Customers Are Channel Neutral

The pervasiveness of telephones, email, and the Internet in the last few years have provided customers with multiple opportunities to interact with organizations – and they do so with ever-increasing frequency. The challenge for most organizations is to determine how to create meaningful interaction at each touch-point that adds value for both the customer and the company – while still maintaining the brand promise across all channels.

Organizations have made significant investments in developing technology to engage and interact with the consumer for the purpose of providing improved choices in product selection and purchase on the front-end, yet similar investments have not been made to integrate the back-end fulfillment and transaction management technology. As a result, the typical organization has created multiple ways for the consumer to engage the company, only to disappoint the same consumer by the bottleneck of information created by the silo approach to managing each channel.

This approach to engaging the consumer is driven primarily by a culture that values customer acquisition over customer retention as a means to meet revenue targets. In an era when almost every product and service offered could be called a “commodity,” organizations are finding that they’ve failed to understand how to build their brand and deepen customer value with consistent interactions and communications through multiple channels.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight potential challenges to multi-channel or omnichannel customer interactions and identify high-level solutions to these challenges.

This whitepaper was originally created for The Jackson Group in 2003 to explore omnichannel marketing challenges. Some content may be dated.