Traditionally, the Service Desk has been the most prominent (if not the only) method of contact users have had for the IT department.
Today, users want to receive service their way, using the channels and interfaces they prefer. They want immediate relief from issues whether through self-service or targeted expertise. The next wave of service will engage users where they want to be by providing a true omnichannel experience. To meet these new(-ish) needs, service desks must transition from their current, rather formal configuration to become more nimble Responsive Automation Centers (RACs) that embrace omnichannel IT service delivery.
In this article, I’ll discuss what omnichannel is and isn’t, how omnichannel – which originated in marketing – can and should apply to IT service delivery, and how to approach and achieve this evolution from the perspective of the RAC.
What is Omnichannel?
Unless you have been spending an inordinate amount of time with your colleagues in the marketing department, right now the term omnichannel may seem like little more than the next buzzy word-salad-of-the-day verbal entree. I am going to take a moment here to describe this term from a general, business-friendly perspective. Then we’ll look at it through the lens of IT, the service desk, and the RAC.
Omnichannel: Your Friend from Marketing
As mentioned above, omnichannel originated in Marketingland. So, let’s start there.
HubSpot defines omnichannel as “a method where businesses promote their products and services across all channels, devices, and platforms using unified messaging, cohesive visuals, and consistent collateral. Omnichannel marketing ensures you reach customers where they are with a relevant and on-brand offer. Hubspot then goes on to say, “Omnichannel…is a lead nurturing and user engagement approach in which a company gives access to their products, offers, and support services to customers or prospects on all channels, platforms, and devices.”
Apimio states, “According to recent research on consumer expectations, 87% of shoppers desire a personalized and consistent purchasing experience across all shopping channels.” The real beauty of taking the omnichannel approach is that while consumers can switch communications channels at any time and continue the conversation in whichever mode is the most convenient for them in the moment, we are capturing all of this content for use across our organization.
Fundamental to your success in integrating your RAC into your Omnichannel strategy will be a PIM (product information management) tool to collect, store, manage, and syndicate product information across your multiple channels. Collating and coordinating all of this consumer information is the key to targeting your consumers with marketing messages tailored to their specific needs based on where they are in the buying/support/consuming process. Such targeted efforts will significantly improve conversion rates – and user support satisfaction rates for the RAC. Proper analytics from such a tool will give you the insights into your consumers you need to be successful.
What’s the Difference Between Omnichannel and Omni-Digital?
There is a chance you might also hear the term Omni-digital. The contrast between the two is quite subtle but it centers on how omnichannel and omni-digital focus on the consumer.
- Omnichannel concentrates on the content. What content over what channel in what moment will be of most value to the consumer.
- Omni-digital concentrates on delivering a consistent overall consumer experience across the entirety of the digital interaction. The central focus is the unified consumer experience, the various digital channels are just different ways to achieve the goal.
Even though omni-digital is more consistent with our goals for the RAC, I will use omnichannel, the better known and more widely used term, as a stand in for both in this article. But please keep this distinction in mind.
What’s the Difference Between Omnichannel and Multi-Channel?
While multi-channel marketing is lightyears ahead of single channel (meaning a single, physical storefront or phone number, for example), it does have its own major shortfalls: none of these channels are integrated.
Simply, all omnichannel communication will be multi-channel in its diversity but only a small amount of multi-channel will be sufficiently coordinated to qualify as omnichannel.
A multi-channel environment, for example, might have multiple marketing teams, each dedicated separately to one channel but none of them share information with the others. Have you ever dealt with a company that had completely different pricing, incentives or even product lineups based on whether you walked into the store, called their phone number, or visited their website? Essentially, multi-channel communication is just an unrelated, non-coordinated collection of single-channel efforts.
A personal example: serval years ago I bought a backyard trampoline for my daughter from a major sporting-goods chain. To save effort, I bought it from their online presence (with free delivery!) so I did not have to figure out how to get the huge box home from the physical store a few miles away in my sporty little convertible. Later, when I needed some spare parts, I drove to one of their outlets only to find that their online store and brick-and-mortar stores sell a completely different line-up of products, especially trampolines. The poor guy at the physical store was only vaguely aware of the online shop and had no idea how to help me. So, I had to go back home and order the parts online. The five-day wait for the delivery of the parts made for a very sad, very pouty, trampoline-less holiday weekend. Disappointment was the order of the day.
While it is great that we have so many ways to find services, getting a consistent answer can be a nightmare in this scenario. This is the classic shortfall of multi-channel marketing: different, uncoordinated messaging going through different, uncoordinated channels of communication.
Returning to our IT context, the following diagram depicts the many ways that your users can contact you. This extends not to just your Service Desk but perhaps even to your larger enterprise as well.
Service Desk Access Channels
The best Service Desk example for this phenomenon is when you, the user, have to tell the same story about your outage to five different people before anyone can help you. Sure, you may be able to contact the Service Desk via phone, email, chat, or whatever else, but if no one is coordinating the various communications media to centrally capture your information, especially during escalations, you would not be exaggerating if you called this a major waste of time. The battle cry of “Don’t you people ever talk to each other?” is a frequent refrain when users must describe their issue every time they are shifted through the support chain.
Each one of these communications channels represents the chance to lose vital customer input and information in the shuffle of the larger picture – someone will inevitably forget to write down key messages or write them down but fail to post them in the right place. Robust service management platforms like ServiceNow seek to coordinate and centralize this data gleaned from all of this user contact, but all too often poor implementation and even poorer processes and procedures can overwhelm the substantial benefits these platforms provide. As with everything else in IT (and life in general) the functional solution is never a technology-only one.
The real disappointment with multi-channel is the lack of follow up and follow through.
The real disappointment with multi-channel is the lack of follow-up and follow through.
WHY OMNICHANNEL FOR IT SERVICES?
At its heart, the goal of omnichannel is to weave all the communication channels you use to work with your customers and users into a single, unified experience for them. It’s achieved by making a myriad of channels available to your stakeholders (chat, Slack/Teams, text, social, websites, meetings/conventions, walk-ups/kiosks, apps and yes, even phone calls), letting them choose the one(s) they prefer, and making sure no messaging, context, or content is lost as communication flows between them (I’m looking at you, multi-channel).
The diagram below shows a scenario in which a consumer of your services moves between various communication methods, from social media through face-to-face. We must make sure that we do not miss or drop any part of that customer’s journey with us through all of these hand-offs.
Example: Customer Communication Journey
While the larger enterprise may already be doing this in terms of marketing and sales, Beyond20 sees it extending to the RAC and service delivery. With this approach, not only will IT, through the RAC, become one more member of the customer-facing omnichannel marketing stack, but the RAC itself will leverage that wealth of communication channels through which service consumers have access to reach us.
For example, the RAC may create or help create automated workflows for specific service request and incident scenarios, bypassing the need for person-to-person support contact so that the work gets to the right team without going through a service desk at all. Then, importantly, the RAC would help engineer a multichannel experience for each of these workflows.
We all need to think about positioning IT as a critical partner within the larger enterprise (you may have noticed how, these days, we are talking more about Enterprise Service Management, or ESM, and less about IT Service Management, or ITSM). At the end of the day, our job is to co-create value with our customers and stakeholders so they can achieve their desired outcomes – not just to keep little green lights green. This is how we move IT’s mindset from being a purveyor of technology into becoming a provider of services. Seamless communication with our users and customers is at the very center being a successful services provider – and omnichannel is critical to achieving it.
THE FUTURE OF OMNICHANNEL WITH THE RESPONSIVE AUTOMATION CENTER
Perhaps you have read this and think, “Thank goodness we already got all of this dropped-communications stuff with our Service Desk sorted out years ago.” (Or maybe your Service Desk is still working on it, in which case you are by no means alone.) “Does this mean we already have a RAC and I can stop reading now?” To which I say, “Probably not.”
The real RAC will not just leverage omnichannel for its own, internal work; it will also be leveraged by your organization’s larger omnichannel consumer-communications strategy.
Think back to the first diagram in this article, the one showing all the various communications channels your customers have access to for your complete brand experience. You can see the direct involvement of the RAC in orange, right in the middle of the mix. This means that RAC agents must have access to considerably more consumer data than they likely have today.
Example: Customer Communication Journey with the RAC
Right now, when your consumers (either internal or external) contact the Service Desk, the agent they speak with typically only has access to any technical IT tickets they have opened. In other words, from the service-desk point of view, the consumer experience begins and ends with IT: those tickets that cover incidents, service requests, changes, problems, known errors and the like. For anyone who has ever lived through a service-desk-transformation effort, you know that just getting to this point is a major achievement, not to be held in low esteem. A lot of work went into getting here.
In addition to creating and maintaining all the Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and automation technology – plus be the engine that drives customer empowerment, the RAC will have access to most if not all the information your enterprise has collected on your consumers, both business and technical. As they initiate technical support for a particular consumer, they will be able to see all the past enterprise contact we have made with that person. The products and services they use, the number of times they have visited our website(s), how marketing and sales have reached out to them, how, when and for what reasons they have used Customer Empowerment, how automation has touched them, if/when they have spoken to one of our SME resources on the RAC, and so much more. If a user does need to make a support call, rather than the consumer telling the RAC Solutionist their life story every time, that consumer-history information will be at the Solutionist’s fingertips. The RAC will have access to all the technical, organizational, and informational resources they will need to resolve those user issues they could not prevent in the first place.
Even more importantly, all of the technical issues that have come before the RAC for your consumers will now become part of their larger customer record. So now when marketing, sales, or customer service reaches out to your consumers, they will have access to IT support records as well. This means closing the loop on your CX and UX activities – the customer journey will now even include all support interactions, thus documenting the complete, holistic experience.
Let’s not forget that we can just as readily focus this effort internally, as well – some of this support will actually go to our own internal staff. So, adding to CX and UX, we need to think about the EX (Employee Experience). If we want to take the best care possible of our external consumers (as well we should), we need to look after the needs of our internal staff too. If they are not as productive as possible, they cannot do their jobs either. As an organization, ServiceNow is embracing the EX as essential to their overall mission. As you can see in this diagram, they say, “You employee doesn’t need to know where their requests go. They just need to know that their requests will be completed.”
Pathfinding, © ServiceNow
ServiceNow is leveraging the power of Omnichannel to make sure that they can communicate with their employees and service their requests however the employee chooses. Closing these UX, CX and EX loops and taking a more holistic view is what many are calling XM or Experience Management.
IMPROVE YOUR CONSUMER EXPERIENCE TODAY: IMPLEMENT OMNICHANNEL
Your RAC will likely be a much smaller but more capable organization, poised to be at the center or your enterprise’s larger consumer-experience chain of activities. They will be able to leverage all the major communication channels that consumers have access to, while drawing from and contributing to your consumers’ information. Additionally, moving to this Omnichannel model could go a long way towards reducing redundant communication channels and thus eliminating costly silos. As ServiceNow says, “Omnichannel lowers operational costs by bringing every involved agent together, ensuring that tasks are being performed efficiently, quickly, and in support of one another.” To go back to the specialist vocabulary: the fact that your RAC will be practicing Omnichannel will enable your enterprise to fulfill Omni-digital and that will deliver a vastly superior consumer-experience to everyone who contacts you.