What Is ‘Channel-less Customer Experience’ and How to Ace It

We talk about why despite the choice of a channel being important to a customer, she wants the experience to be hassle-free and channel-agnostic. We also give you some channel-less customer experience (CX) tips and examples to help you ace CX 2019.

It’s 2019, and hyper-personalization of customer experience is not a luxury but a necessity. It does not matter how the customer contacts you – be it through live chat, mobile, email, or social media –  her only desire is to achieve an effective solution to her problem. If a brand makes that journey simple and seamless, the customer will enjoy the journey and most likely return.

**A customer expects to have a consistent experience across every touchpoint and interaction with the brand. It’s the marketer who think in terms of channels, not the customer.** While omnichannel marketingOpens a new window is having its CX moment, there is merit to considering a ‘channel-less’ approach to CX – which is essentially a mindset change. Here’s why.

What is Channel-less Customer Experience?

Unlike omnichannel which implies a blanket approachOpens a new window – including all possible channels and touchpoints when designing for CX, channel-less customer experience is all about designing a seamless customer experience that allows the customer to enjoy a consistent brand interaction irrespective of the channel. This means, instead of focusing resources on trying to patch together the brand experience across multiple channels and platforms; or on ensuring you are present on every single channel that exists;  the brand starts with the experience and not the platforms on which the experience will be delivered. This helps easily recreate the experience on any channel – including any new ones – quickly and with agility. The channel becomes incidental – the experience becomes central

Also Read: The Goal: Customer-Centric Branch TransformationOpens a new window

In his article The Rise of Omnichannel – A Movement Built on Fallacy?Opens a new window Paul Mandeville, Chief Product Officer at QuickPivot, cites an example, “Let’s say a customer scrolls past a sponsored post in her Instagram or Snapchat feed that prompts her to go to a fashion blogger’s site and read about your brand’s latest set of wedges for Spring. In traditional omnichannel marketing, that might trigger an email communication or a browser-based remarketing campaign. If you’re thinking like a channel-less marketer, however, you might consider that if you do not give that customer a way to shop for those shoes within a 10-second timeframe, you’ll lose the sale. Why not skip the downstream omnichannel triggers altogether? Once she’s reading the blog post, give her a single-click link right to your ordering and fulfillment platform so she can purchase those shoes.”

Mandeville says that this way the marketer and the brand have not only created a direct line from marketing to sales but also shown the customer that they know what she wants. “And you’re doing it by being responsive and anticipatory, not invasive. Moreover, now you know this customer reacts favorably to seasonal fashion changes so that you can be predictive in your outbound communication come Fall,” he adds.

Mandeville’s example shows that channel-less customer experience is easier to achieve than you think.

Also Read: Reshaping the Customer Experience in 2019Opens a new window

How to Achieve Channel-less Customer Experience

Here are two important mindset shifts when it comes to developing a channel-less approach to CX:

1.Focus on the Customer and the Desired Brand Experience – Not the Channel:  

**The customer expects a deeply connected brand experience. They don’t care if its in-store, with a salesperson, with a laptop, coupon, helpdesk or on Amazon!** In fact, it will probably be simultaneously on multiple channels. When a brand keeps the focus on the customer journey and builds an experience that can shift seamlessly between the phone, messenger, website – anywhere – in real-time, they get closer to the idea of channel-less CX. While this ‘real-time experience across any channel’ cannot be accomplished without technology, the crux is envisioning the customer journey and building the brand experience into that journey.

Another interesting way to approach that is to think of the ‘marketing moments’ – or delivering delightful experiences ‘in the moment’ since there is no ‘one blanket’ customer journey. Build experiences that are flexible enough to delight in the moment rather than building experiences that plan for a long journey/ engagement that we really have no way of predicting in advance.

2.Embrace Technology:

While the insight comes from immersion into customer expectations (which are increasingly unpredictable and complex), the execution will need the right technology. Whether it is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)Opens a new window that delivers a unified view of the customer across channels in real time; an intelligent ‘AI’ brain that helps determine the ‘next best action’ even before the customer makes their choice of channel; conversational marketing that can switch to any platform in real time to keep the conversation going; or an automated shopping experience such as Amazon Go, the idea is that marketers need to prepare for a future which will undoubtedly be made up of multi-channel, multi-device, interconnected and real-time interactions. The customer won’t care that you have a presence in every single channel (the omnichannel approach) but will care that they had a great experience – irrespective of the channels they chose.

Let’s take the example of Amazon Go. Amazon surely didn’t start with the idea ‘let’s make a store where everything is automated and doesn’t need a cashier’. The insight was that customers want to feel more in control of their shopping experience – they hate standing in line, and they don’t want to have to carry cash or cards everywhere they go; they want to be able to pick up groceries on their walk home as quickly and smoothly as possible. And then they worked on creating a CX that would be flexible enough to encompass any touchpoint that became a part of this journey. 

Also Read: Customer Experience: It’s All About the DetailsOpens a new window

In 2019, Focus on Owning the Customer Experience – Not the Channels

In interviews to MarTech Advisor, Tom Libretto, CMO of Pega SystemsOpens a new window spoke of realizing this approach from the technology point of view; and Glen Hartman, Managing Director, Accenture InteractiveOpens a new window spoke about it from the marketer’s point of view.  Either way, it’s about refocusing brand interactions around the customer, not the channels. It’s about knowing why a customer bought something, and how they chose to buy it; not just what they bought. Knowing the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of customer purchases helps both- the marketer and the AI come up with better ‘next steps’ than just tracking the ‘what’, including knowing which channels to optimize for in that specific personalized instance.

The channel-less mindset and approach to CX may just be the way to win the CX battle of the next decade!