Why you should be concerned about multi-channel communications
Very simply, to ensure that you can provide the best customer experience at
all touch-points, treating your customers as individuals and optimizing every
customer interaction to improve engagement. Why? To improve customer retention and
maximise growth and revenue possibilities.
This means communicating with your customers in a way that is personalized, contextually relevant and timely, using
channels that are appropriate and suit customer preferences. The key words are Context, Relevance and Immediacy.
To summarize: the right information at the right time and in the right place.
A multi-channel strategy allows you to communicate with your customers using the channels
they choose, not the channels you choose.
Why is multi-channel becoming so important?
Increasing competition. And in an on-line world, you are competing not only
against your direct competitors, but against the standards set by all on-line
consumer experiences.
Consumers are changing. Consumers are increasingly empowered, more
demanding, increasingly self-sufficient and more self-directed - and expect to
be treated as individuals.
Consumers are fragmenting into very different groups, with different
expectations and different technology experiences.
A multi-channel strategy will be critical in reaching Generation-Y consumers.
But it's not just about them - technology use is increasing across all demographics.
Technology continues to rapidly evolve. Mobile internet and Social Networking are having a big impact
on customer communications.
What channels?
There is an increasing range of digital channels through which organizations can communicate with their
customers and partners. At Thunderhead we think these are some scenarios you need to be able to support:
Mobile phones using text (SMS) or multi-media messaging (SMS).
Email - to desktop or mobile devices - delivering content in plain text,
HTML or attachments or via links.
Web pages deployed on portals - accessed from desktop or mobile devices.
Messages delivered to social networking sites, such as Facebook.
Messages delivered via personalized data feeds (RSS or ATOM).
Telephony and IVR applications (using VoiceXML).
For system-to-system communications, XML messaging.
Print of course remains a very important medium, and the most appropriate
channel for certain types of documents. Print comes in two varieties though –
hard copy through the mail, or electronic that can be delivered through digital
channels for local printing by the recipient, perhaps with a notification
message in an alternative channel.
The challenges
There are some challenges with multi-channel communications. These are some of the key ones:
Ensuring consistency and context of messaging across all channels for each customer.
Being able to make on-the-fly decisions about which channel to use. This is important with BPM and SOA integration. And often customer preferences will change, depending on their current situation.
Using more than one channel for one communication: for example, a PDF document delivered via an enterprise portal, with customer notification via another (SMS or data feed).
Our Thunderhead NOW platform, built on our "one-platform for all communications" paradigm, addresses these challenges while providing a full multi-channel capability.
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