Expert insights on channel integration in CX

As companies navigate through their various projects over the years, they often accumulate a collection of channel and program-specific technologies. Without a holistic strategy in place, these journeys can create a tangled mess of systems that struggle to communicate with each other. Customers are, as a result, subjected to fragmented interactions that complicate their service experience.

The state of channel integration in CX 

McKinsey’s research discovered that the pandemic increased the urgency around providing integrated channel support to customers, with eight in ten business leaders surveyed stating omnichannel is more effective than traditional methods. However, businesses are still a long way from integrating experiences across channels with Gartner predicting that 50 percent of businesses will have failed to unify customer experiences by 2022.

To attract and retain customers with convenient channel experiences, brands are investing in integrating channels of customer service for consumers as well as agents. The 2021 Global State of Customer Experience Report saw channel integration appear as one of the top 10 investment priorities of CX practitioners.

In this report, leaders from hotel booking platform SiteMinder, restaurant chain TGI Fridays and Canadian furniture retailer Dufresne share their insights on how they have leveraged channel integration to gain measurable top and bottom-line benefits. Customer engagement SaaS provider Freshworks also highlights what CX leaders should keep in mind while charting seamless experiences across channels.

Did you know?

Channel integration is one of the top 10 investment priorities for CX practitioners in 2021

Global State of Customer Experience Report 2021

Dufresne Group’s journey to expand channels 

Norm Alegria, director of guest care at Dufresne Group, explains the mindset shift triggered at the 35-year-old home furnishings group when it undertook a major digital channel transformation in response to the pandemic.

Until the pandemic greatly disrupted customer interactions, Canadian home furnishings group Dufresne had long focused on bricks-and-mortar business. Alegria notes that this approach was rooted in the assumed reluctance from customers to purchase expensive items, such as sofas, online.

During the first lockdowns in Canada, Dufresne evolved its channel availability and website functionality so it could digitally connect with customers. Following this, customer analysis has shown the retailer that not all individuals depend on visiting stores to invest in expensive products. One customer evidenced this by logging on to Dufresne’s website at 11pm to purchase a sofa via online chat, rather than visit a store.

“I was very surprised that someone wanted to purchase a big-ticket item like a sofa at 11pm without touching it,” Alegria says. “However, in conversing and videochatting, this consumer said she was in the midst of a pandemic living refresh, so she wanted it right away.”

Blending channel interactions

Choice, consistency and personalization have acted as the guiding objectives informing Dufresne’s channel strategy.

“Forcing a customer to call a 1800 number is, frankly, not acceptable in today’s environment – having chat, email, SMS and bots alongside the traditional phone is critical – it’s the price of entry in 2021,” Alegria states.

Alegria observes that shoppers crave a blend of channels across the buying journey.

“We are seeing guests utilizing these multiple platforms – maybe the website to start the search, in-store to finalize, and bots to track their orders or initiate service claims,” he explains.

Its online offering has also allowed Dufresne to improve the efficiency of its maintenance team. Due to its 10- year product warranties, the company receives a large volume of service claims, many of which traditionally required service technicians to visit customers’ homes.

The introduction of video appointments now allows technicians to expand the number of customers assisted past the previous quota of 10 customers per day. Now only 25 percent of technician visits are conducted in person.

As a result of the digital transformation at least 25 percent of the company’s in-store sales now start with an online chat.

Takeaway

Customers crave a channel rich environment to interact with, so customer analysis should reveal the preferences your brand needs to meet.

Streamlining internal channels to enhance external experiences

International hotel booking platform SiteMinder, which generates US$35bn in revenue each year, upgraded its internal phone channel system to offer a seamless service to customers around the globe and reduce frustration levels for employees.

The mission to streamline internal systems was triggered by the issues SiteMinder was experiencing with its open-source Asterisk phone and software system. The system involved four separate servers that were hosted globally in the cloud and were managed by two external companies – one based in the US and one in Thailand. These conflicting time zones exaggerated issue resolution times, especially when SiteMinder’s head office in Australia needed assistance. This fragmentation damaged the brand’s ability to serve its customers – hotel and accommodation businesses.

SiteMinder used multiple telecoms providers for their call centers based around the globe. This variation complicated the process of transferring customer calls, resulting in failed transfer attempts, which also negatively impacted customer experiences. “Our customer base is [anywhere] there’s a hotel,” says Michael Badham, IT director of SiteMinder. “We have so many numbers for people to call from so many different countries.”

Also read: A buyers guide to smart customer experience investments

Pivoting to an integrated channel model

To minimize the existing channel fragmentation, the company chose a single solution that integrated with its customer relationship management (CRM) platform to aid international employee collaboration and communication with handover notes and messages between its 100 contact center agents.

Badham says the new infrastructure, which was deployed within four months, allows SiteMinder to offer “follow-the-sun support” for its customers. “When one region is closed, support calls are automatically routed to another office in a different part of the world,” he says. “This has improved our response times significantly and our clients have noticed big improvements.” The customizable IVR options allow SiteMinder to invite customers to explore online self- serve channels and content when call queues are lengthy as to deflect tickets.

The phone system’s integration with SiteMinder’s customer web portals also allows agents to screen-share with customers that are logged into SiteMinder products. Agents are empowered to visually guide a customer, while still on the call, to support them with the issues they are experiencing. Only selective access is given when screen sharing as to protect the customer’s privacy.

In the face of the continuous growth in online bookings across the entire travel industry, it is imperative that contact center support strategies are optimized. As the proportion of holidays booked online is expected to keep rising – it was at 57 percent in 2019 just before the pandemic hit, according to Euromonitor data – a significant proportion of customers will require omnichannel support during their booking experiences moving forward.

Takeaway

Eradicating fragmentation felt by your employees will directly improve the service experienced by your customers.

How ShipTime achieves 96 percent CSAT with smart channel integration

ShipTime, which helps businesses locate top courier companies and monitor shipments, saw its previous channel integration projects prove to be mission-critical when the global Covid-19 crisis hit.

Before using a helpdesk, ShipTime’s support team serviced its 60,000 customers using a shared inbox. “Organizing files and emails into a folder or trying to find emails to see who was working on what was challenging,” says Dave Wilson, VP of operations. “We average about 60 tickets a day in volume, which became messy to handle for our reps.”

ShipTime wanted to offer their customers a choice of channels to engage from by transitioning to an omnichannel approach to customer service. They established seamless support across email, chat and a support portal with Freshdesk Omnichannel. Unifying support on a single platform made it quick and easy to get everything in one place for agents.

Not only did the move to Freshdesk allow the customer service team to stay organized with support tickets, but Freshdesk’s collaboration functionality improved the brand’s internal coordination. “We use Freshdesk’s Collaboration as an internal chat feature to talk to each other on a specific ticket. This quickly gets the attention of the other party working on the same ticket,” says Wilson.

Channel integration proving vital for business resilience The onset of Covid-19 triggered a surge in shipping demand, with lockdown mandates forcing the public to rely on online access for their shopping needs and many brick-and-mortar stores pivoting to e-commerce models. ShipTime saw daily chat volumes double to around 100 messages, while call volumes also went up from 100 to 150 per day.

Also read: AI in omnichannel world

Previous channel integration efforts allowed ShipTime to adapt to ensure increased enquiry volumes did not create slower response times. An answer bot was implemented within Freshdesk Messaging to handle commonly asked questions quickly, which freed-up agents to focus on priority issues and prevented them from being overloaded with too many enquiries. Ticket workflows were automated by scenario type, also, to prevent agents from spending time unnecessarily on categorizing and assigning tickets to the right group.

Results

• CSAT: 4.8/5.0
• Chat volume since March 2020: 2x
• Time saved with automation: 20s per interaction

Takeaway

The effort deployed into channel integration can prove mission critical when crisis hits

TGI Fridays: Delivering proactive customer support through channel optimization

Ana Pia Guzman-Briley, the director of loyalty and customer engagement at TGI Fridays, details how the multimillion-dollar restaurant chain optimizes its channel integration using demographic data analysis.

TGI Fridays channel management is powered by its dedication to sophisticated data strategies. By gathering the right e-commerce data and analyzing it in detail using filtering, segmentation, visualization tools and predictive analysis, TGI Fridays achieves clarity on who its customers are, which products they enjoy, the channels they prefer and when they might want to make a purchase. Guzman-Briley says: “We do a good job of integrating our data – we don’t rely on anyone else, we are the owners of our data.”

This intelligence informs the restaurateur’s campaigns so it can provide proactive customer support and engagement. During the pandemic, for instance, TGI Fridays supported customers particularly through its delivery and take-out routes to market with a strong focus on personalization and channel activation in the context of social distancing requirements.

Guzman-Briley explains TGI Fridays digital strategy gathers operational and behavioral data onto a unified platform. These data points are then enriched with additional context from internal and external data sources, calculations, profile-matching and sentiment extractions. Insight analysis via reports, dashboards, data segmentation and predictive analysis all help TGI Fridays to reach conclusions on which combination of channels will be most successful for specific customers. Proactive customer support is provided via the likes of social media, email, SMS, TGI Friday apps to increase engagement levels and repurchase volumes.

Demographic segmentation allows TGI Fridays to personalize customer interactions based on their preferred channels, acknowledging any local geographical considerations, as well as tailored menus informed by customer preferences.

Takeaway

Data integration will allow brands to deliver sophisticated channel experiences that are free of fragmentation and are intuitive to customer needs.

“We do a good job of integrating our data – we don’t rely on anyone else; we are the owners of our data.”

Ana Pia Guzman-Briley

Director of loyalty and customer engagement TGI Fridays

Dos and don’ts for sophisticated, loyalty winning channel integration

Pradeep Rathinam, Chief Customer Officer at Freshworks, discusses the dos and donts of channel integration, as well as the crucial role omnichannel plays in B2B and B@C experiences.

CX Network: What is the golden rule for brands getting started with building omnichannel models?

Pradeep Rathinam: An omnichannel strategy should always be governed by keeping the customer in the center and understanding customer behavior. Your customer demographic has specific preferences on how they want to engage with you. They also favor touchpoints or channels based on the nature of the conversation they want to have. Data from Facebook shows that Gen Zs gravitate towards social media and messenger channels for communication. It also shows that 63 per cent of customers would prefer to be serviced first by a chatbot instead of waiting to speak or chat with a human. The bottom line is that you need to meet your customers where they are.

Also keep in mind that customer preferences can and will change, and your omnichannel strategy should evolve to keep pace. For example, since the onset of the pandemic, we have seen conversational and social channels take center stage. Digital and mobile-first channels of engagement have ushered in the age of ‘contactless’ experiences. A successful omnichannel model allows the seamless and rapid addition of new channels as needed.

CX Network: How does the role of omnichannel and channel integration in B2B differ to the role it plays in the B2C universe?

Pradeep Rathinam: Relationships are the bedrock of B2B customer engagement. B2B enterprises have extended customer associations and more complex interactions, with each customer offering greater revenue potential. However, being accessible anytime and anywhere is still non-negotiable. In my own experience, as Chief Customer Officer at Freshworks, we have seen that over 95 per cent of our 50,000+ global customers reach out to us from over three channels or more. The advice we give our B2B customers is to replace clunky, legacy tech stack with an intuitive omnichannel suite to benefit not just from a support perspective, but from a sales perspective as well.

On the other hand, it’s not that B2C organizations don’t value relationships at all, it’s just the sheer volume of transactions that they deal with as well as the channels to incorporate. Customers are quick to find a replacement if their experiences with a brand aren’t fast, easy and empathetic. There is a much greater need to leverage AI and automation to keep pace. AI chatbot-powered self-service can handle simple queries, while helpdesk automations help save time on manual tasks. Modern bot architecture allows you to establish instant self-service across any channel - your app and website or even social media and other messengers.

CX Network: What are the consequences at stake if B2B brands ignore the importance of channel integration?

Pradeep Rathinam: For B2B businesses, support experiences make or break relationships with customers, which in turn impacts revenue. Solving customer problems involves considerable time, effort and multiple teams. For example, a server or product functionality issue can take hours to resolve and require coordination between product, IT and customer service. Or a payment issue might involve the legal and finance teams along with customer service. Phone, email, or in-app conversations are usually the go-to, and customers can switch between them for updates on a resolution.

With a mix of channels and teams in play, it becomes that much more important to maintain contextual history during the lifecycle of the conversation. Stitching the customer journey together with a common thread and making it accessible to every customer-facing team is vital. If channels or teams exist in siloes, your sales and support teams will lack the context to engage with your customers meaningfully. Your customer engagement tool should help you maintain an ‘activity log’ for every customer interaction, accounting for every contact to ensure that all teams working on the issue have the big picture.

Also read: Digital customer experience experts insight ebook

CX Network: A common mistake to avoid in the mission to build integrated channel environments for customers?

Pradeep Rathinam: The biggest shortcoming of an omnichannel strategy is the inability to offer a consistent experience across all channels. You might have established a variety of channels to stay accessible. But your customers are likely to use multiple channels to engage with you for a single conversation or query. They might begin on Instagram and then move to a website, live chat, or an app.

The inability to continue this dialogue seamlessly means that your strategy is multi-channel rather than omnichannel. Our research shows that 89 percent of customers feel frustrated with an experience like this. You need to interweave all channels to provide a single, 360-degree view to all customer-facing teams. Customers can then continue their conversation across channels without having to repeat themselves each time.

Final remarks

It is essential for businesses to leverage multiple channels for customer engagement in line with increased customer demands.

Upgrading internal channels can be a powerful first step, as SiteMinder did to create a more seamless phone experience that removes frustrations for both staff and customers.

Data management is crucial to meet higher expectations around coordinated and consistent channel experiences, as TGI Fridays demonstrates via its intensive data analysis processes.

The pandemic not only got more consumers to accept online shopping, but forced traditional businesses, such as the Dufresne Group, to rethink entire channel strategies and access new approaches to grow market share.

Multi-channel customer engagement is here to stay and companies that adapt quickly, keep abreast of the latest technology, and use data to offer customers targeted and personalized experiences without sacrificing service will be the winners.

Takeaways

• Eradicating the fragmentation felt by your employees will directly improve the service experienced by your customers.
• The effort deployed into channel integration can prove mission critical when a crisis hits.
• Data integration will enable sophisticated channel experiences that are intuitive to customer needs.
• Customers crave a channel rich environment to interact with, customer analysis should reveal their preferences.

Read the PDF report here