With so many channels to choose from, where do I start? This simple question doesn’t always have a simple answer. There really is no definitive answer, but the one that is the best is “where your customers are likely to be most active.”  Gone are the days of customer contact avoidance. Today, it’s all about customer satisfaction, which sometimes results in more contact.

Consider these observations: 

Reactive channels are those you have less control over, they are public, and if you have a presence, customers can engage with you, but are you responding? These channels impact your Brand Image the most and often have a lot of “noise” to weed through, but they can also be a lower-cost channel and provide easy access to self-serve tools.

Proactive channels are private; these are channels you can control by visibility & throttling. You can choose to build or not, display or not, determine and control the % of visibility for these channels. These channels often serve your customer needs, and they can be a lower-cost alternative to expensive voice calls, especially for questions that require customers to share PII.

 

So ask yourself these two questions:

• What are my customer needs?
• What problem are we, as a company trying to solve?

Before you decide, you need to do your research and be prepared with your data to get the best answer for your business.

At a high level, you need to consider customer experience (entry points), channel mix (use cases), and resolution (self-serve or agent-assisted). Use website data, call data, demographics; there is probably a lot of information your company already gathers about your customer.  Also, don’t forget to consider external research; there are plenty of experts out there that are already providing insights and recommendations: 

Forrester - 62% of consumers will switch to a different brand or decide not to purchase from the brand after a bad customer experience. 

Pew Research - 94% of the world owns a mobile phone, making sense to start there.

Once you have all of this data, how do you put it together to determine the next channel to add?

When adding a new channel, consider:

Customer Experience

• Customer Value  - How do you measure the value of your customer engagement?
• Customer Journey - How are you engaging customers along their journey?
• Digital Presence - Where does your brand show up online (social media, website, community forum)? 

Company Goals

• Your Results- How are you using data to drive continuous improvement?
• Your Agents - How aligned are the people in your company in your customer engagement strategy? 
• Your Platform - How many different technologies are you using to track and assess customer engagement? 

Also, consider the level of your Company maturity as it pertains to Customer Engagement. To find out more about defining your path, read this article about the Khoros Maturity Model.

Now let’s dig a little deeper and determine the current state of your Digital Presence

Review this checklist and Channel Guide by gathering the data you have and answering a few questions: 

Channel Determination

• Do you already have active channels? If so, what Channels are my customers already using?  Most likely, if you have a Social (Public) channel, they are already there talking to you, but are you just listening, or are you “reacting”?
• If this is your first digital channel, you can use your phone volumes & call drivers to determine your customer’s types of questions are most likely to seek answers for in other channels. Also, where is your Marketing team publishing content?
• If you have Reactive Channels, which ones are you already using, and how active are your customers? 
• If you already have Proactive channels, what web pages are they visible on, and what are your current volumes?
• Also, consider your demographics and channel mix to make a shift in email and/or voice engagement.

Volume Determination

• What are your web traffic volumes to support and account pages? Mobile volumes,  iOS vs Android? Do you have a mobile app? What is your login %s?
• Are your demographics changing? Boomers or Millennials, Male, Female, Non-Gender specific? Locations?
• How do I know when it is time to add Chat? Are the majority of your Social conversations private? What % of these private conversations could be answered with public responses?
• If you are a B2B  company, many of the same questions apply, you just need to determine what channels are your clients or employees of your prospective companies using? LinkedIn? Facebook? Chat?

Company objectives

• What KPIs are important to your business?
• Increased CSAT/NPS
• Self-Serve, call and contact deflection
• Agent response time,  in-channel resolution
• Brand awareness and image

Workforce Management

• What is the current state of your workforce?
• If you are just now building out your workforce, remember that not all questions require the same attention.
• Determine your priorities and tackle those first. Private channels may require faster engagement times than public, and public channels can help you drive self-service.
• Automation/AI should be considered on both public & private channels; some use cases can be quickly set up to divert questions to the right channels
• Consider the right balance of Quality and Quantity.  You want your agents to be efficient but also give your customer the best experience.

Lots of questions, but this data will help you to determine the next channel you should be considering. 

Once you get through this exercise, you will want to keep all data up to date, so you can analyze and optimize your customer and agent experience, and how that is impacting your company goals. This will allow you to continue to transform your digital presence.

Which leads to the question submitted “If I were to add one more channel in the next 6 months, which one should it be?”   For the majority of businesses, I would say right now you should be focusing on Asynchronous Messaging.  I may not have said that 6 months ago, but in today's world, it is a must!

There are several different ways to deploy this, ABC, GBM, Facebook, What's App etc. or if you want more control over data, your own Branded Messenger, and Khoros can help you with all of these.

Our last question was what are the Automation 1-2 use cases to quickly impact ROI? 

First off, let's start by saying, your "Artificial Intelligence" or Bot, is only as smart as the people who create it.

So when you make your first decision to use automation, step one for success is to map out your plan.

Now that you have all this awesome data you collected, and no matter the channel you have chosen you should definitely consider Automation!

Great AI can give your customer a great experience, while also freeing up your agents for the harder questions.   

But how do you know where to start, and what are the benefits of automation? How would your business most benefit from automation with the least amount of effort? Those are the use cases that will give you the quickest ROI impacts. So consider these:

• For Care, think about your top call drivers that can easily be solved with easy to follow instructions.  If you provide your customers with easy to find self-serve solutions, they won’t have a need to call.
• For Marketing, think about your most visited pages on your website and create ways to interactive engagement experiences. 
• For Sales, think about your sales process and how you can make it easier for your customers to purchase, or inquire about your products, make appointments.

So just to reiterate:

1. The most important thing is having a solid plan before you start! 
2. You should be considering all the same information that you used to select a new channel.
3. Choose simple experiences over complex to begin.
4. Consider the self-serve tools that you already have and take advantage of those.

Also, before you begin your Automation journey, I recommend reading this article, Building a smarter, more adaptable chatbot.

If you have questions, comments, suggestions PLEASE post them below!

Next ➡️ Forecasting & Staffing: Part 2