How Walgreens, Valvoline, Garmin Approach Multi-Channel Customer Engagement

No customer management leader would dare endure the risk of publicly downplaying multi-channel customer engagement. The majority's perspective is decidedly different, however, when it comes to creating a meaningful form of that multi-channel engagement.

During the research process for its Multi-Channel Customer Management Report, Call Center IQ learned that only 30% of organizations are capable of serving customers in their preferred channels or seamlessly communicating information across contact channels. If organizations truly understand the importance of multi-channel, why are they so slow to implement some of the concept’s most fundamental tenets?

It would be easy—and accurate—to blame the disparity on the complacency that so frequently plagues the customer service community. But the reality is more nuanced.

Different companies—and, more importantly, different customers—will have different perspectives regarding a multi-channel customer experience. Attunement to those differences will determine the speed and philosophy with which an organization embarks on a multi-channel initiative.

It is for that reason that we asked three esteemed leaders from three reputable brands to share their perspectives on multi-channel engagement. All distinct, they provide a window into how different businesses are tackling the multi-channel question and thus how their efforts should and will be directed.

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Troy Mills, Walgreens

"I think the biggest transformation for call centers is just the fact that customers are interacting with us on multiple channels, and that the number of interactions is just continuing to increase. So we’re seeing more interactions, we’re seeing them across different channels, and our customers are expecting us to interact with them how they want to.

So, when you think about mobile, web, text, whether it’s your IVRs, chat, generally your human capital is the most expensive channel that you have. But how many of these channels that you have fail? And the first response you have is to go, let me go talk to a person. So what we’re trying to do is understand what are all those failure areas across the channels, so that we can keep the conversation consistent with our customers and allow them to self-serve, keeping the costs low. But it actually reduces their effort and jumps up their satisfaction."

Shawn Castle, Valvoline

"You can have all these channels, but what would also be good would be to have a marketing method that sways people to your preferred channel. You have to think, what’s the biggest opportunity for you? For us, it was phone, email, internal chat. So this internal chat thing has actually done really well for us. A team member can just run over to the point of sale, double-click an icon, and within eight seconds they’re getting a help desk, a tech line, or a customer care employee that can provide them an answer so that we can service you. It’s very seamless. And then, you know, you have a great experience.

You know, thirteen years ago, or even probably five years ago, we hired people that could answer the phone. Well today, you have to hire people that can, in our world, answer the phone, be able to respond to a tweet, respond to a Facebook post, answer a chat, and do that with some degree of proficiency. And even snail mail, I mean we still get snail mail. It’s so weird to go back and educate them on the right voice that we wanted and the right branding that we wanted."

Erica Tyler, Garmin

"From an agent perspective, you need to have a holistic view of all the interactions that you’ve had with the customer. And this is a disconnect that we once had, a severe disconnect. A customer could send us an email, a customer could call us, and we had nothing to tie those connections together. We couldn’t see that, ‘Oh hey this is the same customer that sent us an email, and then they also called us. We actually had two interactions with this customer.’"