Omnichannel customer service is the notion that somebody can reach you down whatever road suits them of an evening, the phone or the mail or a message left on your shop page at eleven at night, and get one continuous conversation out of the whole of it instead of a cold start every time they move. That is the idea, and there is nothing wrong with the idea. What happens in a small firm is that the roads arrive one at a time across a good long while, not one of them ever decided on in a meeting, and the continuous part never arrives at all. You have a phone on account of always having had a phone. Somebody sets up the shop page because a supplier said you ought to. A mobile number goes on the side of a van and people start texting it at the weekend. Not one of them was ever chosen. Then a bill lands one February with the calls itemised on it and the shape of the thing is sitting there in print in front of you, and you had been paying for the whole of it the whole time.
The phone bill that had the one number on it three times
Emer has two pet shops and a grooming room outside Navan, the second one opened four years back, and there are six people on the payroll counting her own self. It is a small enough operation. She went and changed phone providers in January for the sake of about eleven euro a month, and the first bill off the new crowd came itemised, which the old crowd had never once done in nine years.
She was reading it to settle an argument with herself about whether the second line was earning its keep. Halfway down the second page a mobile number appeared three times inside eight days, and she knew the number, or near enough knew it, the way you know a number you have rung back a few times. It belonged to a woman who bought a prescription food for an old collie, sixty euro a month give or take the odd bag of treats, in every second Thursday for the guts of three years. A good customer, plainly said.
Emer had not seen her since before Christmas.
Three answers went out and not one of them was wrong
The rest of it took an hour to piece together and she had to go looking on two other roads to do it, since none of the three sat in the same place as any of the others. An hour is a long time for eight days of talk.
A message had come into the shop page on the Sunday night asking whether they could get a particular veterinary diet in, the renal one, the sort a vet puts a dog on and you are then stuck with. Lorcan does the page, he is part time and does his own hours, and he answered it on the Monday saying they could order that in and to give them a week on it. Which was true.
She rang on the Tuesday instead of waiting. Ronan had the counter that morning and Ronan does not do the page, has never once opened it in his life. What he knew was that the shop does not stock that diet, which was also true enough. So he told her they did not have it and that the vet would be her best bet. He was polite with her, quick too, and the question he answered was the question she had put to him, mind you, which is the whole of what anybody had ever asked of him on that counter.
The mail came in on the Wednesday to the general address, the one on the receipts, and Emer answered that one her own self inside the hour. She asked which bag size, being the professional question, on account of the renal diet coming in two of them and the vet usually specifying. No answer ever came back to that. Fair is fair, by the Wednesday the woman had asked three times and been told yes, no, and which size, and there is no version of that where she is the one at fault for going quiet.
Nobody did a thing you could call careless. Three people answered inside a day of being asked, which is a better desk than most, and every one of them was working off what was in front of them. What was not in front of any of them was the other two conversations. So the customer did the joining up her own self, and what a sensible person concludes out of a yes and a no and a question is that the shop has no great grip on its own stock, which was never once true of that shop in nine years of trading.
Why a road gets opened and never once gets closed
Most talk about omnichannel starts from the roads, which is the wrong end of it, though it is the end everything gets sold on. A road costs nothing to open. The shop page took twenty minutes and the van number was already in Ronan’s pocket. What a road actually costs is that somebody has to be sat looking at it, and that cost never appears anywhere, it just gets absorbed by whoever happens to be nearest. Nobody writes that one down.
And once a road is open you cannot shut it, on account of people being on it. Emer could take the number off the van in the morning and there would still be forty customers with it saved under the shop name, texting away into a phone that lives in a coat pocket in the grooming room. That is the honest reason small firms end up with four ways in rather than any decision anybody made, truth be told. Roads accumulate. They do not clear them selves out.
The other thing nobody says out loud is that each road carries its own clock. A mail can sit until the afternoon and nobody thinks the worse of you. A message to a shop page has an hour in it at the outside, less on a Sunday, on account of the page saying something cheerful about typically replying in minutes that Lorcan never went near and could not have turned off if he wanted to. Mix roads with different clocks and the slow ones look like silence rather than like a queue, which is the whole of what sends somebody down a second road. Silence is silence to the person waiting in it.
The count goes up when you add a road, it does not divide
The assumption underneath most omnichannel customer service strategy is that the work is a fixed lump of contact which then gets spread across however many roads you open, so adding one is free and the customer gets a choice out of it. That is not what happens. The lump is not fixed.
Some of it is plain new traffic. A chat box gets used for questions nobody would have bothered ringing about, small ones, the sort a person would have looked up or let go, and a share of those are worth having and a share of them are not. The larger part though is the same question arriving twice. When a road goes quiet the person does not sit there waiting, they go and try another one, and the second contact is not a new question at all, it is the very same question sent down a road they are hoping runs faster.
Emer counted a fortnight of it in March with a biro, every contact across the four roads, the name or the number beside each one. Two hundred and ten contacts in the fourteen days. Forty four of them were somebody who had already been in touch inside the week on a different road, and eleven were people on their third go. So better than one in five of everything landing on that shop was a repeat of something already answered, or already sitting somewhere unanswered, and every one of those repeats got handled as though it were fresh, by somebody who read it, thought about it, and wrote back. That is the bill for having no memory, and it does not show up as a bill anywhere, it shows up as everybody being busy, and a busy Friday feels the very same whether the work on it is real or not. Nobody stands in a shop of an afternoon and goes counting the second asks.
There is a piece of research everybody in this trade quotes, a Harvard Business Review one from a few years back built off some forty six thousand shoppers, and what it found was that people who used more than one channel went on to spend more than the people who used one. It gets waved about as the case for opening roads. It is a shopping study. Read it plainly though and it is about buying, about somebody browsing on a phone and going in to collect, and buying is not the same animal at all as being answered. There is nothing in it anywhere about the woman who had to go asking twice, and whether she is worth more to you at the end of the year than the one who asked the once and got told, which is the question this article is stuck on.
What anybody asking for omnichannel actually wants
If you sit with somebody who has gone looking at omnichannel customer service software and get them past the feature list, what they go on to describe is hardly ever a set of doors at all, it is a memory, though nobody puts it to you in that word. What they want is for the person picking up the phone on the Tuesday to be able to see that the very same woman was answered on the page on the Monday, and to see what she was told, before they open their mouth to her.
That is a much smaller thing to want than a platform, and it is a duller thing to sell along with it, which is roughly why it gets buried under the word omnichannel in the first place. The test of it is simple enough, mind you, and you can put it to anything anybody tries to sell you. Somebody rings. You have their name or their number and nothing else. How many seconds before whoever answered can see everything that person has ever asked you and what came back at them each time. If the answer runs past about twenty seconds then in practice nobody will do it while a customer is breathing down the line at them, and you have bought four doors with no memory behind them. Twenty seconds is the whole test.
Which is also why the integration on the box so often disappoints. The tools were talking to one another the whole time in these cases. Lorcan and Ronan were not, and no amount of software puts a conversation in front of a man who is not in the habit of looking for one. The gap on that shop was between two people standing forty feet apart, one of them holding a phone and the other holding a counter, and that is nearly always where the gap is, no two ways about it. A firm can have a call center with the routing done properly on it, and a chat tool with a lovely widget on the front of that again, and still go and answer the one woman three ways of a Wednesday.
The road we do cover, and what it costs you
So here is the selling, done early and in daylight, and it is a narrower pitch than the heading of this article would have you expect.
The thing we build goes by the name of Maxdesk, a help desk wrapped around one shared inbox, and the only bit of it that bears on today’s subject is the memory, on the mail road and no other. Everything a person has ever sent you comes up under their address in one thread, whoever answered it and whenever they did, so Ronan on the counter would have seen Emer’s Wednesday question and her own Wednesday question would have shown him Monday’s answer off the page had that answer ever come in by mail. Two people cannot go and answer the very same thing twice without one of them seeing the other at it. That is the whole of the trick. And the charge sits on the workspace rather than on the heads round it, so putting a fifth or a sixth person on the mail in your busy month adds nothing whatever to the bill. There is no head count in our pricing.
There is a cost to taking the free one and you should have it in front of you before you go near it. History rolls three months and not a day more, which on a trade with a slow half of the year is a real loss. Three months is nothing on a seasonal book. Supporting ads run in the workspace your own staff are looking at all day, though not in anything the customer receives, their mail comes off your address looking like mail. Our branding sits along the bottom of what goes out as well. Twenty dollars a month clears the ads and the branding and opens the history out to a year. For ninety nine you get the AI layer put on top of that again, with the memory stretched to two years. That is the whole of the pricing, and there is no fourth plan hiding behind a form anywhere.
The parts of this we do not do at all
We are not an omnichannel tool. Plainly said, and this is the one subject where we have to lead with it rather than tuck it in at the end, since the search that brought you here is asking for the very thing we have not got. Maxdesk reads mail. Your shop page it has never heard of, no more than it has heard of a chat widget sat on the corner of your site, there is no phone line running through the thing at all, and whatever gets texted to a mobile in a coat pocket stays in the coat pocket. That is a real hole and we know the size of it.
So if half of what comes at you arrives on a road we do not cover, we are not the answer for those roads, and I would rather put that in the middle of this article than have you find it out in week two. Go and get a tool that reads the page you actually get messaged on. We will not be one bit sore about it. If pre-purchase questions are what is killing you, there is more of that argument in what we wrote about ecommerce customer service, including the bit where we say straight out that a chat widget will beat us for it.
And the fix in Navan had no software in it anywhere, which is worth admitting on a page whose job is to sell software. What Emer did in the end was give the page and the van number to one person, Lorcan as it happened, on set hours, with a rule that anything he could not close in two lines got forwarded into the mail where the rest of them could see it. That is a rota and a habit, plainly said. It cost her nothing and it did more than any tool did, on account of the roads having been nobody’s job up to then, and anybody telling you the tool comes first has something to sell you and is not being straight about the order of it. What the tool did afterwards was stop the mail road losing things once everything was being funnelled onto it, which is a smaller claim and a true one. There is more on the difference between answering fast and answering with a memory over in customer care, and the mechanics of the mail road itself in email management software.
A fortnight and a biro
You can find out which problem you have without buying a thing, and it takes a pen and about four minutes a day.
For the next fortnight write down every contact that comes at you, whatever road it lands on. Name or number, road, and the date. A pen will do it. Nothing else, no categories, no spreadsheet with columns you will resent by the Thursday. At the end of it go down the list and mark every line where that same person had already been in touch inside the previous seven days on a different road.
If that count comes out under one in twenty then your roads are behaving them selves and people are picking one and staying on it, and you can go and open a fifth road with a clear conscience if the trade wants it. Now say it comes out around the one in five that Emer got. Your trouble is not the number of roads at all in that case, it is that nothing anybody says on one of them can be seen from any of the others, and opening a fifth gives that trouble one more place to sit where nobody is looking. Somewhere between the two figures, do the count again in a month before you spend a penny on anything.
Emer rang the number in the end, which took a bit of doing. The woman was decent about it, said she had assumed the shop had simply got out of that side of things, and she had been buying the food off the vet since February at a price she was not one bit happy with. She came back after that, funnily enough, though it took the guts of a year and Emer would tell you her self she got luckier than she deserved on it. The itemised bill still comes every month. She has stopped reading it for the money on it a good while back, and reads it now for the numbers that turn up on it twice.