Every industry has its jargon phrases. Upon each mention, you can feel your eyes rolling into the back of your skull.
The customer experience space is one of the worst for this. From a “holistic view of the customer journey” to “vendor-agnostic solutions”, there are plenty of classics.
Of course, these terms have merit. After all, cliches are often cliches for a reason.
Yet, the widely-utilized phrase: “Serve your customers in the channel of their choice,” has perhaps passed its sell-by-date.
Many would argue that this is still sound customer experience thinking. But, there seems to be an opportunity to evolve.
The Problem with "Serve Your Customers In Their Channel of Choice"
Traditionally, the contact center had two core channels: phone and email.
Then, with the advent of live chat, customer experience evangelists started to use the phrase “serve your customers in the channel of their choice.”
The goal? To deliver convenience and minimize customer effort.
Yet, ten years later, customer service experiences are at an all-time low. Indeed, that was the conclusion of a 2024 Forrester study.
Commenting on that research, Rick Parrish, VP and Research Director at Forrester, stated: “US consumers are having, on average, the worst experiences in a decade.
Brands want to create better experiences, and they realize that putting the customer at the center of their business is the way to do it. However, organizations struggle with the scale of change that this requires.
The effort to serve every customer on their channel of choice has made that scale of change an incredibly tricky task to manage.
After all, it’s not just voice, email, and live chat anymore. There are multiple messaging apps and social media channels. Some contact centers even leverage video and the metaverse.
By covering that immense spread of channels, contact centers have many more service touchpoints to manage. Moreover, customers are reaching out more, as they have lots of new communication channels to engage with.
With all this going on, contact centers are more prone than ever to day-to-day firefighting. That makes finding the time to strategize around these new touchpoints difficult.
As a result, service experiences haven't kept pace with the innovation cycle, and customers still default to the phone. According to evaluagent research, that won't change anytime soon.
As Chandler Galt, Senior Product Marketing Manager of the Zoom Contact Center, summarized:
Though consumers want to interact on channels besides voice, brands have not been able to replicate the QUALITY of CX on those new channels. So, they still revert to the phone in situations where they aren't able to sacrifice quality of service.
The Alternative: Meet Your Customers Where They Are, But Don't Always Keep Them There
As suggested, meeting a customer on X, Facebook, or WhatsApp won’t benefit them if they must resort to the phone to find a resolution.