Omnichannel Design

Omnichannel design provides customers with a consistent and unified brand experience, regardless of the channels or devices they use to connect with the company. The strategy involves designing the right capabilities for each channel, including IVR, phone, email, social media, and web, and creating seamless interactions between channels.

We enable a successful omnichannel experience by helping your organization build an impactful customer experience for each channel. Each channel must interact with the others to create a consistent experience while accounting for the nuances among channels in people, processes, technology, and governance. These considerations include:

• Technology: Enable each system to communicate with the other.
• Data: Ensure customers and frontline employees can access data across channels.
• Process: Manage each interaction in one channel to trigger a notification for the other.
• People: Plan how to hire, train, and support employees on each channel.
• Governance: Build controls and compliance measures to protect customer data as they move between channels.
• Customer: Decide how to inform customers which channels are available, what to expect from them, and how to use them.

These considerations require thoughtful dialogue, planning, and execution to enable a best-in-class omnichannel experience.

Our design process helps you optimize and expand your channel capabilities to create an omnichannel experience for customers and employees.

1.      Current state assessment

We work closely with you to assess the current state of your omnichannel experience, learn about your organization, and compile the necessary facts to understand your service vision and priorities. We leverage this learning to guide our future state design. During this stage, we do the following:

• Conduct in-depth discussions with leaders, employees, and business partners.
• Listen to and observe customer interactions across channels to learn how customers interact with you.
• Understand the customer’s end-to-end service journey to identify what is and isn’t going well, diagnose customer pain points, and devise a plan for how to remedy issues.
• Review all available data to identify opportunities for improvement, including work output, KPIs, and customer and employee insights.
• Assess the technological infrastructure in use to execute omnichannel service.
• Understand the broader organizational vision and strategy.
• Facilitate a mirror walk workshop to review our findings and align on top opportunities for improvement.
• Develop guiding principles for the target state omnichannel experience.

2.      Target state design

After synthesizing the current state, we work with you on a target state design, where we define how ideal omnichannel service delivery looks and feels. By collaborating closely with you, we take an intentional and interactive process to arrive at the right design. During this stage, we:

• Define service delivery and associated processes to enable customer interactions across channels.
• Develop a strategy for integrating channels and providing a differentiated experience.
• Establish guidelines for brand messaging, visual identity, and messaging tone.
• Define the future technology landscape to support and enable the omnichannel design.
• Use data and analytics to facilitate ever-improving interactions.
• Develop a balanced scorecard to measure and manage performance.
• Build a financial model to quantify required investments.
• Facilitate a prioritization workshop to map out what design aspects to work on and when to set up the development of the transformation roadmap.

3.      Transformation roadmap

Once we develop a blueprint for your omnichannel design, we prepare a roadmap from the current to the future state. This iterative phase includes prioritization workshops to ensure everyone aligns on what element of the design to do and when.

• Define clear workstreams, milestones, timelines, and accountability to get to the target state.
• Set up reporting and tracking against milestones and set the cadence for project execution.
• Identify key project risks, potential impacts, and mitigation options.
• Develop an implementation plan.

4.      Implementation and deployment

We define the scope of support required to make implementing your omnichannel model a success. This support may include:

• Project management: We manage the mechanics of implementation delivery, including initiation and planning, day-to-day execution, stakeholder management, budgeting, risk management, quality assurance, status reporting, and closure.
• Change management planning: We leverage our change management framework to develop a comprehensive and structured plan to help lead your people through organizational change.
• Problem-solving support: We work with your team to address and break through potential roadblocks encountered in the implementation stage.
• Training and capability building: We upskill your team to ensure a smooth transition and the sustained success of the implemented solution.

• We have in-depth knowledge of service delivery and contact center technologies that shape the customer journey and enable successful omnichannel delivery.
• Our practice leader has decades of industry expertise leading contact centers and has extensive experience leading consulting engagements for some of North America’s largest contact centers.
• We have a track record of delivering and sustaining transformational change for our clients across various industries and geographies.
• Data from our contact center benchmark program informs the right KPIs to measure service experience.