Your Omnichannel Strategy: Common Problems and How to Solve Them
With Julien Rio, AVP of International Marketing at RingCentral
Show Notes
Julien Rio is the AVP of International Marketing at RingCentral, a leading provider of employee and customer communications systems.
Although Julien comes from a marketing background, his passion has always been around customer experience. He is a CCXP (Certified Customer Experience Professional), and co-host of the CX Therapy podcast.
Today, he shares the common problems he sees in omnichannel strategies, and how to solve them.
Julien’s Top 2 Tips
Open one new channel at a time, by finding out which one customers use on daily basis, and then launching it with only a sample of customers. That way, you can expand it at the rate you’re comfortable, or switch it off if it doesn’t work (11:28).
If you’re thinking of switching off a channel, make sure the data shows that it’s time to transition away from it. Assumptions can often get in the way of making the right choice (13:12).
You'll Learn:
The difference between omnichannel, multi-channel, and cross-channel, and why it’s important to know (02:47).
Why moving to an omnichannel approach is mission critical for your business, if customer experience is a priority (04:28).
The 2 steps (which are often missed) that will help you deploy your omnichannel channel strategy successfully (05:46).
The skills to bear in mind when recruiting agents to deliver an omnichannel experience (08:24).
The danger of having phone teams also do email, which hurts customer experience (10:22).
Why good customer experience is the shortest path to additional revenue (14:57).
How your Customer Service Representatives can be the best possible sales people in your team (16:37).
Connect with Julien on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julienrio/
Tune in to Julien’s podcast, ‘CX Therapy’ on YouTube, or follow it on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Follow me on LinkedIn, or connect with me on Facebook.
Transcript
Blair Stevenson (00:00)
Welcome to the Secrets to Contact Center Success podcast, connecting you with the latest and greatest tips from the best and the brightest minds in the industry.
I am Blair Stevenson, founder of BravaTrak. Our Sales Leadership System enables contact centres to increase revenue and achieve their sales growth targets.
Today I'm really pleased to be joined by Julien Rio, who's the Assistant Vice President of International Marketing for RingCentral, based in Paris. He's also the co-host of the CX Therapy podcast.
So Julien, welcome along. A pleasure to have you here.
Julien Rio (00:33)
Thank you so much for having me, Blair. I'm really happy that we found the perfect time slot between New Zealand and Paris, which was not necessarily an easy task, but here we are. So really glad. Thank you for the invite.
Blair Stevenson (00:44)
Thank you. Just for the sake of listeners, tell us a bit about who you are you, a bit about your background and experience.
Julien Rio (00:51)
I actually come from a marketing background. That's really what my job has been for the past 10 plus years. But my passion has always been around CX, which is not that different from marketing. It's actually a crossover, a pretty interesting one, because marketing has a big role to play in customer experience.
Now I also happen to be a CCXP, which is a Certified Customer Experience Professional. Not because I need that in my job, but because customer experience is such an important part of every company's life.
Blair Stevenson (01:23)
So for those listeners who don't know what RingCentral is, can you just give us a quick background of your company?
Julien Rio (01:32)
Absolutely. So RingCentral is a company that offers communication solutions, in the B2B world. So what I mean by communication is everything around internal communication. So if you've been around COVID in the past 18 months, you probably have realised that now we need to have video conferencing and team messaging and phone solutions at work. Both on your computer, your phone line and your smartphone.
So all these kinds of communication solutions to help internal communication, and external communication. Everything about how do I keep in touch with my customers? How do I power my contact centre? How do I make sure I'm available not just on phone, but on digital? And so that's really both sides of communication, internal and external. And that's what we've been doing for the past 20 plus years now.
Blair Stevenson (02:19)
Nice. I'm interested in a couple of things to talk about. One of them is, thinking about the conversations I have with my contact centre clients, I hear the term 'omnichannel' a great deal. I suspect there's a lot of confusion in that space between omnichannel and multi-channel. And so as a starting point, what does omnichannel mean to you versus multi-channel?
Julien Rio (02:47)
I think there are three terms that I've heard over and over again in the past few years. There is multi-channel, which is a starting point. Then you get cross-channel that we don't really hear about anymore, but that used to be a popular word 10 ish ago. And then there is omnichannel.
To me, the difference is pretty obvious. Multi-channel is, I am - as a company - available on multiple channels, but each channel works in a silo. Meaning there is no connection between those channels.
And when you start making an effort to allow customers to move from one channel to the other, you could end up with something that we would call cross-channel, that would basically allow you to build bridges between them. But the connection, the bridge, would not be smooth. It would not be seamless. We start something with you as a customer, I allow you to move to a different channel and you pretty much restart from scratch.
Omnichannel is a different beast entirely. Omnichannel is, I start anywhere, I continue anywhere. You keep the context, the background information. You allow me to continue that conversation like if I did not change channel. Omnichannel is also about mixing departments.
What I mean by that is, a company that is available from a marketing perspective on Facebook and Instagram, but customer service only by phone, is not omnichannel. You need to figure out how to harmonise the channels within your company, across different departments.
In just a few words, that's the main difference between the two terms.
Blair Stevenson (04:18)
Cool. And from your perspective, and from a CX perspective, why is it important to move to that omnichannel approach?
Julien Rio (04:28)
I don't think that's important. I think that's vital. I think that's way beyond important at this stage. I think the best way to describe it is to go with an example.
How often do you call a hotline, explain your problem after waiting for ages on the phone, explain your problem, get transferred because that was not the right person, need to re-explain the whole problem over again. Then they tell you, "You need to send an email." So you drop the line. You need to rewrite the whole thing in a form because you've lost context again. Moving from one channel to the other, restarting the whole thing.
I don't have my notes and my official latest stats with me, but if you look at any survey, that's one of the biggest pain points that customers are talking about when they say, "When you feel your customer experience is not satisfactory, what's the problem?" It's usually too much waiting time and having to re-explain over and over again, who am I? What is my problem?
People hate that. I hate that. I'm sure you do. And you don't have that when omnichannel is being deployed properly.
Blair Stevenson (05:34)
How can contact centres then ensure a constant customer experience across those channels? Clearly there's a technology element involved there.
Julien Rio (05:46)
So there is a bit of technology because technology enables it. But there is a major processes change that you need. Technology is just going to support it, but the right technology without the right processes is just a waste of your money. You need to get both sides of the coin. So in terms of processes, the first thing I would say is, you've got to change the way you look at teams.
Meaning, even if you have perfect technologies that mix everything up, and then you've got that omnichannel journey on paper - because the technology is here - if you've got a social media team that has different objectives, different KPIs, different processes, different whatever, from the email team - which is different from the phone team - and those guys never communicate with each other, then you still end up with the same silos.
(06:33)
And therefore you might have the omnichannel tools and technology, but end up with a multi-channel CX. So the first thing is figuring out, "How do we make sure that people actually work together?" A good approach to that - and it's very easy to say, it's obviously more difficult to execute - but a good approach to that is to stop looking at channels altogether, and start looking at problems and categories.
Meaning, if I reach out to you with a financial issue - I need to download my latest invoice or I could not pay my bill for whatever reason - I should talk to an agent that is specialised in that type of issue.
Regardless of whether I'm talking to you through Twitter, through WhatsApp, through email, through phone, I should have a finance / accounting expert. If I have a technical issue, same kind of thing. You should somehow become channel agnostic, because I should get the same kind of answer regardless of the channel I'm using. That's probably step number one.
(07:29)
Step number two is, obviously, we need to start with the contact centre, because those are the most critical experiences you have with customers, because you have human connection. But CX is not just customer service, right? It goes way beyond. So you need to start with the contact centre, but you need to spread that word across all the departments.
I'm thinking obviously, sales, who are very much in contact with customers as well. Marketing, because they are talking to customers. It's important that they get this alignment. So you really need to spread this across the rest of the company. The contact centre is probably the right place to start because it's a very critical one.
Blair Stevenson (08:04)
So thinking about starting with the contact centres, it seems to me that potentially one of the challenges is you've got, in some ways, different skillsets associated with voice contact - phone contact - versus digital contact. I suspect you're, to some extent, recruiting different people in those spaces. What's your experience there?
Julien Rio (08:24)
I would recommend you hire different people. And while I'm saying you need to remove silos based on channels, you still need to keep some level of silos based on competencies. And I don't like the word 'silos', there's probably a better way to phrase that, but a voice agent has very specific skills. We don't ask him to have perfect grammar. You don't ask him to know how to write an email efficiently or to type quickly on a keyboard.
But what do you want from a voice agent? You want him to have a soothing voice that makes your customer feel good, that makes them calm down when they start the conversation being angry. That you need them to show empathy. You need them to be able to take on the heat, because having a angry customer on the phone is not an easy thing to do. So there are a lot of personal skills, soft skills, that this voice agent needs to have.
Now when you talk to a digital agent, you need someone - regardless of the voice they have, it doesn't matter, the customer is never going to hear that - you need them to know how to type an email properly, quickly. You need them to have the perfect grammar. There are so many differences.
And in the future, probably the near future, not in every country, but in the near future, we're going to start looking at a new hybrid type of agent, which is going to be the video agent, who needs to have a soothing voice, but also need to be able to be on camera without feeling stressed about it, and present properly. And that's a new type of skill, again.
Julien Rio (09:56)
And I think because the skills are different, you have to have different teams with different trainings. They have to mingle. They have to know each other and to have common ground so that they answer customers the same way, but different skills. So probably different tools, different strategies. And that is incredibly important if you want to have that omnichannel structure.
One thing that I find that we've been doing in this industry for the past 30 years, I guess - I exaggerate, 20 years is probably more realistic - is adding the email channel to the phone team. And why we do that is because we use it as a patch. When I don't have a phone call and I have nothing else to do, then I do emails because emails are asynchronous while the phone is synchronous. So I don't want to lower my productivity. So whenever there is no phone call, I move on to emails.
And I think that's a mistake. It does make sense from a productivity standpoint. I understand it. There's a good reason why we're doing that, but they're not the same skills. And usually when you're good at one, you're not necessarily good at the other. And that's probably hurting your CX, even though it's helping your productivity KPI. So probably something to keep in mind.
Blair Stevenson (11:11)
Yeah. Makes huge sense. Just thinking about this omnichannel strategy, what are the challenges that contact centre leaders are going to face when implementing it in their contact centre? What are some tips you've got for them?
Julien Rio (11:28)
Well, the first thing is something I love in the CX world. We keep saying, "Don't try to boil the ocean", and that's very much it. Meaning, whatever your CEO is telling you, don't start 15 new channels this year, because it's not going to work. So you're going to have to start one after the other.
What I've found seems to be the most successful approach for all the companies I've been working in the past few years, is to have a test lab. Let me give you an example. Let's take the example of AXA because everyone knows AXA, they are really worldwide. I've worked with AXA Switzerland.
And what they've done is, when they wanted to open new channels - for example, they opened WhatsApp, they opened Apple Business Chat, which is the iMessage for businesses, and so on. They opened many new channels. What they did is two things.
(12:17)
First, they said, "Let's talk to our customers, find out what they use on a daily basis. Make sure we don't launch a new channel that no one cares about, but launch something that people actually use." Starting with the customer is never a bad thing. So that's what they did.
And then after that, instead of just saying, "Okay, we've got this new channel available, everyone can come", they started with a sample. They opened it to just a few people to see, do they use it? How do they use it? What does they use it for? And based on that, they started expanding to more and more people. Opening it, not just to customers within a specific customer journey, but to customers across the journey, then to prospects as well, web visitors and so on.
And that's probably the right path. Start with a channel, make sure it makes sense for your customers, and then open it slowly until you're comfortable. Because if you do it with a sample and it doesn't work, it's not too late to kill it. Once you open it to all customers, it's very hard to kill it. That's probably the first thing.
(13:12)
The second thing I would say around the strategy is don't make assumptions, always back everything up with data. And when you do that, you will often find out that you cannot kill a channel.
People often ask me, "The world is digital. Should we kill the phone?" No, you should not. You should absolutely not, because some of your customers will still prefer the phone 30 years from now. So if you do care for these customers, and that could be 5% of your customers, or it could be 95% of your customers, don't kill it. It's not because WhatsApp is a hot channel today that you should kill the phone, because otherwise you're going to upset people and lose this market share.
And there are also situations where the phone is important, regardless of whether you like it or not. When you have a complex problem to explain, a voice conversation is so much easier. So for all these reasons, try new stuff without killing the old ones, unless the data actually shows you that it's about time that you transition from it.
Blair Stevenson (14:08)
Makes a lot of sense. I'd like to just move over to another topic which is around the intersection between service delivery and sales, and where that fits from a CX perspective. And the reason I'm curious about your thoughts on it is, I hear agents saying, "I want to provide really good customer experience, and therefore I don't want to be pushy with sales."
And yet, organisations have customers who are calling them, who actually have needs that the organisation can fulfill. And I'm curious about your take on where sales fits within CX, and that intersection between service delivery and sales.
Julien Rio (14:57)
I think those are actually the same thing. Good customer experience is probably the shortest path to additional revenue. Good customer experience usually does two things. It allows you to sell more to your existing customers, and it allows you to reduce churn and increase referrals. So basically making sure your customers stay longer, and they bring other customers as well.
Now you've used a word that I think is the core of the problem. You've used the word 'push' or 'pushy'. Yes, you should not push sales because if you push sales, it's probably that you're doing it wrong.
If a Customer Service Representative is trying to push a product because we can feel, "Hey, he has a commission at the end of the month, it would be really good for you as a customer to help him get that commission." I don't feel like I'm going to buy, because what is the value for me? Selling the value is way more important than selling the package.
(15:53)
So here are my thoughts on that. If you've had a conversation with a customer, he started angry or frustrated in some way, and after a few minutes discussion whether voice or in a written form - a digital conversation - that customer is now feeling good about it.
The problem is solved, the question is answered and you feel like the customer is in a much better mindset than he was five minutes ago. And you can identify through the conversation you had with that person, that there are things that you are selling that could actually make his life easier. And now is the time not to sell, but just to bring it to his attention and let him come to you and actually make a sale.
I think that Customer Service Representatives are the best possible sales people you have in your team, because they have built a strong bond, assuming that the customer experience went well. That's the prerequisite, obviously. But they've built such a strong bond by helping people, which your salespeople can hardly ever do because you see them coming, they are here to sell something.
Your Customer Service Representative, they have helped your customers out. So they build that relationship. You want to trust them because all they've been doing is listening to you and helping you out.
So there are two ways of doing it. It's either I'm telling you, "This is available. Do you want to buy it?" And that's probably not going to work, or selling through curiosity, getting to understand what is the problem, how we've solved it, and how could we actually sell extra value to make your life easier.
If you can do that, you're going to be way more successful. But it requires the Customer Service Representative to be trained for that. It's not a natural skill you were born with.
Blair Stevenson (17:36)
No, it's not, it's not. And the reality is that many people who are recruited as Customer Service Representatives, if they were really keen on sales, they would have gone into a sales role, and so there's a level of misunderstanding.
On the podcast recently, I had the chance to interview an experienced contact centre leader by the name of Emma Riordan. And she's a strong advocate of servant leadership, which is 'serve first, lead second'. And Daniel Pink in his book, 'To Sell is Human', talks about servant salesmanship. That is, along the lines of what you're talking about, serve first and sell second.
That is, let's find out what this person's needs are, let's help this person get those needs met. And if we identify any other needs along the way, then let's let them know about how we can help them fulfill those needs.
Julien Rio (18:35)
Absolutely. And sometimes, just having a fantastic customer experience and telling the customer, "If you need anything else, here is how you can reach out to me directly so that you don't go back to the long queue of holding the line for 20 minutes." Now we've built that relationship, here is how you can skip the IVR and get to the right person directly.
Sometimes you also find out that this person just needed to spend a couple of hours or a couple of days thinking about the offer and coming back to you, and then you make a sale because you made it available, you showed the value, you understand their needs, you built a bond, which is so much more powerful than pushing for sales. No one likes to be sold anything, people like to get the value.
Blair Stevenson (19:19)
Totally agreed. Fantastic. Julien, thank you very much for your time. It's been a pleasure having a chat with you. For listeners, you'll find a link to the show notes in the episode description below.
And if you'd like to connect with Julien on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/julienrio/), you'll also find the link to his LinkedIn profile in the description too.
Lastly, if you'd like to follow me on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevensonblair/) or connect with me on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/blair.stevenson.980), you'll find a link to my profile there as well.
Well, that's it from us today. Have a productive week.