What is omnichannel management, why is it difficult? The key difference between marketing first versus operations first with omnichannel management solutions.

1. What is Omnichannel?
And what is the
Omnichannel challenge?

2. Omnichannel
• It is a buzz word and means nothing. There is no
serious definition.
• Usually it refers to the fact that your customers can
reach you via different channels, and omni,
meaning everywhere, refers to the fact that you
should be in control of all these ‘touch points’.
• Since we live in the digital age, contacts via letters
and at the desk / reception are mostly not
included. Again, there is no tight definition.

3. What is the problem?
• The problem is what you must have experienced
somewhere in your life: you call the contact
center of an organisation after you have e-mailed
them and the agent picking up the phone has no
clue to whom you have e-mailed, that you have
e-mailed or what the e-mail was about.
• Omnichannel management should stop that from
happening. And apparently that is a challenge.

4. What is the real problem?
• The real problem is that customers start to get fed
up with explaining everything over and over again
and that this mess is expensive for your own
organisation.
• If your contact center call agents have no clue
what your customers are doing e-mail wise, your
contact center is not helping.
• Customers even start to expect integration with
social media in your contact center. It’s 2020.

5. The other real problem: your
people can’t do everything
Not everybody in your contact center can do everything. So
you have a matrix of skills, for example:
e-mail invoices X X X
e-mail travel booking X X X
phone invoices X X X X
phone travel booking X X X
chat travel booking & invoice X X
whatsapp immediate support X X
people having the skills ☞
Paul Susan Imad Abdullah Aisha

6. And you have incoming
requests from customers

7. Mapping supply and demand
without routing strategy
calls waits for 2
min. and drops

8. First in to first available
agent without any strategy
• The panic Whatsapp goes to a person who is on
the phone, Abdullah.
• Aisha gets no calls or e-mails at all.
• Paul gets every channel, except the ones he is
trained for.
• Dropped calls, while Aisha is available.

9. Implementing a real solution
• You can only optimise all the queues if there is
one captain on the ship, in other words, one
application ruling the behavior of all the queues.
• Since telephony tends to generate the bulk of the
real time traffic, the application must have the
ability to prioritize that.
• Therefore we think the captain has to speak
Telecomise.

10. Then you will get:

11. And then it will all make
sense
• The application will make sure that there is an optimal
spread and distribution of the different types of traffic
entering your contact center.
• Optimal means that there will be a perfect balance
between the total output of all your people in the contact
center and the average waiting time for your customers.
• In the example Paul will get e-mails only, since there are
a lot of them, and Aisha will get the panic Whatsapp,
since that is easily to be handled during or in between a
chat session.

12. The alternative | if you don’t
solve the problem
If there is not one captain doing the distribution, you have two options:
1. a very disorganised impression left with your customers, trying to hide
the absence of one captain by connecting several databases in batch
processes over and over again, or even worse, via alt-tabbing agents
or…
2. ordering all agents in all channels to log all communications
extensively (tedious work) in an effort to make that organised
impression on the customer.
And always you will experience ongoing ‘wars’ between the lords of the
channels for resources; people & budget for their channel.
And finally, this mess is expensive because it’s time consuming.

13. Digging deeper 1:
operations versus marketing
1. Optimised for the workforce (operations first)
Everybody in the contact center gets enough work on his or her
level, and that load is evenly spread.
2. Optimised for groups of customers (marketing first)
Your customer base is separated in ‘gold’, ‘silver’ and ‘bronze’
customers and you would like to give priority to the gold customers at
all times, no matter which channel they choose.
It is possible to combine these two algorithms in an super-optimal
distribution but I see that fail very often. Therefore I recommend highly
to choose one of the two. Actually, I most often recommend choosing
the first option.

14. Digging deeper 2: why your CRM
system should not be that captain
Many organisations reason: since all channels end
up doing something with the data of the customer
in our CRM system, our CRM system will do the
work flow too.
My vision is that this might work, but that you
should be careful because most CRM systems
have great difficulty handling real time traffic. And
real time traffic often makes up the bulk of your
most important customer connections.

15. Digging deeper 3: one task at a
time, or allowing for cherry picking?
If you have one captain, he can throw one task at a
time to contact center agents - forcing them to do
that now - or he can present a list of things to do
where the agent can check box the thing when
finished.
I see over and over again cherry picking happening
with the last option which usually is not in the
interest of your customers. So I most often
recommend presenting one task at a time.

16. Useful?
• You can share this document freely, as long as
you leave it intact.
• Comments are welcomed and you can drop me
an e-mail on paul.harts@a-report.nl