3 Reasons Your Organization Needs Digital CX in 2021

Digital customer engagement is about more than simply adding new channels to the contact center. Digital CX also enables contact centers and back office digital workers to truly understand their customers’ behaviors, wants and needs. It is with this information that contact centers can provide more informed and personalized service.

Customer experience then becomes a core strategic focus for businesses. Research from McKinsey shows that becoming more customer-centric can lead to improvements of 20-30% in customer satisfaction.

However, it is not enough to only focus on the customer experience. Providing great CX requires more. Creating deeper engagements with today’s customers requires digital CX.

Here are three examples of how a digital approach makes for better CX.

1. Digital CX Levels the Playing Field

Generations Y and Z have only known a digital world. They have always had the Internet and mobility, and their entire world is filtered through those technologies. So, the path to great CX needs to be digitally driven.

More often than not, customers are more digital than the contact center, and that means they’re the ones driving engagement. CX leaders must recognize that digital customers are enabled and empowered in ways that analog technologies cannot fully address. If you don’t speak their language, they won’t remain customers much longer.

Part of that language is the expectation for digital self-service options, like AI-powered chat bots. Digital natives want to be able to resolve the issues they face anywhere, anytime – even if they don’t have access to human agents.

2. Digital CX is all About Data

For contact centers and back office operations, the most important element of digitization is the ability to track and measure the inputs that comprise CX.

Digital customers use and expect multichannel engagement for customer service. As a starting point, agents need the same capabilities. The real payoff occurs when all these channels are digital, and data can be captured across the entire interaction on any channel. When AI is layered on top this, organizations can map every customer journey. This is what enables deep, personalized engagement.

3. Digital CX is Better for Everyone

Digital CX isn’t just about enabling agents to engage more effectively with customers on any channel. Having agents answer routine inquiries remains common, but this is transactional service. With AI, it’s getting easier for chatbots to handle routine inquires, leaving agents to focus on more complex issues –especially those that require practicing empathy and emotional intelligence.

By tapping into data from customer journey mapping, agents can respond in the right way, about the right things, at the right time. This is a big step up from analog CX as it creates more human, relational forms of customer service. In today’s always-on environment of instant gratification, what really matters to customers is issue resolution with minimal effort.

Another layer to consider is how digital technology goes in both directions. Just as a journey map provides deep customer insights for agents, all digital channels can be used as real-time feedback vehicles for customers to share their views about CX. Whether posting reviews on social media or answering a pop-up survey after a web chat session, these inputs all help the process of continual improvement.

Download the Upstream Works Insights Report to learn how contact centers can adapt to the new normal as we approach 2021.