Within Distribution & Channel Management we include Multi-channel and Distribution Strategy and Capability Effectiveness

Multi-channel

In the last decade, a whole generation has come to accept the internet as the way to access information, compare competitive offerings and purchase goods and services. Add to this the rapid take-up of social media and mobile technologies, such as smart phones and tablets, and it has never been easier to develop new, and leverage existing relationships with customers as a first step to engaging with them to sell financial products and services. This phenomenon is opening up the market for financial services to new entrants from retailers, to mobile phone providers, payment services providers and many others. Multi-channel capability is one of the major battlegrounds of the moment – not just expected and demanded by customers but also a strategically necessary capability for those organisations which will endure and thrive in the digital age.

A customer needs-focused approach to developing multi-channel strategy and capability is essential to ensure the individual channels become value-adding to both the customer and the organisation rather than a  series of disconnected, add-on channels which add cost rather than reduce it and which do not deliver the joined-up experience expected by customers.

Ensuring that all the channels are integrated is key to achieving the above. This incorporates processes which are developed end-to-end from the customer’s perspective and which recognise that customers will want to break journeys and hop from one channel to another.  It also  requires a single view of  the customer which is operational across all channels and  enables contact history to travel with the customer as they hop.

There are big multi-channel lessons to be learned from the Retail sector. We have the capabilities and experience to allow you to do just that and leap-frog the competition.

Distribution Strategy & Capability Effectiveness

How you distribute products and services to potential and existing customers has changed massively over the last decade with the advent of the internet and now mobile channels.  These new channels need to join up with existing face-to-face and telephone channels to create an integrated, multi-channel capability. And yet, at the same time, the old basics still run true – needing to know the customer, understand their needs and, where appropriate, to develop a relationship and seek to add value across the lifetime of the relationship; needing to have the right people, well trained and incentivised to do right by the customer and maximise revenue; leveraging technology to increase efficiency and enable higher cost channels to focus on higher value segments and higher value journeys. You still need to do all of this and apply these common sense, customer-centric principles to all channels both old and new.  And, most importantly, you need to have a clear distribution strategy of what you are trying to achieve for the customer and the business.

At Egremont, we have the capabilities and expertise to help you define the optimal distribution strategy and operating model to achieve your corporate goals - whether this be to determine the role of the branch within the context of a multi-channel distribution capability or to define the role of direct and intermediated distribution for a corporate business-to-business proposition in the context of the Retail Distribution Review.

From the perspective of any one of the channels, from contact centre  to branch we have the expertise to help you develop new capability and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of existing  capability .  This could be developing the branch of the future, face-to-face sales force effectiveness underpinned by key account management, consultative selling and automation, or a contact centre based on a 3-layer customer-centric model – 1^st time resolution simple query, complex enquiry, or transactional interaction.

Whatever the channel and the challenge, we take a systems thinking approach which addresses all of the capability levers – process, people, information and technology – to deliver holistic capabilities which start and finish with the customer.