Ian Golding is one of the most respected Customer Experience specialists out there. Recently in his blog he wrote a fantastic post – “John Lewis’s greatest challenge – the omni channel customer experience” – where he touches one of my dearest topics.
I have been trying to evangelise my readers, clients and peers about this for some time: Multi-Channel is different from Omni-Channel. And that discrepancy can ultimately have an enormous impact on the customer experience.
We are in the digital age and the majority of organisations offer their customers a variety of channels to interact, providing a Multi-Channel service. But the truth is – and this is what my personal experience tells me – all channels are detached.
This is the slide that I usually include in my presentations:
Should technology help? Yes, definitely. Is technology helping? No, not really. Due to the fact that organisations use silo applications for different channels, departments, or lines of business. Normally those silo applications don’t speak with one another.
If organisations want to make those silo applications talk to one another they have to build some complex, expensive, time-consuming and clunky integrations. Usually it ends up not working that well and being far away from perfection.
The best solution is to adopt an Omni-Channel platform where all channels are connected, and everything is truly and natively joined-up. Where customers can use their preferred and most convenient channel, and agents have a sole way of deal with interactions, regardless of the channel.
Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service (aka Oracle Service Cloud) is certainly the best, and probably the only Omni-Channel platform in the market.
Doctor CX 