Digital channel strategy

Ambition

To integrate online as the key enabler to bring the channels together in one single experience across all phases of the customer life-cycle, ultimately becoming a partner in the customer dialogue. The telco as a pro-active advisor rather than being reactive to customers reaching out.

 

Problem statement

Channels have developed in isolation of each other, pursuing individual goals and building channel-specific journeys. As a result, channels compete and cannibalise rather than complement and strengthen each other.

 

Direction
Channel and lifecycle 360° with digital @ core

Besides being a self-service channel, online shall evolve as the key logistical enabler to tie retail and call centre into one seamless experience.

Although those customers that are comfortable with online services can fulfil the entire journey within the online channel, most customers will use a combination of touch points across channels to buy, get help and use the telco services. The total landscape of touch points will foster a dialogue with customers, rather than merely ‘push products’.

 

In order to understand your current and future customer experience, you will need to map your journeys comprehensively. The concept below shows the ‘value blue print’ where the customer journeys, the lifecycle and the capabilities are linked to their commercial results (either save on cost or increase on value-add).
A detailed description of the approach can be found here: Step-by-step Journey Mapping

 

20151118 service_blueprint_lifecycle

Phase
We focus on a specific section of the life cycle to document the customer journey. The Journey is defined as a specific customer objective from initiation to satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction
We measure the current NPS feedback from our users and customers and plot it against the level we aspire in the strategic period.

Customer behaviour
We document the customer experience from the customer’s perspective and from 3 discrete angles:

  1. What the customer feels (entry and exit emotion)
  2. What the customer thinks (information)
  3. What the customer does (intended action)

Goals:
We define the ultimate goals for a successful user experience for both the customer and the Brand, which do not always coincide.

Channel roles
From the strategic direction, we take the current and target channel roles. This will expose the target channel shifts we aim to achieve with the UX design.

Key capabilities
A capability is defined in three elements:

  1. Functionality (technology)
  2. Process (governance)
  3. People (skills)

We document the required capabilities to facilitate the UX. A capability is nominated, yet not detailed to the extend that is required to develop the ultimate solution. This will be done in-market on the basis of the local legacy IT and local processes.

Functional core
We need to get an early insight in the incurred complexity for our back-end systems. Using the impacted processes as a starting point we document the functional requirement to our core IT systems by defining the information captured from the user (agent, customer) and passed on to the back-end via the screen interfaces. Subsequently we define the requirement for the information that is passed back to the user in order to continue the process.

To baseline the digital maturity of your channels today it is good to start making a comprehensive inventory of the current status, the target and the gap between it. The angles on which to assess are explored in the digital channel assessment.