Customers change, technology changes, but do business processes change in response? They must if organizations want to remain competitive. Customers now expect expansive service experiences; organizations that fail to deliver them will lose customers and revenue. This elevates the importance and profile of customer experience (CX) initiatives. But many efforts fail to move the needle because they don’t tackle the real causes of poor experiences.
The most important shift in the way customers relate to organizations is the transition to digital engagement. People want the power to control as much of the conversation as possible. That could be via a mobile app, a user community, a messaging channel or a conversational chatbot. And because digital contact is trackable and continuous, customers want to hop from one mode to another with continuity across touchpoints.
This consumer shift to digital has forced the hand of businesses that are trying to cope with growth while being constrained by resources. Frontline workers who deal with hard problems and high-value customers need better resources to solve problems and to spot opportunities to grow revenue through cross- or up-selling. There are more stakeholders involved across the enterprise, ranging from back-office knowledge workers to marketers to planners and financial teams, all trying to maximize the value of each customer and interaction. New analytic tools offer an understanding of what customers want, how they feel and how well the organization is responding. But when transitioning to a form of blended contact center that emphasizes digital interactions, businesses open the door to new challenges, such as massive amounts of interaction and customer data.
As the customer-relations problems facing businesses evolve, so too must the approach. The most obvious adjustment is to automate as much of the customer engagement process as possible. This extends from the very front of the interaction (self-service) to how customers connect to agents and how information is transmitted to each participant at different stages of the customer journey. With advances in AI, natural language processing and complex workflow design, intricate problems and long interactions can be seamless and unfragmented, no matter how many people are involved in the chain. Many businesses are using the transition to digital engagement platforms as a lever to build process automations that extend beyond service departments, bringing marketers, sales teams and others efficiently into customer-facing activities.
With more complex process automation in place, organizations can pivot to a deeper level of control over the experience. “Customer support” differs from “customer experience” in that support is usually driven by the customer and the business is reactive. By contrast, experiences can be orchestrated and designed using foreknowledge about customers as individuals and as groups. To do that, CX teams must use customer feedback in conjunction with data analysis. Customer feedback can be direct via surveys and comments or inferred through speech or text analysis. If an organization wants to evolve its CX from good to great, it needs to go beyond capturing a snapshot of customer sentiment at a moment in time. Many feedback or voice of the customer programs do a great job at capturing mood, but then drop the ball when it comes to prescribing specific actions or which processes to activate to change experiences and outcomes.
A useful by-product of improving customer experiences is that employee experiences also improve. Providing frontline teams with better insights and instructions allows them to act with more assurance and control over their work. Service jobs become more attractive, which in turn makes it easier to attract and retain skilled talent across a variety of roles. Automation does not have to be seen as a way to replace workers to save money, but instead can be a way of empowering existing employees—while also saving money.
Better employee relationships are just one of the desired outcomes from today’s CX transition. Satisfied customers are the most important result. They buy more, and they engage more often. They respond more approvingly to offers, suggestions and promotions. They speak highly of a
By 2027, two-thirds of organizations will conclude they lack visibility into customer experiences, leading to initiatives to streamline analytics, performance and customer data integration. Through these initiatives, organizations can turn a good customer experience into a great one, thereby generating loyalty and increasing customer value in both the short and long terms. For many years, the prevailing view of customer engagement has been that it is a costly necessity that needs to be contained and triaged. In reality, customer experiences are the foundation of business health and growth and have a direct impact on revenue. When we make appropriate use of automation, digital technology and data, we can see how much revenue businesses have been leaving on the table by not fully engaging with customers. And in this era of change, those who recognize the new possibilities will reap the benefits.