Chapter 20. Ensuring Consistent Customer Service Across Channels

“Focus on your customers, figure out what they need and want. Make it easy for your customers to do business with you!”

—Excerpted from Customers.com, Patricia Seybold (1998)

A knowledgeable friend recently asked me whether customer relationship management (CRM) was truly a new business approach or simply a repackaging of old concepts. Needless to say, having been in the CRM industry for 17 years, this question got me thinking. I conclude “yes,” CRM really is a new business approach resulting from two complementary factors. First, CRM allows customers to conduct business with a company the way the customer so desires; this is new and quite important to many customers. Second, CRM offers new technology tools to make this happen. For this new approach to work, you have the need for consistent customer service across multiple channels.

When properly implemented, consistent customer service across channels allows customers to reach your company any way they so desire. Increasingly, customers opt to use multiple contact channels that include voice, leaving a message on voice mail, fax, regular mail, e-mail, Web chat, collaboration, assisted browsing, and customer self-service (e.g., FAQs or knowledge-based queries). Equally important, once customers have reached your company, they expect your front-line agents/reps to be knowledgeable about them regardless of how the customer may have contacted you in the past.

So when the customer informs you, “I am phoning you today about the e-mail that I sent to you earlier this week, which was in response to last week's Web chat session that resulted from the letter that I sent you via regular mail last month,” they expect your company's agents/reps to know about all of the contacts that they have had with your company and they expect your agents/reps to be ready to assist them accurately in real time. How you realize consistent customer service is your concern, not theirs. Moreover, achieving consistent customer service is indeed a concern for most companies in that it may be technically complex and costly, is likely to require a rethink of existing customer-facing processes and may require extensive retraining of your agents/reps who initially may be resistant to change. Nonetheless, those companies that successfully realize consistent customer service will be the winners in today's increasingly competitive marketplace where competition is but one mouse click away.