A New Approach to Omnichannel

Agent and Brokers Commentary: December 2023

December 11, 2023

When e-commerce began to develop in the mid-1990s, the digitization of the process created great efficiencies and opportunities but also produced a challenge: Companies not only had to prepare for a stream of digital interactions but had to manage the many possible handoffs to and from all the interactions that still occurred in the physical realm.

Lots of folks came up with clever notions. The CEO of Charles Schwab wrote a book called "Clicks and Mortar." Someone else came up with the term, "clicks and bricks." In some industries, including insurance, the term of choice is "omnichannel."

But those coinages mostly just papered over the fundamental complexity involved in combining the physical and digital realms -- and the complexity is profound.

Frankly, most companies weren't any good even at dealing just with the physical interactions. How many times did we all call a company and spend 10 minutes with a representative, then get transferred to a specialist or a different department and find we had to start at the very beginning? What's your name? What's your address? What's your account number?

As companies have gotten better at interacting with customers over the past 25 years -- and they have, though way too many still make me start over if I get transferred during a call -- they've generally focused on making sure the necessary data gets passed around. That mostly means my account information shows up on the new rep's screen if I get transferred. Often, notes from the initial rep and any prior calls are there, too. Handoffs from a chatbot to a human are pretty smooth if I'm querying a company online.

But I was struck during this month's interview, with Bryan Davis, an executive vice president at Hub International who is responsible for its VIU digital brokerage platform, that he's thinking less about the data and more about the humans. Rather than focus on resolving the data exchanges that happen between the computers, he talks about smoothing the handoffs that touch the customer.

"The customer needs exit ramps at certain points," he says. "Sometimes, they just want a quote and not to be bothered. Other times, they just want to get advice and not to be bothered. Sometimes, they want to transact completely digitally without being bothered.

"Most folks are somewhere in the middle. They might say, 'I want a quote, I want to learn and be left alone. But I do want to check in with someone to make sure that I'm buying the right thing,' Insurance is complicated. You may have some folks who say, 'Hey, I value human touch. I might want to go into the office and talk to a person.'"

The human tendency, because of something known as "anchoring bias," is to start where we are and then work outward. We start with our existing processes and try to improve them. We start with our existing departments and data flows and try to make them work better.

But we need to recognize our bias and then set it aside as best we can, so we free ourselves from the limitations that existing processes, departments and data flows impose on us. We need to be able to look from the outside in, to see ourselves and our processes as our customers do and then to try to become what they want us to be.

Cheers,

Paul

He is also co-author of A Brief History of a Perfect Future: Inventing the Future We Can Proudly Leave Our Kids by 2050 and Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn From the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years and the author of a best-seller on IBM, published in 1993.

Carroll spent 17 years at the Wall Street Journal as an editor and reporter; he was nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize. He later was a finalist for a National Magazine Award.