Challenges and Opportunities in Multichannel Customer Management

TLDR

Multichannel customer management involves designing, deploying, coordinating, and evaluating channels to enhance customer value through acquisition, retention, and development. The authors identify five major challenges—data integration, understanding consumer behavior, channel evaluation, resource allocation, and channel strategy coordination—that practitioners must address. They propose a framework linking these challenges to conceptualize the field of multichannel customer management. A review shows uneven research growth across the five challenges, summarizes current knowledge, and highlights emerging generalizations.

Abstract

Multichannel customer management is the design, deployment, coordination, and evaluation of channels through which firms and customers interact, with the goal of enhancing customer value through effective customer acquisition, retention, and development. The authors identify five major challenges practitioners must address to manage the multichannel environment more effectively: (a) data integration, (b) understanding consumer behavior, (c) channel evaluation, (d) allocation of resources across channels, and (e) coordination of channel strategies. The authors also propose a framework that shows the linkages among these challenges and provides a means to conceptualize the field of multichannel customer management. A review of academic research reveals that this field has experienced significant research growth, but the growth has not been distributed evenly across the five major challenges. The authors discuss what has been learned to date and identify emerging generalizations as appropriate. They conclude with a summary of where the research-generated knowledge base stands on several issues pertaining to the five challenges.