Digital Workspace

The Distinctions Between Customer Service Channels Are Collapsing

In a world without boundaries, businesses must engage customers everywhere.

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Ryan has been a magazine and newspaper editor for 21 years, with the last 15 covering a variety of bases for CDW’s family of tech magazines. As Editor in Chief, he works on developing editorial strategy and is always on the lookout for new writing talent and sharing great stories with the IT world. In his spare time, Ryan enjoys spending time with his family, biking and obsessively following Iowa Hawkeye sports and Cubs baseball.

When we think about customer experience, we typically have some specific things in mind: particular communication channels, as well as online and physical forums where customers gather.

A retailer might think about how customers interact with its physical stores, and how they engage with its e-commerce channels. Is the shopping experience smooth and painless? Can customers quickly locate and purchase the items they want? Can we track their movements and understand their behavior well enough to anticipate their needs in the future without seeming overbearing?

Businesses in other industries may think similarly about the customer experience, even as circumstances change. An electric utility company may not have public-facing facilities, but its customers expect to get someone on the phone if they’re experiencing a power outage or have questions about their bills. A bank needs to empower customers to manage their finances online, but most still have physical branches where they can speak to someone in person.

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Why Businesses Must Think Holistically About Customer Service

Recently, though, I’ve come to realize that the most successful businesses think about the customer experience holistically instead of as a series of engagements in different places or on different channels and platforms. To them, the customer experience is seamless and “always on.”

When the home furnishings company Kravet built digital workspaces inside physical showrooms for its customer base of professional designers, it created just this kind of holistic experience, collapsing the space between the physical and digital worlds (see our story on the latest set of interactive, digital signage tech). The NBA’s Orlando Magic is extending the fan experience off the court while ensuring a vastly improved experience for its customer service representatives with a new cloud-based contact center, where fan and agent locations are irrelevant.

It’s all part of an emerging paradigm of customer service that acknowledges our boundaryless world and strives to meet the customer not just anywhere but everywhere. And it all starts with a wisely crafted mix of technology solutions.

UP NEXT: The Arizona Cardinals are using data to deliver a better user experience.

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