The digital transformation of companies during the pandemic has been a great step

Throughout this bizarre year, many businesses have made the decision to implement their digital transformation or technological innovation plan to maintain their relationship with their customers in less than 6 months.

From C3 Digital we support businesses to rethink and reactivate their digital transformation and innovation plan to face the complexities that may appear in 2021.

According to the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, artificial intelligence acts as a catalyst for research and innovation for public administration, companies, social agents; making generation, storage and Big data an economic sector in itself in the new digital and technological development scene. This is having a strong transformative impact in multiple sectors of activity: environment, energy, logistics, industry, transport, mobility and logistics; among others.

Companies that work with artificial intelligence have seen accelerated both the development and use in their businesses. For this reason, it is understood that there is greater accessibility to the computing power, the frames and the algorithms necessary to apply it.

With everything we have learned from business this year, the growth of AI ensures customer knowledge, efficiency, and saves of the operational costs. The pandemic has also forced businesses to keep a close eye on their budgets. Some have resorted to RPA (Robotic Process Automation) and IPA (Intelligent Process Automation) to perform tasks in order to release employees to do other, more complex things.

Digital transformation, RPA

This has been a great focus of RPAs as we move towards higher levels of intelligent automation that links traditional robots used for process automation with intelligent processes powered by the cloud, Machine Learning and AI. Little by little the IOT (Internet of things) is gaining prevalence in business and we starting to see a confluence between IOT and AI. Now you can monitor, interact with the devices and store data with automatic processes.

We have been waiting for the benefits of 5G for years, but it wasn’t until remote working, video conferencing, and digital collaboration became central parts of our lives that it became a real benefit.

Another important input is customer data platforms (CDP). These help to collect data from all available sources, organize it, tag it and make it usable for anyone who needs to access it. Several technology companies are creating powerful CDPs to solve the challenge of obtaining the coveted 360 customer view.

Undoubtedly AI & Big data will continue to be a key trend in 2021. And more so when it comes to choose technologies to rethink business strategies and priorities. The pandemic has become businesses into being extremely analytical, predicting information in less than 3 months, learning from systems autonomously, and streamlining internal processes.

From C3 Digital we support companies to rethink and reactivate their digital transformation and innovation plan to face the complexities that may appear in 2021.

Do you really know the differences between multichannel and omnichannel? What communication strategy with the client would be the most convenient?

Rosa Cabanillas, Senior Consultant at C3, will discuss in the following article a clarifying topic about two terms that we hear frequently: multichannel and omnichannel.

Through our training, we hope to establish their differences. You may also find another interesting article on training: Has the end of face-to-face training come?

On the one hand, both words are based on similar concepts. Whereas in a literal multichannel translation it would be, “Multi” comes from the Latin multus (much, abundant); “Omni”, from omnis (all, all kinds of). “Omnichannel” refers, therefore, to the internal and interconnected use of all channels. On the other hand, the real difference between both concepts does not lie in the number of channels, but in the management strategy used to use the channels in relationships between clients and companies. And, therefore, the words chosen provide to mere differentiations in details.

Differences between multichannel and omnichannel

If we wanted to summarize it quickly, we could say that omnichannel is a management strategy in which all the channels between which the company and its client interact (possible or current) are presented to the client in a homogeneous and seamless way. That is, without differences in treatment or results between one or the other, and they are managed in a global and unified way, with a far vision removed from the classic treatment. While multi-channelling remains more on a technological level: the capability to include several channels (no matter the number, they can be two, three, or they can be all existing) in the relationship and interaction with the customer. In this case, we are talking about training and enabling these channels, but we are not talking about any type of strategy related to them.

We can also consider the separate definitions of both terms.

Multichannel

It deals with all the management and customer relationship tools that allow interaction with customers through incoming or outgoing contacts through any of the communication channels established by the company with customers. It offers a variety of channels and they can use one channel in a single interaction. If they change the channel, the context and the story are lost.

These tools began to gain strength at the beginning of 2000 to incorporate the voice, email, fax and SMS management. Over the years, all those communication channels that customers use in their daily communications between friends and family have been incorporated. The goal is to be closer and to empathize better. Today, we can establish multichannel communications with voice, email, fax, sms, chat, web, mobile apps, video calls, shared browsing, social networks, WhatsApp… In addition, more channels will be added over time.

Omnichannel

It is a term used to refer to a client management strategy. It Offers a choice of channels, and customers can use more than one in multiple interactions, preserving the history and context of the original inquiry at the same time. Relevant information follows the customer through channels and interactions.

This strategy addresses the entire life cycle of the customer’s relationship with the supplier company. A coherent, consistent and seamless communication and interaction is established through the different channels that the client wants to use to interact with the company. Mainly in physical stores (Retail), Internet, Mobile or the Contact Center. In order to achieve this omnichannel customer management, it is necessary to coordinate all the areas that interact, directly or indirectly with the customer.

Among the most used examples to illustrate the concept of omnichannel are usually innovations in the field of retail, where a customer, regardless of the channel used, receives a unified treatment. That customer who buys a product online, picks it up in a physical store, but later discovers that he needs a different size. Thanks to its mobile application, you can determine in which store near you have that size, go to it and make the change. During the whole process there have been no obstacles or different information.

We add the Multimodal term

It offers a variety of channels. Customers can use more than one in the same interaction. For example: an agent can send an email or SMS to a customer while talking on the phone.

Definitely, the most difference between multichannel and omnichannel is that while the first rarely allows us to jump between channels, in omnichannel the channel is transparent.

At the business level, omnichannel service is one that allows the use of different channels, both sequentially or simultaneously. Besides, they are fully integrated with the attention process and are aimed at ensuring a satisfactory customer experience.

It is almost obvious that to achieve the second, that is to offer omnichannel customer service, you have to go through the first, and, however, problems arise when an appropriate strategy is not implemented after the acquisition of the technology. Technology partners have great products that they integrate a large number of communication channels, allowing to join the information from all of them to be combined in an appropriate way. There are still a large number of companies that do not take advantage of these capabilities once acquired. Until the Business department includes the monitoring and improvement of the customer experience in the service processes within its strategy, it will not begin to take advantage of omnichannel technology.

One of the most common mistakes when implementing an omnichannel strategy is to confuse the need to attack all service processes from all available channels.

Successful omnichannel experience

Finally, and going back to the service processes in general, it is important to define the factors that define a successful omnichannel strategy:

1. Customers have used the different channels according to the degree of penetration of the use.
2. Customers have been able to put a process on hold on one channel and continue it without repeating the previous story from another channel.
3. Customer satisfaction levels regarding the service received are clearly positive.

 

Multichannel and Omnichannel Conclusions

It is interesting to see how those companies that have focused on omnichannel service processes also have simultaneously focused on managing customer knowledge and their experience with the company. Definitely, everything is a part of the same journey, which is none other than incorporating customer management and knowledge as part of the core of the company.

Above all, we hope to have clarified the difference between the referred terms multichannel and omnichannel.

We introduce you the decalogue for your customer service from MST Holding. Times are coming when commercial activity increases and many customers call customer service to resolve incidents, buy products or answer their questions.

For this reason, we want to ask you some questions that you can share with Alberto Exposito who will help you for free until December 31^st.

Decalogue for your customer service

• Do I have my equipment sized correctly?
• Is my service really efficient?
• Do I know how to manage my equipment remotely without affecting service?
• Am I getting the most benefit of my tools and CRM?
• Do I have the best professionals for my activity?
• How does it affect and deal with my periods of seasonality? Am I really flexible?
• Do I know how I could reduce my number of inbounds?
• Do I know how omnichannel and digitization can impact my business?
• Am I measuring what happens in my service and how my clients perceive it?
• How does my customer service affect the business numerically?

If you have them all resolved; you should ask yourself: how is your humility going?

Otherwise: Would you let me advise you for free?

Do you want to know us more? Contact us for free and without obligation at alberto.exposito@mstholding.com

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You want to know…

Why do consumers change brands?

87% of consumers would change brands as a result of a bad experience. A study carried out by eAlicia among all its subscribers, clients and workers. Some conclusions that we have known thanks to the eAlicia survey service.

You may also be interested in other functions that eAlicia allows you to do, such as measuring the satisfaction of your customers or the quality of your services.

The dependent survey (refers to the questions that appear according to the answers you are doing) consisted of the following questions: Have you had a bad experience with the service they have offered you when buying a product? If they answered “Yes”, the question asked was: Would you change the brand for a similar competitor product? If they had answered “No” to the question about a bad experience, they were asked: “Would you change product if this brand increase the price of its product?”

To finish the survey, we asked them: With what brand, company have you had your bad / good experience Respondents could respond with a simple name but could also explain what had happened to them.With only three questions we have been able to obtain very significant information.

Why do consumers change brands?

“I would only change brands if I couldn’t afford it”

In the optional comments, we have come across interesting observations: “I would only change the brand if I couldn’t afford it.” For example, we know that the Apple brand is one of the most expensive on the market when we are talking about mobile telephony. There are phones with better features at much cheaper prices. What is the difference? A story that began years ago with customer loyalty through personalized service.

“I received a package in a poor condition and it took 2 days to start the refund procedures”

Another comment is about a girl who had a bad experience buying an online product. The consumer, who placed an order on «Wish», an online shopping portal, told us in the survey the following: «I received a package in a poor condition and it took 2 days to start the refund procedures. Next time I pay a little more and I make sure that I can follow my product at all times and can return it instantly if it is necessary.

After seeing two particular cases we are going with the generic data of the study.

87% of consumers would change brands as a result of a bad experience. On the other hand, all those who had answered that they had not had a bad experience, 72% would change their brand if it increased the price.

Another relevant information that we do not have mentioned in this report and that has been interesting to us has been the percentage of distribution portals that appeared in the answers to the third question. 90% were online distributors such as Amazon, ASOS, Zalando…

Do you want to know us more? Request a free demo now. We will teach you how to do dependent surveys with eAlicia.

Follow our Linkedin accounts and stay tuned eAlicia /MST/C3/.

From C3 Digital we review practical cases that can inspire us to optimize our business models in the use of technology. In fact, we have been interested in reviewing the models used in the pre-election forecasts in the United States. We have evaluated two, the first is ‘The Economist’ (which combines surveys with advanced AI analytics). The second, the City University of New York (social listening, big data with AI).

According to The Economist (2020), pre-election forecasts indicated that Joe Biden will probably defeat Donald Trump in the elections. As in most predictions that are used, past patterns of voter behaviour are applied to new circumstances. For example, if you answer the question, “How often have previous candidates won similar positions?” If those historical relationships break down, the prediction will fail. But one of the paradoxes presented by Trump’s unprecedented presidency is that voters have mostly treated him as they would be any other Republican. This quantitative model is updated every day and combines state and national surveys with economic indicators to predict a variety of outcomes.

Precisely this model overestimated Biden ahead in so many states around the country that it was hard to imagine him losing positions in all of them. As the counting indicates, Biden has more than 305 votes, which is a 95% confidence interval. A level too high of certainty for the prediction. The following graph shows how The Economist failed in the pre-election surveys, underestimating the Republican vote.

University of the City of New York

On the other hand, the University of New York City used an artificial intelligence model in the Democratic candidate Joe Biden would be the winner over the Republican candidate Donald Trump in the US presidential elections. This prediction model was based on machine learning patterns trying to predict the future by extrapolating data from the past, combining big data technology with the ‘social listening and social understanding’ of more than one billion opinions on social networks. According to the experts of this university they affirm that, the investigation had already begun in the previous elections of 2016; and ending with the predictions for the 2020 US elections.

Taking into account that there is a lot of activity that occurs in each election, the researchers use this information to train their machine learning model by training a neural network using AI to predict the opinion of each user on the social media platform. The statistical analysis based on more than 800 million tweets in total gives weight to the results, thus making an approximation to the prediction.

However, the university researchers reveal that the method has certain limitations, because it is not yet fully ready to predict and call elections in an accurately way. Given that, one is the sampling bias that takes 20 million people across the United States, as long as they are the people who actually use Twitter.

Influence Artificial Intelligence in surveys

When only raw data is taken directly from social listening & social understanding tools’ without doing any of the weights or scales, Joe Biden has a huge advantage to win by high volume. However, in cases where there is a large voter turnout of people living in rural areas, Twitter penetration is very low. Another bias would be that you cannot predict how many people will vote. Therefore, controlling these two variables is important for the AI ​​tool to predict accurately. Therefore, the solution is to try to calibrate the current model, based on the previous choice, and including this choice.

The reflection of both models starts from the fact that the global context must be taken into account. These elections have been celebrated in the middle of a pandemic and a volatile economy; as well as the identification of variables that can help us improve the AI ​​training pattern to obtain optimal results.

C3 Digital has solutions and practical cases of machine learning, social listening & social understanding that can transform your business.

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Supermarkets, pharmacies, tobacconists, small shops, markets … Are you asking if the hygiene of your establishments is correct?

Do you want to analyze how buyers are evaluating your hygiene measures against Covid-19 in stores? From eAlicia we have created a service that allows you to see in real time the results of the surveys that consumers do once they have left your establishment.

For only € 990 you will know the opinion of all the clients that pass by your premises. A single payment that will allow you to analyze the results for three months.

All companies have changed their hygiene habits and ways of selling because of the Covid-19. Hygiene is essential in all establishments since many consumers coincide throughout the day.

With the measures of lack of confidence, the population will return to the streets, supermarkets, shops, markets … A step towards normality that will make us consider ourselves as businessmen if our hygiene measures are being effective.

For this reason, from eAlicia we provide you with the means so that your clients can assess through electronic surveys the measures that you implement in your company to prevent Covid-19. And, see the results at the moment.

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