It’s not the ability of organisation’s to shoot themselves in the foot that amazes me; it’s the speed at which they can reload! Multi-channel marketing has the potential for another reload.

Organisations appear to adopt multi-channel marketing for one of two strategic reasons. Either you want to grow your business from new and existing customers using multi-channels to offer customers the easiest ways of doing business with you, which can dramatically increase your revenues. Or you want to reduce the cost of sale by offering a variety of cheaper channels, thereby increase your margin. However there are some significant dangers in either strategy.

Lesson learnt

As with many developments in marketing strategies, organisations set out with a customer facing strategy which is very quickly hijacked by a focus on the operational impact rather than the customer experience. Unfortunately, the knowledge these organisations have gained from previous channel developments, sadly lay’s dormant, like a “spent cartridge” or otherwise known as the lessons learnt file.

Marketers only have to look back over the last couple of decades to see the mistakes made and the lessons that can be learnt. The arrival of advanced telephone technologies in the 1990’s offered customers a new channel to the company, the “one number” for sales/help desks; and within a short period of time every product manager had developed one number for their products. The fact that the customer bought several products and therefore had several “one numbers” from the same company was lost on many an operational manager. However those that got it right attracted more and more customers as Viking Direct and First Direct proved.

Or not!

The arrival of web capabilities saw the rise and fall of multiple company website channels, again focused at various products, by now called customer propositions. With their innate ability to lose customers, in both senses of the word, in a maze of company links that were only logical or fathomable to the organisational career climber. However Dell has led the way in the exploitation of company extranets to help lock in customers. In recent times PC World has worked hard to offer business customers the same offer in store and on the internet.

The growth in internet usage produced the “cost of sales” channel model, offering customers their channel of choice; but normally meaning face to face sales people for large customers, telephone account manager for medium and the internet or email for small customers. This again negated the impact of the customer. Many large customers were far happier with an internet or extranet interface than seeing a person, and a lot of small businesses moved to local suppliers rather than buy from the internet. It was interesting to see BT moved to a franchised model for their smaller customers, as they realised that small customers need advice and hand holding.

Consistency or confusion

From recent debates, it appears that multi-channel marketing will suffer from the same fate in many organisations. The danger of bolting on a channel to other channels because it works well in certain scenarios is fraught with danger.  Once you are into a multi-channel strategy, there must be a consistent customer experience, especially uniformity of message and offer, across the channels.

If you offer products and services using a sales force, outlets, a contact centre, direct mail and the internet then they must be well thought out and well planned mechanisms of operation. It is startling how little attention is paid to the customer journey when organisations are implementing channel strategies!