When taking this all into consideration, remember this one fact: customers don’t really care about channels.
Channels Don’t Exist in Isolation
What do customers care about? They want products and services that deliver for their explicit goals and implicit needs. Customers care about how organizations treat them, how their time is spent, and when and where they interact with products and services. In this landscape, channels are a means to an end.
Historically, organizations have viewed customer interactions and the channels that support those interactions—phone, store, and web—through a one-to-one lens. Each channel’s team delivers solutions to support customer tasks with their channel. But this doesn’t reflect the reality of how customers move across channels and connect with products and services.
People interact with many channels every day. They also switch among them—sometimes by choice, sometimes not. A commuter hears an advertisement on a podcast for ordering glasses online, checks out the website, and orders a sample kit, receives the kit a few days later, tries to chat online with customer service, and then finally calls a toll-free number to get her questions answered (see Figure 1.4). This type of scenario plays out millions of times every day with all sorts of products and services.
FIGURE 1.4 Companies organize by channel, but customers move across channels in predictable and unpredictable ways.
Yet, customers don’t think about channels. They navigate the options available to them based on knowledge, preference, or context. Pathways can be designed to try to nudge customers to stay or move to a specific channel, but humans envision their own pathways where it is more attractive, useful, or expedient.
The general wisdom is that customers have these preferences, but organizations still spend a lot of time and energy to optimize channel investments and move customers to low-cost channels. Digital transformation efforts (common to most companies the last two decades) have moved jobs performed by employees to customers themselves (i.e., self-service).
Customers also do not care about what groups own the channels that support their experiences. An IKEA customer having an issue with the online store can easily walk into their local store to complain because, to the customer, it’s all IKEA. The physical store team likely had little to no role in the online experience, yet consistency and continuity of experience is the customer’s expectation.
Over the last 20 years, organizations have been told by analysts and consultants to strive to be omnichannel—available to customers in multiple, coordinated channels. Brand teams push to have a consistent look, voice, and tone in all their channels. Marketers attempt to create continuity in messaging while optimizing for high-impact channels. Technologists define architectures to share data and track customer actions across channels. As a result, much talk and effort goes into determining not only what channels to invest in, but also how to coordinate people, processes, and technologies to support and connect them.
This gets even more interesting when you look at the opportunities to mix and combine channels. A simple example is reflected in secure authentication experiences. In Figure 1.5, a user forgot her password to an online bank account. A typical pattern would be to ask her to fill in some information, such as the last four digits of a Social Security number and a bank account number. If she gets that right, then she is presented with the option to receive a passcode by email, text, voice, or (in unfortunate situations) by mail. This security requires the user to interact with two channels: web and text, web and email, mobile app and text, mobile app and email, or web and mail. The end-user here is trying to get one thing done—recover a password—but multiple channels are leveraged for security while offering the option of which channels to support user preferences.
FIGURE 1.5 Most online banks offer customers the option to combine the web channel with text message, voice, email, or IVR to complete the password retrieval process.
As much as companies try to organize and optimize investments, people, and processes by channel, they don’t exist in isolation. Customers maneuver among them, and smartly combining them can lead to innovation and delight. Yet, to be able to orchestrate experiences across channels, you must understand each channel’s unique material.
Channels Reflect Interactions, Information, and Context
To design for good product and service experiences, you must know the capabilities and constraints of the different channels at your disposal. Designing a form delivered via a mobile channel is very different than designing one delivered in print. Creating advertisements for web, outdoor, and television requires different skills and expertise. This means that organizations need specialists for each form to be defined, designed, and executed. These specialists are typically organized by channel (i.e., digital) and then by a specialty in that channel (i.e., web, mobile, etc.). A hierarchical taxonomy of channels based on technology, however, gets muddy fast in the context of defining and executing end-to-end experiences.
As an exercise, list common channels in your business by media, and you will find overlap, redundancy, and conflict. Some of these channels are defined by their context of use (mobile), some by the means of interaction (tablet), others by their technological means of distribution (web), and still others by the content or information they distribute (social media).
A better approach is to define channels by three qualitative facets—interaction, information, and context.
• Interaction: What means does the customer use to interact with you? Examples include touch devices, mouse and keyboard, keypad, or voice (see Figure 1.6).
• Information: What is the nature of the content being provided to, or exchanged with, the customer? For example, social media.
• Context: What is the context—from environment to emotion—in which the interaction is happening. For example, physical stores.
FIGURE 1.6 The materiality of a channel creates opportunities and constraints.
A channel may be defined by one or more of these facets. Thinking explicitly about each channel through this lens ensures that you are not overlooking the unique material of a channel and how best to leverage it to support customer needs.
Channels Support the Moment
The concept of channels is just that—a concept. Channels help functions and support reaching a company’s objectives—from marketing to operations to products.
This is where the challenge rears its ugly head again. Channel specialists, working in isolation, lack an overarching view of what customers will experience in other channels. They see their channel as the primary (if not only) point of customer interaction, not as one of many possible enablers for meeting customers’ needs.
Put another way, defining channels as destinations obfuscates their supporting role of enabling and facilitating customer moments in different contexts. A customer shopping in a physical store while using her mobile phone to talk with her spouse and comparison price-check via an app does not represent three separate users in three different channels. She is a single person in a decision moment in which each channel can help or hinder her experience.
When