I recently participated in a panel at the ICMI Call Center Demo and Conference here in Atlanta with Sarah Stealey Reed (@stealeyreed), Chad McDaniel (@ExecsInTheKnow), Kim Martin (@kbmartin15), and Jay Wolcott (@jaywolcott).  A theme I kept returning to was that of establishing a business process that focuses on your customers’ experience without regard to the channel, and then pushing that logic or process into the channels individually. While I pointed out several advantages to this approach, I didn’t really go into any detail about how to define that process. Here we are not a week after the conference and Paul Hagen from Forrester is talking about it. He recently wrote an article titled “Eight Reasons to Master Customer Experience Ecosystem Mapping” and that’s a process I definitely recommend, so take a minute and go read the article.

My particular twist on this is to not get bogged down in the channels while designing the process, even though while you’re mapping the current experience, you may have to consider them. While you’re coming up with what the process should look like, consider functional categories of channels like notification (one-way), confirmation, interactive, etc.   After you know how the business process should work, apply whatever channels fit the needed function. You may find you can use channels in ways you never expected, from geolocation to confirmation to dynamic offers, profile updates … who knows?