Speech Summaries

Nelson Carbonell CEO Cysive

Lunch/Sponsor Presentation by Cysive

The 5 Building Blocks for a Great Multichannel Experience

Nelson Carbonell, CEO, Cysive, focused on five elements that make multichannel experiences great, both for the customer and for the business -- Choice, Consistency, Continuity, Coordination, and Control.

Designing a great experience, from the customer's perspective, includes providing them with the choice of channels that they want to use. Enterprises are already multichannel today since they typically have some combination of physical locations, web sites, live customer service, IVR systems, and other channels. The measure of a great multichannel experience from the customer's perspective is whether they can use the channel that is most convenient for them. New channels will emerge over time, potentially including recent innovations such Tivo and OnStar.

When customers interact with the enterprise over different channels, it's essential that the channels are consistent -- so that the customer gets the same results and can follow the same processes as appropriate. Unexpected differences in information or capabilities between channels will confuse and frustrate customers. It is also essential to provide customers with continuity in their experience as they move across channels by maintaining the customer's context from one channel to another. This will avoid the common, and frustrating, problem we're all familiar with where we key our account number into an IVR system, and then if we transfer to a live customer service agent, we have to provide the same information again. Bad experiences like this will condition customers to use more expensive live channels.

Another part of a great multichannel experience is coordination -- enabling a customer to follow a process in one channel, and then if necessary escalate to get help from a service agent, who can see the customer's problem in the context of where they are at that moment, then return the customer to self service.

The final element is control -- enabling the enterprise to monitor, measure, and manage customer interaction across channels. Great multichannel customer experiences don't happen by accident. They are based on an overall scenario design of how customers interact. The actual customer activity should be tracked and analyzed across channels, and scenario adjustments made as necessary to control and improve the interaction process for the customer, and make it as effective as possible for the enterprise. This control capability becomes a tool to achieve right channeling, and to change customer behavior, both during the process of pre-sale demand creation as well as in post-sale service.

Nelson finished with a case study of a Fortune 500 company that applied these principles to an employee benefits program using Cysive's Cymbio Interaction Server to lead users into more self-service activities -- thereby increasing their satisfaction using the system as well as providing significant economies to the company.