Omnichannel experience: Execution not so seamless
A really good experience is a well-orchestrated digital and physical touchpoint. But “orchestration” requires people to coordinate and collaborate — which often results in mayhem!
Many organizations today have been trying to achieve consistency in experience across all of their channels. Irrespective of digital or physical, every Brand has been trying to ensure that their customer’s buying journey is seamless across any channel they choose.
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This “omnichannel experience” is possible today due to the possibility of data sharing, open APIs, and cloud infrastructure. But digital applications is not the only contributor to the omnichannel strategy.
Another key player that facilitates this strategy to be executed is ‘people’.
It is easy to get machines to talk to each other and integrate seamlessly. All it takes is the right algorithm and functions. But this is not the same process while involving people.
For an Omnichannel strategy to be executed you need — systems to be aligned, applications to be aligned and people to be aligned!
Often we tend to think, it is because of the technology that we are facing issues or delays in executing a seamless experience.
Working across different organizations and industries, I have come to realize that it is usually bureaucracy, departmental differences in processes, KPIs, objectives, and goals that lead to difficulty in executing the strategy.
Who is vested with the responsibility to ensure that inter-departmental processes and backend applications are seamlessly integrated within the organization?
Well… It's the Service Designers! Why are we responsible? This is because our ultimate objective in creating any processes or Service Blueprints is to ensure the highest quality of experience for anyone, be it customer or employee.
Most Industries have never worked with a Service Designer before. Though it is popular in developing countries, it is not a popular designation yet! This is because, with the recent development in technology, strategies like omnichannel has been discovered to add immense value to businesses.
Due to the above pain point, a Service Designer’s biggest hurdle is trying to explain to people what we do! Organizations adopting or adapting towards a customer-centric value proposition is still either at a transitory phase or an exploratory one.
Service Designers design processes keeping customer experience at the core of every process and the omnichannel strategy as the backbone. In order to build out these processes, the effort is extremely collaborative across departments. This involves multiple stakeholders, multiple philosophies, different processes and departmental structures.
As designers, we are comfortable failing fast and iterating. This is not the same sentiment with every other department, they feel they need to be extremely sure before they communicate anything to another department! Due to this difference in ideologies, it is often the first step for designers to create a safety net for other departments to feel ok to sound silly. Because we believe no ideas are lame and no questions are stupid!”
Often pain point faced while working to enable the omnichannel strategy are the following -
1.Coordinating across 5 to 6 departments that are directly or indirectly involved in a customer’s journey.
As Service Designers we always have to be 10 steps ahead of every other department so that we have enough time to test, iterate and propose the different solutions.
2. Mapping different department’s goal to identify the gaps and pain points
To be able to facilitate the above objective, we have to ask a few questions that usually are uncomfortable to answer for the departments. Eg — “ Where did you feel your last process failed or could have done better?” or “ What is the key pain point faced by your customer according to you?”. These questions often lead to some departmental heads not willing to share or not cooperate. During this process, often Service Designers are viewed as auditors or those who would be replacing their department.
3. Once the above hurdle is tackled, the key challenge arises — “Collaboration across departments”.
As Service Designers we challenge the existing process of every department to re-align or answer the key question to enable omnichannel strategy — “ How might we ensure the departmental processes interact with each other to ensure a seamless experience for the customer”. ( To know more regarding why this is required to enhance customer experience read — https://uxdesign.cc/omnichannel-customer-experience-3eef04abf97d).
It is key for the processes to be built along with departments so that there is ownership to the decided workflow. As a Service Designer, our key role always lay in ensuring the Customer experience is at the heart of the entire SOP.
Often the above Process that we call a ‘Double Diamond Method’ is very easy for designers and to some extent software teams to adopt. But management teams, operations, and Marketing teams have been working in a very different structure for over several years.
To expect these departments to immediately align and work with us to build experiences that customers, as well as employees, would appreciate is definitely not an immediate process.
It is a journey that an organization has to traverse with its Service Designer. In turn, it takes a lot of patience and courage for a Service Designer to stick to his/her belief in the process without giving-in to the chaos.
Please feel free to write to me (juneza.niyazi@gmail.com) if you have other ideas or methods that you tested and succeeded or failed at. Don’t forget to clap if you appreciate the article!
