Orchestrating Experiences. Chris Risdon

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ rel="nofollow" href="https://NEWSROOM.LOWES.COM/NEWS-RELEASES/LOWESINTRODUCESLOWEBOT-THENEXTGENERATIONROBOTTOENHANCETHEHOMEIMPROVEMENTSHOPPINGEXPERIENCEINTHEBAYAREA-2/">HTTPS://NEWSROOM.LOWES.COM/NEWS-RELEASES/LOWESINTRODUCESLOWEBOT-THENEXTGENERATIONROBOTTOENHANCETHEHOMEIMPROVEMENTSHOPPINGEXPERIENCEINTHEBAYAREA-2/

FIGURE 1.2 LoweBot, developed by Lowe’s Innovation Labs, opens a new channel to help customers find products in the store while also tracking and managing inventory.

      Lowe’s went online. Sears opened retail stores. UPS put digital tablets in its associates’ hands and self-service websites in its customers’ browsers. Netflix shifted to streaming. Amazon now sends their own delivery drivers (and drones!) to bring items to your door. Over time, organizations determine which channels to invest more or less in to meet their business objectives and connect with the evolving needs and behaviors of their target customers.

      A good example of this evolutionary pattern can be seen in marketing. As the number of communication channels expanded in the last century, marketing groups (and their external agencies) formed teams to own newer channels, such as web, email, search engines, social media, and mobile. A typical marketing campaign, as a result, requires a lot of coordination. Multiple channel experts must align around a common strategy, the channel mix for tactics, and a plan on how to get all the right messages to all the right people at exactly the right time. Then they must coordinate with internal and external partners to define, design, and develop customer touchpoints for their channel.

      That’s a lot of people and a lot of coordination, and marketing is only one group among many looking to leverage the same channels to deliver value to customers.

      NOTE WHAT’S A TOUCHPOINT?

      That’s a good question. Definitions—and whether it’s spelled touchpoint or touch point!—differ as much as they align in disciplines from marketing to service design. For now, think of a touchpoint as what facilitates an interaction within or across channels between a person and a product or service. But, it’s a little more complicated than that. Chapter 2, “Pinning Down Touchpoints,” will delve into how to understand and codify your touchpoints.

      These dynamics have only accelerated over the past 30 years as new digital channels—web, email, mobile, virtual reality, and so forth—have emerged as new ways to communicate, interact, and deliver products and services. The bright and shiny digital world often overshadows older media and channels. Yet, companies still invest in physical retail, direct mail, call centers, outdoor advertising, television, radio, and the like. (Just look at Amazon’s 2017 acquisition of Whole Foods.) A greater focus on digital doesn’t mean that the other channels go away—rather, it means that companies have more ground to cover than ever before.

      NOTE PRODUCTS VS. SERVICES

      Throughout this book, you will see the phrase “product and services” as a nod to the applicability of these approaches to multichannel, multitouchpoint systems. Services—such as traveling by air, staying at a hotel, or seeing your doctor—contain many products, and products—a digital camera or an automobile—can have many supporting services. Labels aside, if your offering operates in more than one channel with many touchpoints, you’re in good hands.

      Regardless of which channels it began operating in originally, a company’s organizational chart often reflects this type of channel or business expansion (see Figure 1.3). With each emerging channel, companies typically follow a pattern of leaning on outside experts and then building those capabilities and skills internally as it becomes clear that they are core to the business’ long-term success. New groups get built and slotted next to existing channel teams, each with its own strategies, visions, plans, and incentives for creating customer experiences. This redundancy leads to fragmented channel experiences, as well as more complexity in connecting touchpoints across functions and channels.

      Channel proliferation (and its resulting effect on organizational structure) has made life complicated for even relatively small companies. How much should be invested in each channel? How can traditional channels be maintained while shifting into emerging channels? How do you manage all these channels? Who owns which channel and how do you get on their priority lists?

FIGURE 1.3 A representative organizational chart reflecting the separation of functions combined with channel proliferation.

      When taking this all into consideration, remember this one fact: customers don’t really care about channels.

Channels Don’t Exist in Isolation

      What do customers care about? They want products and services that deliver for their explicit goals and implicit needs. Customers care about how organizations treat them, how their time is spent, and when and where they interact with products and services. In this landscape, channels are a means to an end.

      Historically, organizations have viewed customer interactions and the channels that support those interactions—phone, store, and web—through a one-to-one lens. Each channel’s team delivers solutions to support customer tasks with their channel. But this doesn’t reflect the reality of how customers move across channels and connect with products and services.

      People interact with many channels every day. They also switch among them—sometimes by choice, sometimes not. A commuter hears an advertisement on a podcast for ordering glasses online, checks out the website, and orders a sample kit, receives the kit a few days later, tries to chat online with customer service, and then finally calls a toll-free number to get her questions answered (see Figure 1.4). This type of scenario plays out millions of times every day with all sorts of products and services.

FIGURE 1.4 Companies organize by channel, but customers move across channels in predictable and unpredictable ways.

      Yet, customers don’t think about channels. They navigate the options available to them based on knowledge, preference, or context. Pathways can be designed to try to nudge customers to stay or move to a specific channel, but humans envision their own pathways where it is more attractive, useful, or expedient.

      The general wisdom is that customers have these preferences, but organizations still spend a lot of time and energy to optimize channel investments and move customers to low-cost channels. Digital transformation efforts (common to most companies the last two decades) have moved jobs performed by employees to customers themselves (i.e., self-service).

      Customers also do not care about what groups own the channels that support their experiences. An IKEA customer having an issue with the online store can easily walk into their local store to complain because, to the customer, it’s all IKEA. The physical store team likely had little to no role in the online experience, yet consistency and continuity of experience is the customer’s expectation.

      Over the last 20 years, organizations have been told by analysts and consultants to strive to be omnichannel—available to customers in multiple, coordinated channels. Brand teams push to have a consistent look, voice, and tone in all their channels. Marketers attempt to create continuity in messaging while optimizing for high-impact channels. Technologists define architectures to share data and track customer actions across channels. As a result, much talk and effort СКАЧАТЬ