Whilst we all implicitly understand the benefits of the omni-channel customer nirvana, more consideration needs to be given to the cost to serve, revenue uplift and operational impacts. Last week Adele made my case for robust quantitative reasoning (rather than vanity) even stronger.

Being able to flit between Call Centers, Branches, Smart Phones, PCs, Tablets and Wearables to complete a loan, mortgage or other financial transaction is a great vision to hold. However, the ideal is complicated not only by legacy platforms but more-so by the financial and quantitative benefits.

Many of the clients I speak with are working the ‘inform-nudge-direct-push’
process of getting customers onto channels they can plan staff against and
build (predictable) operations around. This is important as operations need to deal with sustained ad-hoc traffic, as well as surge events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Floods and the release of a new album from Adele.

If customers are offered such a diverse range of channels, the cost to staff each at a reasonable level of quality could seriously impact cost of operations and the ability to offer the range of products most FS customers require. Many that espouse omni-channel operations are in much more heterogeneous environments with simpler products with far less regulation.

Omni-channel appears to be a nirvana that many strategists are navigating around with a more prudent and considered multi-channel affair. The use-case for the omni-channel-ever-connected-every-device customer is largely a worst-case scenario.
Using some clever tools to map customers segments to channels and to attributable sales is the first step – the quantitative data generated should direct your channel investment choices. Not vanity.

As with all worst case scenarios we should weigh-up carefully the benefits case and likelihood of realisation. How many more sales will this generate? How will the CSAT scores change? By how much will this extend CLV ? By what percentage will this reduce churn?

After all, Adele didn't opt to put her album on any streaming channels (yet) - why? Hello Profits.