Multi-Channel Customer Experience Myth

Many companies would have you believe that a “multi channel customer experience” means you make your “content” or “applications” available to all a customers devices, and making sure your “brand” or “message is consistent. So content for the phone should be the same, only smaller and more difficult to read?

But it’s not about your message, it’s not about your brand, its about the “experience” and guess what, “consistent experience” is not the very peak of any endeavor, it’s marginal at best.

Multi Channel Customer Experience is about “context”, “appropriateness”, “fulfillment”, and guess what, Microsoft is going to give you one of the best examples of multi-channel customer experience right here:

So in the Microsoft example here they are talking about an xbox360 racing game called Forza Motorsport 2 (which I am really looking forward to). Now Forza is a console game where you have lots of cars that you can race against other people online. All the cars are very customizable, and you can change their paint jobs, or do all kinds of real world tuning etc. Now, i’ve played the original game, and it’s a lot of fun, but when I’m sitting in front of my 42″ plasma with the xbox fired up the last thing I want to do is tune the suspension, which is essentially dialing numbers up and down on different aspects of the car. So the new version of Forza is going to enable you to access your cars from your cell phone, or your PC, or your xbox360, but in the example they show here, they’re adjusting the suspension from the mobile phone, changing the paint job on the PC, and finally playing the game on the Xbox360.

Now that’s thinking about the “experience”.