The $4.6B Omni-channel Opportunity
An omni-channel approach delivers significant OPEX savings in customer service by avoiding duplication of work, as well as the simplification of renewals and new customer acquisitions. Further savings can result from greater efficiency in marketing, sales and IT operations. Omni-channel capability can also optimize the use of social media by both businesses and consumers. This is key in today’s social media-driven world, which highlights inefficiencies in customer care functions. The high volume of queries generated are typically handled manually and not automatically integrated into customer profiles, so valuable information is lost, and customer frustration increased. An omni-channel CRM approach is able to streamline this and other inefficiencies and provide increased value to both consumers and operators, delivering the savings required to fuel innovation and continuously improve the customer experience.
Omni-channel is no longer a "nice to have." It is an inevitable evolution to reduce the complexity of a cross-channel experience, and provide a streamlined process for the customer. Omni-channel is a key solution to fix the broken customer experience many operators provide today. At its best, omni-channel delivers the promise of customers moving fluidly between different customer service, shopping and self-care channels, with the operator in lockstep and able to delight the customer with a truly joined‐up experience.
The Northstream research highlights that as business models have moved from single to multi-channel customer interactions, a lot of complexity and manual processes have been added. Omni-channel is the answer to reduce that complexity and provide a streamlined process to deliver better CRM and significant savings to the business. However, this can only be fully achieved through a fundamental IT transformation to next generation CRM architectures that separate the front end channels from the business logic, services and data which are shared by all channels.
Innovation should begin with delivering the best possible customer service. The need for a seamless, consistent and personalized omni-channel response is now critical for operators wanting to compete in the ever-changing digital ecosystem.
