Editor's Pick @ CustomerThink.com
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing insights from my research
and consulting work in a series of posts, which will discuss critical
aspects to delivering successful CX experience. You can read the first
post,
Demystifying The Black Box – How To Design, Manage, And Measure The Most Profitable Customer Experience (CX) Strategies, here. The series will conclude with a podcast with the
Center for Services Leadership,
where I will be answering questions from the CX community. I invite you
to share your questions and comments through the blog or via
Twitter (#CXquestion) and I’ll be happy to address them in the podcast. This is the second post in the CX series.
Social Media—a manager’s curse or blessing. To use the words of some
of my clients, “As if managing offline channels wasn’t hard enough
already?”
Managers worldwide, while almost evangelistically embracing the new
multi-channel environment, are often left with very little guidance on:
(a) how to take advantage of online channels, (b) how to develop a
corresponding multichannel strategy, and (c) how to manage the
multi-channel strategy in the best possible fashion. This, in turn,
leads to frustration in the boardroom about both the benefits of online
channels and the influence on the overall customer experience (Klaus,
2014a).
CEOs worldwide are questioning the push towards adding new online
channels, and whether they are destined to be an expensive
cost-of-doing-business to meet customers’ ever-rising expectations of
service quality, with no incremental return (Klaus et al., 2014). The
alternative may be a different impact upon business performance that
might better assess, and, therefore, improve how positive outcomes are
generated from multi-channel strategies (Maklan, Peppard and Klaus,
forthcoming).
In our global research, which consists of multiple longitudinal
studies dissecting multi-channel strategies and their performance, we
explore a dynamic, competitive environment. We developed a typology that
can be used to benchmark existing practices to the described state of
management, including how different multi-channel practices are linked
to performance. We found clear evidence that social media has an
important role in successfully managing the multi-channel customer
experience (Klaus, 2013). The most successful firms use social media for
stakeholder communication, resource allocation, competitive environment
tracking, and segmentation practice enhancement. Thus, social media
delivers key insights for the internal and external perceptions of the
entire multi-channel strategy, elevating it from being solely a channel
of, to a key component of, the overall strategy.
Based on our results, we suggest that to develop and take advantage of opportunities, firms must:
- develop an online channel strategy focused on multiple channels,
- manage transformations of this strategy internally,
- upgrade their skill sets, and
- integrate new technologies such as mobile devices and social media, in order to
- improve the customer experience.
The development of a new multi-channel transformation plan
requires a coherent buy-in from all functions inside the firm. Our
findings submit that many firms are struggling to come to a consensus on
how these changes will be formulated and implemented. The documented
tensions between the different channels have to be overcome in order to
succeed with a company-wide accepted vision, including the new marketing
approach reflecting the new channel mix.
Once this is achieved, firms face the task of managing the
transformation internally. We found support for the proposition that the
introduction of an online channel program influences the constellation
of the entire firm. Entire business models and constellations, such as
financial services (see Klaus et al., 2013), hospitality, retail, need
to be scrutinized and reconsidered to adapt to the new multi-channel
environment (for more details see Klaus, 2014b; Klaus and Nguyen, 2013).
The main benefit and challenge of the new multi-channel
environment is to create immediate access throughout all channels, to
not only gain insight in the new customer-experience-driven behavior
pattern, but to also deliver the corresponding experiences. We
found clear evidence that once organizational barriers to use of digital
tools fade, they form a foundation of entirely new business processes.
For example, a national real estate agency now uses a platform
allowing them, while at location with a client to sign a binding
contract, to initiate loan application/approval, fix an appointment with
the notary, set-up telecommunication, electricity, gas, and water
services ‘right on the spot.’ This unique, customer-experience-focused
solution led to higher customer satisfaction, positive recommendations,
an increase in return business.
A management consultant
firm used social media effectively as a platform to allow their
employees to engage in, and freely exchange ‘best practice’ examples,
leading to both, a more defined learning and experience exchange, and
higher employee satisfaction. These processes, thus, in turn, improve
performance significantly. Firms able to address and master the
multi-channel challenges deliver better customer experiences, leading to
superior financial performances. (Klaus, 2014b)
There is no doubt that the online channel is a crucial ingredient in
firm strategies worldwide. Firms will use them to support a range of
business processes to create stronger links to employees, suppliers,
customers and vendors. A key challenge that remains is managing
unavoidable multi-channel strategies in which all channels –
face-to-face and online – must co-exist and deliver the best customer
experience possible (Klaus and Maklan, 2013). Thus, all channels are
truly equally important.
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