Digital Disruption Transforming Customer And Employee Interaction

Customer Engagement in the Multichannel World

Because multichannel service delivery is still evolving, many companies find themselves challenged by data residing in discrete functional silos, making it difficult to provide a true view of the customer journey. However, a view into the end-toend experience is critical for companies to understand in order to more effectively and efficiently communicate with customers across channels consistently and contextually. This is a result of businesses being expected to have full insight into all of customers’ prior interactions and be able to respond in an actionable, personalized and consistent manner.

The challenge with this lies in capturing each of these interactions across many individual channels, and linking the data to gain a single, consolidated view of all interactions in order to deliver service that reflects this awareness. By evaluating the customer experience across all channels using a centralized solution, companies can quickly determine where to focus customer engagement efforts to help realize the greatest impact, and gain a deeper, more contextual understanding of customer data.

While multichannel engagement is recognized by most organizations as a strategic imperative, many find it challenging to link all the interaction data together for contextual insights that present a single view of the customer’s journey. For example, if a customer makes an inquiry by phone, then engages in an online web chat session and later performs a transaction on their mobile device, it is important for an organization to piece the different interactions together to understand when and why customers switch channels, and how that impacts the business. By understanding previous interactions and likely outcomes, companies can use the intelligence gained to deliver highly personalized service. Additionally, they can align customer feedback with the acquired insights to predict customer behavior or identify opportunities to reduce churn.

With this cultural, organizational and operational approach, recognizing buyer intent and customer needs, while delivering the right offer and support at the right time, drives more personalized, more predictable and more productive customer engagement.

CONSUMERS HAVE AN UNWAVERING LIST OF DEMANDS, AND FIND IT EASIER TO SWITCH BRANDS WITH A QUICK SWIPE OF THE FINGER.

Digitization Has Created a Next-Generation Workforce

As digital disruption has affected the way customers conduct business and their lives, it has had the same effect on the workforce. Particularly with millennials, who make up the majority of contact center employees, and need access to information and user interfaces similar to what they use personally. This digitally savvy workforce is more comfortable operating in a multichannel environment, therefore fostering the need for organizations to optimize and empower their next-generation employee workforce to be responsive to customer demands.

Organizations that enable an engaged workforce empower employees to do their best for continuous improvement and inspired customer interactions, impacting greater customer loyalty and overall business performance. Culturally, it is important to let employees know they are customer champions and play a role driving great experiences that lead to brand satisfaction. Engaged employees are key to driving customer engagement and the customer experience.

Organizations need to give employees access to the data and solutions they need to be champions for their customers, and ensure that employees are comfortable leveraging technology to support customer engagement in order to drive better customer experiences.

Giving Employees the Right Information and Tools

Successful organizations are empowering employees with data and analytics to decrease customer effort and help support all aspects of customer engagement. This can include from the provision of customer journey insights to access to analytics-driven data that can help employees ease customer effort and improve experiences in real-time. Access to analytics will continue to drive areas like self-service, social and mobile customer engagement as well as direct digital interactions across channels like chat and video.

Providing employees with tools to make interaction more personal and productive often involves taking the context of previous interactions and providing actionable recommendations to the agent. This context may exist in many places within the organization, but the information needs to be readily available, despite its location and age. Customers know the context of their interactions and expect the companies they engage with to know it too.

One aspect of this dynamic is the importance of integrating system information to be readily available to the agent. For example, systems of record containing billing and shipping data may be on legacy technology, and need to be woven into current channels of engagement and available on the employee desktop. Luckily, since digitization is happening across the organization, if an individual purchased an item back in 1988, the record will easily be available to the agent as part of the customer’s journey.