacerbate the issue of metrics though.

If advisors are spending time helping customers to help themselves in future and working through more difficult problems because self-service is filtering out many of the more routine calls, then your Average Call Duration will be through the roof.

Instead of worrying about the impact on existing metrics design new ones for this new environment. Focus on metrics that reward contact centres and advisors for adding value and helping customers help themselves. The old metrics might have worked when customers called for help as a first port of call, but now customers are calling only when they can’t resolve a problem. It’s time to start changing how you measure the activity of your customer experience advisors.

by Webhelp

[Infographic] From Problem Solver to Digital Coach

Continuing on with our “digital coaching” to self-serve theme, we thought it would be interesting to look back at the changing role of the customer experience advisor over the years and how it has evolved.

The contact centre advisor role has come a long way over the last 50+ years...

Back in the 1970's advisors were very much focused on transactional telemarketing activity, evolving to incorporate customer service in the 1990's through to omni-channel management in recent years and looking ahead, possibly the biggest evolution of all - that of coaching customers to self-serve online.

So take a look back in time now with our handy new info-graphic which you can view by clicking the link below.

Click here to access the full infographic

by Webhelp

The Golden CX Rule Gamers Can Teach Other Industries

Around 85% of the top 700 grossing apps in the world are games.

What does this say?

Well to start with it shows that games are a great way to make money because these days a game developer will often give away the game and make money from in-game purchases. Secondly though, it suggests that almost every smart phone has at least one game installed.

Gamers are all ages and can spend nothing or spend a lot on their gaming hobby. The games industry is often overlooked by those who don’t spend time playing games, but in revenue terms you can combine the global music business and Hollywood movies and games are still worth more – playing games is a serious business.

But gamers are a very special kind of customer. They want customer service quickly when something goes wrong. If a gamer needs to spend hours getting help then they will be lost to the game. They might not try again, meaning they might never return to that game and all those revenue opportunities vanish.

There is one golden rule about helping gamers that is now being taken seriously for all forms of customer service and this is to ensure that the customer never has to leave the channel they are inside.

Gamers using a console game can usually stay inside the game and use text to ask for help. Gamers using an app-based game will rarely stay in the game if the only way to get help is to exit the app and then to make a phone call.

We have all seen poor service across channels. This week I asked on Twitter for help with a product I recently purchased. The response was an email address. I replied saying that I’m using Twitter because the email response was very poor. They responded with a phone number, which doesn’t sound like progress, but it was a direct number to their headquarters and helped, but the lesson here is that everything should have been handled in the channel that I chose.

More customer service executives should start playing games and seeing how these extremely demanding customers not only demand service quickly, but across a variety if channels and – most importantly – they usually want it inside the environment where they are spending time. If you ask your customers to put down your product while they ask for help then they might never pick it up again.

by Webhelp