Business Case and Implications for Consistency – Part 5 – Inter-Channel Consistency
The modern customer experience environment is constituted of an ever expanding variety of delivery channels, with no evidence of the slowing of the pace of channel expansion. As channel expansion continues, customer empowerment is increasing with customer choice. Customer relationships with brands are not derived from individuals’ discrete interactions. Rather, customer relationships are defined by clusters of interactions, clusters of interactions across the entire life cycle of the relationships, and across all channels. Inter-channel consistency defines the customer relationship.
McKinsey and Company concluded in their 2014 report, The Three Cs of Customer Satisfaction: Consistency, Consistency, Consistency, demonstrated, in a retail banking context, a link between cross-channel consistency and bank performance.
In customers’ minds, all channels belong to the same brand. Customers do not consider management silos or organizational charts – to them all channels are the same. Customers expect consistent experiences regardless of channel. In their minds, an agent at a call center should have the same information and training as in-person agents.
What are the implications for managers of the customer experience?
The primary management issue in aligning disparate channels is to manage inconsistency at its cause. The most common cause of inconsistencies across channels is the result of siloed management, where managers’ jurisdiction is limited to their channel. Inter-channel consistency is increasingly important as advances in technology expand customer choice. Brands need to serve customers in the channel of their choice. Therefore, the cause of inter-channel inconsistency must be managed higher up in the organization at the lowest level where lines of authority across channels converge, or through some kind of cross-functional authority.
The implications for management are not limited to senior management and cross-functional teams. Customer experience managers should be aware that top-line averages can mislead. Improvement opportunities are rarely found in top-line averages, but at the local level. Again, the key is to manage inconsistency at the cause. Inconsistency at the local level almost always has a local cause; as a result, variability in performance must be managed at the local level as well.
In a previous post from 2014, we discussed aligning cross channel service behaviors and attributes.
In the next blog post in this series, we will explore intra-channel consistency.
Kinesis CEM 