One Voice Strategy

One Voice Strategy is a marketing and strategic management concept that refers to a firm's capability to deliver seamless, harmonious, and reliable interactions throughout the customer journey for effective customer engagement.^[1]

Background

Modern communication technologies, communication devices, and automated robotic, artificial intelligence driven communication are expanding the variety of interfaces and therefore the possible ways that customers and firms can interact. This in turn poses a threat to customer engagement, because mismatched preferences on what is called service interaction space – the universe of possible points of customer-firm interaction – can create pain points for customers leading to interrupted interactions, delays, and even interaction termination.^[1] One Voice Strategy can help enhance customer engagement by integrating these various interfaces.^[1][2][3]

Definition and dimensions

One Voice Strategy is defined as an on-going "organizing approach for a firm’s actions, communications, and exchanges to deliver a seamless, harmonious, and reliable stream of interactions for effective customer engagement."^[1] Central to a successful One Voice Strategy execution are a firm's learning capabilities that enable intelligence generation from customer interactions and integration with available intelligence stocks, as well as coordination capabilities that enable intelligent action by reconfiguring resources/assets of the firm in anticipation of yet-to-occur customer interactions. By distinguishing between human and non-human actors – such as chatbots or LLMs – One Voice Strategy execution takes place on a 2x2 configuration of human/automated learning-coordination capabilities for intelligence generation and use. The four configurations, Q1 to Q4 are:

Configuration

	Tacit knowledge	Explicit knowledge
Agent control	Purely employee mediated customer interactions such as personalized service performances in restaurants or hotels	Technology augmented employee customer interactions that require human judgment to guide customer interactions, a form of One Voice Strategy execution most evident in the digitization of health care service delivery.
Algorithmic control	Technology augmented employee customer interactions such as personalized services that automatically draw on centrally stored customer knowledge.	Autonomous and automated customer interactions without human interventions such as over-the-air service updates.

Bibliography

• Singh, Jagdip, Satish Nambisan, R. Gary Bridge, and Juergen Kai-Uwe Brock (2021), "One-Voice Strategy for Customer Engagement," Journal of Service Research, 24 (1), 42-65.

See also

• Customer experience
• Customer engagement
• Omnichannel