The $4.6B Omni-channel Opportunity
A multi-channel environment means that coordinating and launching new services is complicated and expensive. Customer data exists in isolated chunks, stuck in siloes, with different business process logic per channel. As well as driving up the cost of campaign management, multi-channel is degrading the service experience for customers who expect seamless service.
Customers today expect a consistent brand experience irrespective of the channel they use. They also expect that sales and service staff and systems will have full knowledge of and access to the information about previous interactions. For example, a customer who complains about their mobile phone on a live webchat with a customer services agent would expect the retail store to have a record of that chat when the customer visits to have the device repaired or replaced.
Another example would be a customer browsing online and building a preferred shortlist of devices, then visiting a store to see the physical products, and finally ordering and paying for the product via a smartphone app. The store staff would know the customer had already looked at the products online and would have the shortlisted products to hand. The app would know which products the customer had looked at in-store and have the choice ready for checkout.
Can a mobile operator deliver that experience today? Many operators would struggle to support a customer seamlessly through this type of journey, and the Northstream research showed that most of those interviewed believe that an omni-channel solution is key to meeting their requirements. One response was: “From a disruption perspective, if you are the one in telco that can provide a single customer view and omni-channel in a good way, you can have an enormous advantage over the others.”
Yet operators believe there are some major challenges associated with the omni-channel approach, with legacy IT considered to be the main barrier. Operators are also dealing with multiple teams operating channels in parallel, with their own processes, compensation/commission models and organizational structures.
The disconnected multi-channel setup means that operators face significant customer-related challenges and huge missed opportunities for customer engagement. The separate channels cannot easily share data, and this prevents meaningful holistic customer insights from which the operator could create personalized value-added services.
It must be said that operators are dealing with a more complicated environment than is seen in other industries. Telco propositions are complex by their very nature. As well as the differences in the way products and services are bundled, there are more sophisticated processes for promotion, lifecycle and order management. To support the complex inventories, contract offerings, numerous payment options and billing analysis (all characteristic of the telco operator landscape) requires a great deal of resilience and heavy lifting. Omni-channel commerce is complex, calling for a huge amount of accurate information to be available to the customer and the operator 24/7. Managing this requires specialized systems, built for the job and integrated into the operator’s enterprise architecture, not adapted or re-engineered systems simply ‘bolted on’ to attempt to do the job. With a fit-for-purpose system, services can be designed and deployed once, and rolled out across all channels simultaneously, streamlining the introduction of new campaigns and service launches.
