3 Ways to Digitally Empower Your Customer Experience From Every Dimension
Consumer expectations regarding personalization are growing. But businesses are being forced to offer better personalization across a vast digital landscape with fewer resources, leading to a digital divide. To succeed, companies must close the divide by digitally empowering the stakeholders. Brett Weigl, SVP and GM for digital and AI, Genesys, discusses three fundamental priorities businesses should consider in their quest for digital empowerment.
Consumer expectations for personalized, seamless experiences across all channels are higher than ever. And today, it is not only voice, email, and SMS — it is also web chat, messaging apps, and social media. For businesses, it is hard to connect across an endless digital landscape and provide the high-quality service customers expect.
When people do not receive the assistance they desire, they simply go elsewhere. Bad experiences cause people to leave brands, but lack of personalization could be a far more common culprit. Why? Consumers know brands gather tons of data about them, and they expect it to be used to provide what they want, where and when they want it.
See More: How To Improve Consumer Experience With Dynamic Audience Segmentation
The Digital Divide
With mounting economic pressures, businesses are tightening resources, compounded by increasing customer interactions and a growing number of channels. Companies are being asked to do more, personalize more and serve more — with less. Leaders are often tasked with making decisions that drive revenue but often lack the insight and input when needed.
To satisfy customers and shore up support operations, many companies will attempt to administer service across multiple touchpoints yet treat each channel independently. They track different key performance indicators (KPIs) and use separate technology, processes and resources to capture and manage engagement. This fragmentation obstructs their view of what it is like for their customers, causing them to miss opportunities to provide a more connected experience.
This is what is known as the digital divide. And the bigger this divide is, the better it is for competitors. To achieve breakthrough success, organizations must close this divide by digitally empowering their customers, employees, and the entire business.
As companies realize these gaps, it is tempting to add more channels to the digital arsenal. Instead, leaders should strategically assess if additional channels are helping or hindering the customer experience. Companies need not be on every digital channel; they need to be on the right channels.
Here are three fundamental priorities all businesses should consider in their quest for digital empowerment:
Connect data for people-centered experiences
Most everyone has been on the receiving end of disconnected data.
You call your cell phone provider using your device, authenticate yourself to a polite customer service employee or bot and explain the reason for calling, only to be transferred to a different department for assistance. When transferred, you are asked to repeat the process all over again. While the employee you spoke to was friendly and ready to help, the experience was still frustrating because you were asked for the same information multiple times, and the company did not recognize you as a loyal customer.
To build stronger connections with people today, businesses must prove to customers they know them. This requires businesses to continually connect and refine data around each customer’s unique experience. They need the capability to see people’s history, including the current and previous engagements, to understand where their customer has been and why they are here now.
And it is not just customer data businesses must connect. There is also a need to connect their own knowledge to ensure customers receive the same message across all channels, including self-service. Businesses should invest in a centrally managed knowledge portal, allowing every resource (human or bot) to access the same information guaranteeing customers have consistent experiences everywhere service is provided.
Unleash team potential by harnessing digital tools
Another problem many businesses face is digital limitations that short-circuit customer interactions. Businesses can solve this by tapping into digital and artificial intelligence capabilities, which will magnify their team’s reach, understanding and impact.
Employees perform at their best with access to the right insights at the right time. Intentionally investing in workspace tools that balance usability and customization with rich data will reduce complexity for employees and maximize their results. This empowers teams and creates excellent experiences for customers.
It can be tricky to show empathy to customers and treat them as an individual due to channel saturation and the data disconnect. As people interact with bots, employees, and content on different channels, they leave clues about who they are and what they want. Linking these clues and identities across all channels and platforms is key to providing the whole customer picture to employees.
Finally, pair every customer with the right employee for the task the first time. Use data strategically by leveraging intelligent technology to predict and automatically direct customers to the resource most qualified to assist. This will ensure efficient team performance and benefit customers and businesses in achieving successful outcomes.
Put real-time visibility into action for optimized results
People interact with businesses to fulfill an unmet need — an answer to a question or investigating a new service or product. But if a customer cannot accomplish their goal, they will take their business elsewhere.
It’s critical to understand what’s important to customers and how to make it as accessible as possible on their terms. If a customer is struggling to access information, businesses should know about it and help remove that friction in real time. Just identifying what needs to be changed is no longer enough. To diagnose problems or make strategic decisions, many companies rely on static reports and complicated dashboards which only show part of the customer journey in the digital world.
Businesses can overcome these barriers when actionable visibility into what is happening across all digital channels ensures their ability to act fast. Businesses should look for dynamic journey analytics and experience orchestration capabilities that provide insight to identify the evolving needs of customers in real-time. These should include the capabilities to intervene with a perfectly timed offer that increases conversions or the ability to make meaningful changes in the customer journey, optimizing their experience for greater overall satisfaction.
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Effortless Digital Experiences Drive Customer Trust
To navigate, survive and thrive in this complex digital landscape, businesses must be both intelligent and cohesive — supporting success from every dimension. With the capacity to predict, listen, understand and act as it happens, businesses can orchestrate an effortless experience for their customers. This is how to scale empathy and become an engagement center built for the experience era, driving greater customer trust and loyalty.
How are you empowering your customer experience in today’s business landscape? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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