What Is Channel Switching and Why Does It Undermine Digital Journeys?
Channel switching happens when a customer starts a task online, finding a plan, enrolling, managing an account, and finishes it on the phone instead. For a competitive energy supplier, that switch matters more than most companies realize: the digital experience is part of the product itself. Customers can shop and switch providers freely, so the ease of completing a task digitally shapes whether they stay.
Reducing channel switching does more than cut contact center volume. It gives digital investment an operational measurement instead of a design opinion: where customers fall out of digital, what each fallout costs, and which fixes return the most.
Client Opportunity
A national competitive energy supplier engaged Andrew Reise to explore its digital journey across awareness, finding an energy plan, enrollment, and ongoing use, with a specific focus on channel switching and task completion. Andrew Reise reviewed existing voice of the customer data, conducted qualitative interviews with business customers, and mapped the digital journey along with its critical moments and metrics.
The Challenge
The supplier needed to understand its digital journey end to end, simplify the experience, and reduce cost, with particular attention to where customers were switching channels instead of completing tasks digitally. It also had an internal problem common to large organizations: stakeholders working from a project list with no shared agreement on priorities.
Channel Switching Was Eroding the Digital Experience
Customers starting tasks online and finishing them on the phone rarely complain. The digital channel simply doesn't finish the job, and the contact center absorbs the cost, call by call, with no clear view of where or why it's happening.
A Project List Without Agreement
Without a shared, evidence-based view of the journey, digital investment was being argued from opinion. The projects that shipped were the ones with the loudest sponsors, not the ones with the largest impact.
