What goes wrong when you open every channel at once

Every channel is a promise. Opening five at once means five promises with one team, and customers notice which are not kept.

Every channel is a promise. Opening five at once means five promises with one team, and customers notice which are not kept.

What actually goes wrong

• Live channels beat asynchronous ones for attention. A chat that pings wins over an email sitting in a queue, so email response times quietly get worse the week chat opens.
• Nobody agreed who covers what. Everybody assumes somebody is watching the new channel.
• Expectations differ per channel and nobody told the customer. A chat widget implies seconds; the team is answering in twenty minutes.
• The configuration is unfinished on four of them. Routing, business hours, out-of-hours messages: each channel needs its own and only the first one got attention.

The order that works

1. Email first. End to end: address, authentication, triggers, routing. Get one channel genuinely right.
2. Then the help centre, which reduces volume on everything else.
3. Then one live channel, whichever your customers actually use.
4. Then the rest, if there is still demand once the first three work.

Closing one is harder than opening it

Worth knowing before you open. Customers who found you on a channel keep using it, and withdrawing it reads as a reduction in service however carefully you explain it.

See also

• Email, messaging or phone: what suits what
• What not to do on day one
• How email works in Zendesk