Do You Contact Customers Where *They* Want to Be Contacted?

I pay my Time Warner Cable bill online. I issue support inquiries via only web and mobile chat. I raise complaints via Twitter. I never initiate a support interaction by calling my cable provider.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I learned that the strange, unidentified 800-number that left a series of missed calls and automated voicemails on my phone belonged to Time Warner Cable.

Across countless, diverse interactions over a span of twenty four months, I have made it clear that I possess no interest in communicating with TWC via telephony. Time Warner, however, was neglecting all of that behavioral intelligence in imposing a phone call on me. Worse, the messages left did not provide any information. They simply teased an "account change" that required further effort (another phone call) to clarify.

It turned out that my payment was due. Naturally, I returned to the online platform—my preferred platform—and paid that bill.

I now go through the same charade monthly. By now, I recognize the number and use it as an "alert" to pay my bill, but the burdensome hassle of having to delete missed calls and voicemails remains an inescapable part of my monthly routine.

More crazy than the fact that Time Warner Cable aggressively contacted me outside of my preferred channel is the fact that it likely believes its effort was customer-centric. It, after all, was engaging in proactive care. It was alerting me to a billing issue before it affected the actual cable service. It was demonstrating an awareness—albeit an automated one—of its individual customers.

Unfortunately, that demonstration of awareness serves as a simultaneous demonstration of unawareness. Insofar as Time Warner Cable is signaling that its automated systems know my unique payment standing and that it believes proactive messaging is an important part of the customer experience, Time Warner is letting me know that I should anticipate a valuable experience with the company’s billing team. The experience I get each month, which requires me to deal with unwanted interactions in an undesirable channel, does not deliver on that expectation of value.

While Time Warner Cable itself should use this story as an impetus to improve its practices, this article is not designed as a rant against Time Warner (we have already bombarded them with significant artillery over the years). Rather, it is to shed light on an oft-ignored element of the omni-channel revolution: outbound calls.

When speaking about omni-channel (or even multi-channel, its precursor), customer service thought leaders almost exclusively focus on inbound interactions. When asking whether a business can accommodate customers in their preferred channels, thought leaders have traditionally been asking whether a business can sufficiently respond to a customer when he contacts the brand in a given channel.

In reality, that only accounts for one direction of the two-way street. Many contact centers also rely on outbound communication to interact with customers. When doing so, they must remember that even though they are the ones initiating the communication, they are expected to just as rigorously adhere to customer channel preferences.

All interactions—constructive or destructive, proactive or reactive, inbound or outbound—require customer time and effort. All interactions, therefore, come with costs that were not necessarily priced into the valuation the customer ascribed to the brand and its offering. Already operating in a state of negativity, businesses make the matter exponentially worse when the interactions they either address or initiate do not occur on the customer’s precise terms.

When implementing an outbound interaction strategy, businesses typically think about why their call is important to customers and thus why it can prove valuable for the business.

That is not the entire story. The business must also think about how its communicates that information will add or subtract value from the customer’s experience. It must use business intelligence to determine not only that it should connect but how it should connect.

If a customer demonstrates a clear preference for e-mail over telephony, he is not simply advising the business of the need to respond to his e-mail. He is also advising the business that he fundamentally wants to interact in the e-mail channel.

Grading on a curve does not exist in the age of the empowered customer. If you proactively try to contact me in an undesirable channel, I am not going to dismiss my own preference and celebrate your partial act of customer-centricity. I am going to ignore (or only begrudgingly accept) your communication and conclude that you do not know or care about me.