In the main business to consumer industries there has been a large degree of product commoditisation over the last decade. Take a look at the mobile phone industry, often the same handsets are available from all of the operating companies and there is a remarkable similarity between all of the tariffs which are on offer in a supposedly competitive market. The virtual network operators piggy-back on existing networks (for example Virgin Mobile on the Everything Everywhere network http://www.virginmobile.com/vm/ukCoverage.do?contentId=coverage.in.uk.howdoi.sm235) and even large brands share network infrastructure (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jun/07/vodafone-o2-4g-shared-network) either because of strange business holdings or just because of the huge capital cost associated with building new networks.

In the financial services industry you can buy essentially the same product from any one of a number of retail financial services organisations. In the insurance market consumers are often surprised by the end provider of the branded products that they have purchased. You have similarities with the telecommunications market with “virtual” financial institutions (for example Sainsburys Bank) who do not manufacture any products. Even for those financial product manufacturing businesses (interesting to look at those who have crossed from virtual provider to manufacturer such as Tesco Bank) there is a large degree of similarity in the products that are offered – often due to the financial mechanics of making profitable products (http://www.money.co.uk/current-accounts.htm).

So where does this leave these so called competitive business-to-consumer organisations if all of their products are now so commoditised that consumers can no longer make decisions to purchase based on product features? The common reaction and the focus for many large organisations has been to focus on the service delivered to their customers as the place that they can differentiate themselves within the market. This is a difficult “feature” of your product to quantify but this hasn’t stopped many organisations using this as a marketing tool. As the disgraced banks try to earn back some trust and credibility they have led with service as a differentiator – see for example The Royal Bank of Scotland Charter (http://www.rbs.co.uk/global/customer-charter.ashx). In the communications space the level of service provided by for example The Geek Squad (http://www.geeksquad.co.uk/) is seen as an essential part of a successful customer relationship – to the point that this is now a charged for service.

One obvious area of investment is to ensure that you have sufficient capacity in each of your interaction channels to ensure that you can deliver that customer service. This has led to a lot of investment in self-service channels (web, automated telephone, ATM) where it is easy to scale these capabilities. On the “manned” channels this is typically a more expensive investment because it involves recruiting and training more people. If you are currently managing your contact centre by the metrics of “average call handling time” and are looking to decrease that metric – this is a common key performance indicator and goal in many organisations – then this is often at odds with providing a differentiated customer service. If your agents/operators are focussed on closing down the call and getting on to the next one then you may not have the time to deliver the right service. Many organisations should look to see if they have the correct metrics in place that allow for a successful interaction management strategy.

Once you have made all of the investments that you can in capacity and training for agents there is still more that you can do in creating a differentiated customer service and this is where Interaction Management can be deployed to make a difference. The business case for investment in Interaction Management is worthy of a completely separate article but there are a couple of requirements that are really important to the differentiated service objective.

• Cross-Channel Consistency – getting an organisation acting as if it is a single entity from the customer perspective [See https://theaoim.com/2012/02/13/welcome/]
• Context Aware Interactions – using all of the available information to make the interaction as relevant as possible

Given the right interaction management tool that allows an organisation to connect channels in real-time there is still a large gap between having the technological capability and delivering the differentiated service which will be remarkable from a customer perspective and will build a platform from which cross-sales and up-selling is possible.

One of the main struggles that organisations have is in embodying their business strategy in such a way that they can put this into their interaction management tooling. This is not a simple process and should not be underestimated in any implementation. The good news is that this is a separable part of the implementation process which can take place in parallel with the technological implementation.

The goal as described by one of our customers would be to “have the marketing director whispering into the ear of every manned channel”  interaction to ensure that the interaction is optimised from both the short and long-term organisational outcomes”. If that analogy is too creepy for you what you might think about is how do we ensure that our customer strategy is deployed in every conversation.

This really gets to the core of the issue. In order to be able to deploy an interaction management capability there is a necessary requirement to have clearly identified the business strategy related to each and every customer. This is often different from the cherry picking approach used in outbound marketing where you choose your segment and then communicate with that segment in inbound conversations you don’t get to choose the segment you are going to talk to and so you need to be ready to have any conversation with any kind of customer.

This pushes organisations quite hard to get to the basis of their value proposition. Do I have a customer centric strategy that allows me to explain for each and every customer type how I will make that customer more profitable, how I will retain that customer, how I will keep the customer satisfied and how I will do that in every possible channel across time? That is quite a challenge for most large organisations and the route to creating the “Interaction Strategy Book” can be tortuous and fun-filled at the same time.