By Michael Smitheman, Product Manager, Tealeaf

There’s quite a lot to gain from offering customers online self-service. Organizations that do it well will save money, keep their customers happy and have bragging rights over the competition. Those who do it poorly will spend a lot of time and money trying to win customers back. Of course, the outcomes are not quite as clear cut as those starkly contrasting scenarios. Yet the reality is that even with the most feature-rich website and the best website design, self-service still requires service. That’s why superior customer service requires a seamless multi-channel customer experience—where customers can cross from one channel to another without feeling like they are interacting with two different companies.

Forrester’s research shows that only 49% of customers report being “satisfied” with transitions from the web to the phone. In large part, this issue stems from customer service agents having no visibility into what online customers were doing before calling in—they have no knowledge as to “why” an individual needs their help, so must ask time-consuming diagnostic questions instead. This lack of visibility and context creates a multi-channel customer experience gap that results in slower problem resolution, lower first-call resolution rates and less satisfied customers.

This gap impacts customer loyalty, causing significant harm to a company’s bottom line. A Harris Interactive survey shows that 45% of customers who receive bad service from a call center after having problems on the web will stop doing business with that company. Can any organization risk losing that much of its customer base?

Closing the Multi-channel Customer Experience Gap

This cross-channel issue is pervasive. In fact, a recent survey3 of e-business professionals conducted by consulting firm Econsultancy shows that only 3% of businesses provide an excellent multi-channel customer experience. The same study shows that for 94% of businesses the offline parts of their companies have limited or no visibility into how customers have engaged with their websites.

So what are organizations to do about this issue? How do they gain visibility into the online customer experience to close this costly gap? There are a few different approaches to consider.  

Duplicate Website: Some organizations provide call center agents with an internal version of their websites so those agents can “impersonate” their customers. However, this mandates maintaining not one but two sites—including any current pricing, product promotions, etc.; it doesn’t account for transaction history, visitor preferences and the unique and unpredictable behavior of each user.

Shadow-Browsing: Contact center agents may also have co-browsing tools, allowing them to follow customers through the site. However, these tools do not give agents context about what happened prior to the customer’s call. Co-browsing works only at the point when the customer reaches the call center.

Customer Experience Management: Done properly, Customer Experience Management, or CEM, provides visibility into the complete context of the online experience—it moves beyond what customers are doing in real-time to provide a quick snapshot of their actions from previous visits and online interactions with a business—from both mobile devices and website. This gives agents a first-hand look at why things went wrong for the customer. While on the phone with customers, agents can use this information to validate what those customers experienced and help them to accomplish their goals. After the call has ended, agents can quickly escalate any website problems to the appropriate team.

Why Close the Gap?

The benefits of closing the multi-channel customer experience gap are significant. They include:

• Shorter call handle times: Rather than asking the customer, “What did you just do?” the agent can begin each interaction at a point that makes sense to the customer and provide a much higher level of service. Research shows this ability shaves an average of 30 seconds off of call handle times.
• Improved first-call resolution: Front-line agents are able to solve customer issues themselves, so there’s less often a need to escalate the issue to tier-two support. That means greater efficiencies, lower costs, less time on hold for customers, and significantly improved customer satisfaction.
• Higher customer value: Call center agents are more likely to help the customer complete the transaction when they’re armed with online visibility. What’s more, agents now have valuable information about their customers’ interests, which they can leverage for targeted cross-selling and up-selling. Organizations can also use this information for proactive outbound calling—for example, reaching out to customers who abandoned just before completing their transaction online. Outbound teams have achieved dramatic results in closing business that would otherwise be lost.

The companies that invest the time and resources to close this gap will not only achieve the business benefits described earlier, they will also distinguish themselves by their superior customer service. In this day of far-reaching social media comments, #fails and Yelp ratings, the brand impact of cross-channel customer service is greater than ever.

About Tealeaf

Tealeaf is the industry-leading provider of Customer Experience Management solutions, with more than 450 enterprise customers worldwide. For organizations that make customer experience a top priority, Tealeaf solutions provide unprecedented enterprise-wide visibility into every visitor’s unique online interactions for ongoing analysis, website optimization and superior cross-channel customer service.