Multi-Channel Service

Gwynne Young
Managing Editor, CustomerThink
Member

Posted 21-Sep-2004 04:23 PM
There is kind of a conventional wisdom that the more channels, the better. But if multi-channel is such a great idea, why doesn't Amazon provide an easy-to-find phone number? Southwest Airlines has the opposite strategy. They want you to call them. "Don't email me," they made a very big point of saying.

Is it always a good idea to have all these channels working, even though your customers may want them? Or should you be more selective and just pick one or two, and say, "That's how we're going to serve our customers"?

Gwynne Young
Managing Editor, CustomerThink
Member

Posted 21-Sep-2004 04:24 PM
[Posted for Jim Sterne, Target Marketing of Santa Barbara]

My focus has always been as customer advocate, so what I think is best for the company is to serve the customer the best way you can. Now, I'm going to weight the word, "can," in just a second. But first of all, if a customer wants to call or fax or email, you let them. A customer wants to talk to you, that's the most valuable thing you can get. It costs a lot of money to put together a focus group with questionable results or field a survey with statistical significance. If a customer wants to call you and contact you, it's an opportunity to give them the best branding experience they could possibly have, so let's communicate with customers.

That said, now we have to talk about what the company can afford to do. I have an absolutely schizophrenic reaction to Southwest Airlines. No. 1, I am incensed about their statement on their web site: "Why we don't accept email." That frustrates me to no end. I think they're being cheap. I think that they're stymieing me from being able to communicate with them. It's just as annoying as can be. On the other hand, I'm a United Airlines frequent flyer, and you know, I'm at the platinum level, and I can't think of very many occasions where I have ever wanted to send an email to United Airlines. Either the information is on their web site, or I give them a call. And that's good enough for me.

Gwynne Young
Managing Editor, CustomerThink
Member

Posted 21-Sep-2004 04:25 PM
[For Donna Fluss, DMG Consulting, LLC]

Does the message on the Southwest Airlines stop you from flying them?

Gwynne Young
Managing Editor, CustomerThink
Member

Posted 21-Sep-2004 04:26 PM
[For Jim Sterne, Target Marketing of Santa Barbara]

I haven't flown on Southwest Airlines for about 10 years, and these last 10 years have been the time I've made my most flights, and accrued the most miles. I'm trying to decide if this might be the reason. I'm just so annoyed at them for not allowing me to communicate with them. I can't say, absolutely, that's the reason I don't fly with them, but I feel that it's arrogance.

I look at my behavior with United Airlines, where I never send them an email. But the fact that I can makes me feel that much better about them.

Gwynne Young
Managing Editor, CustomerThink
Member

Posted 21-Sep-2004 04:28 PM
[For Bill Price, Driva Solutions]

When I was global vice president of Customer Service at Amazon.com and we made the decision to move away from releasing the phone number—in other words, making the phone number harder to find, from the customer's perspective—we had just finished doing a pretty detailed set of analyses on how our customers were contacting us and the success of some of the web self-service that we'd been putting in place over the years. We determined, through looking at weblogs and combining that with the email and phone history that we already had within our CRM system, that about 75 percent of all the issues that our customers had to deal with were done online, completely.

And that's an IVR system we put in place with one of the voice XML companies, as well as coming into the web, itself.

Of the remaining 25 percent, 75 percent were already being done by email. When you do the math, only about 6 percent of Amazon's contacts from customers were actually in the phone channel when we made that decision. Another 19 percent were email, and again, the original 75 percent were done through self-service. We were hoping to nudge that number even further, on behalf of the customer, to enable them to help themselves, through self-service lanes.

What's interesting is that the ratio didn't change in the six months or nine months or so that I had remaining at Amazon. I'm not sure what the data are now. Customers still called us with the exact same ratio of calls that they did before, because we didn't change the 800-number. The number is available on Google, on blogs and other places you can search online, and it actually is on the web site, but it's really hard to find. It's way down in some bottom link, somewhere.

But, at any rate, it didn't change the ratios. What we found was that customers who needed to call us could call us. Amazon's got two call centers in the United States, two in Europe, one in Japan and then a very large group of email support operations, even more broadly than that. What we found is that it just didn't make a difference. Customers could call us if they needed to and if they wanted to, but most preferred to reach us by email and by the web.

Gwynne Young
Managing Editor, CustomerThink
Member

Posted 21-Sep-2004 04:29 PM
[For Jim Sterne, Target Marketing of Santa Barbara]

Boy, I'm adamantly in disagreement. Let's make it easy for people to use the phone. If they don't call you any more or any less, it doesn't make any difference.

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 22-Sep-2004 05:06 AM
As the varied comments in response to Gwynne's original question show, even the experts can't agree on a common best-practice solution to this tricky problem.

Whilst I agree with Jim that it is always good practice to make it as easy for customers to do business with you as possible, as Bill points out, that may conflict with management's strategy or the economics of the business.

This difficult trade-of lies at the heart of CRM today.

Look at the low-cost European airline, Ryanair for example. When they started operations in 1998, they only offered reservations over the Internet. That decision was driven by their strategy of developing a value advantage by being the absolutely lowest cost airline. Despite their absolutely no-frills operation, their rock-bottom prices brought Ryanair a year-on-year increase in passenger volume and profitability that the European majors can only dream of.

Today, Ryanair do offer limited access for reservations but only on expensive brown phone numbers. The call centre has become a profit-centre, in line with their strategy of growing ancillary business profitability at a faster rate than their core airline business.

The trade-of between customers needs and a company's ability or willingness to meet them has always been there. It just takes on a higher priority in these difficult economic times. Paradoxically, this trade-of shouldn't be an entirely economic decision. It should also involve a strong enderstanding of how customers think and are likely to behave in response to the company's decisions. Maybe it is time that we started to use insights from behavioural economics to make the trade-off.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant

MRHoffman ClientXClient
Member
Picture of MRHoffman ClientXClient

Posted 23-Sep-2004 09:48 AM
Business has always been multi-channel. From the moment of the first commerce exchange when someone told someone else about a good deal or a bad deal business has been multi-channel. You can choose to ignore channels or choose to manage and leverage them—but customers will vote with their feet if they feel the service relationship is inequitable—Call the phone company and be on hold for 20 minutes to be transfered, or dropped. Channel management or the illusion of channel management—CTI, IVR, personalization, priority routing numbers, sites, service desks, et al invokes trust, reliability and the new buzz word "transparency" all are important if you want repeat customers or extended customer tenure

Michael R Hoffman
President/CEO
CRM BPM, Client X Client LLC
908 542—1134
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