How Do You Build Personalized Customer Experiences? Ask the Tough Questions.
Delivering a great customer experience is vital, and complex. According to Dimension Data 2017 Global CX Benchmarking Report, digital transformation is essential in order to compete in today’s market. Digital workspace and engagement is not a competitive advantage – it’s a necessity.
Businesses need to look closely at what their customers require today in order to gain their loyalty, and develop a plan that meets those requirements while positioning them for continued success in the future. At the same time, they need to take into consideration their management needs, technology requirements, and how to equip agents for success. What is really required then, amounts to a counterintuitive oxymoron: innovation that leverages technology to humanize and personalize and customer engagement.
Let’s take a closer look at the realities and expectations from each of these angles.
Customer Demands: Recognition, Understanding, & Differentiation
When they reach out, they expect to be recognized and greeted as the valued customer that they are. Know their name, know what the last conversation they had with your organization was about, regardless of who interacted with them. Show an understanding of what they’re trying to achieve, what their concerns are. Offer a differentiated experience based on their own personal history and preferences, including being proactive with targeted, relevant information, products, and services by offering them at the right time. The flipside of this level of customer understanding, however, is respecting their privacy – when does it become too much and seem like Big Brother is watching? Do different types of customers have different expectations when it comes to privacy? Knowing the preferences of your various demographics will be a key consideration as you develop your CX strategy.
Management Needs: Visibility, Consolidation, & Value
In order to provide a continually great customer engagement experience, there needs to be visibility into the quality of the experience, i.e. How is the organization doing in terms of meeting customer expectations? Are your agents productive and happy? Can you identify and celebrate agent successes? What about training opportunities? Which processes need to be tweaked? Are you offering the right services on the right channels? Is there a feedback loop for continuously adapting and refining your CX strategy? Management tools that provide insight into both data and people across your organization and across the complete customer journey, allows you to dig deeper, make an impact and drive real business value.
Agent Empowerment: Skilled, Ease of Use, & Success
When you think about it, the agents on the frontlines make or break the customer experience. With self-service being such a focus these days, by the time a customer gets to an agent they’ve exhausted all other options and now need an answer – fast. This means agents need to be skilled, aware, ready, and empowered to deliver a positive, successful, personalized experience to each customer. Technology is a huge part of it, but also consider skillsets – both hard and soft, recruitment practices, performance evaluation, and motivation. In short, agents need to be happy in order to make your customers happy. When customers are happy, they’re loyal and buy more. When agents are happy, they’re committed to success and to your organization.
Technology Considerations: Connection, Integration, & Consistency
Do you have technology in place that is capable of meeting the needs of all these players? For agents, this includes a consolidated view of interactions in real-time and related history. It needs to be easy to use, both for the sake of the agent but also to help with reducing training costs. It also needs to assist with personalization and proactive service – equipping the agent with not only accurate customer information but also with accurate predictions of what they’ll want to discuss next. Organizations should also be considering the value of building and sharing interaction data across the organization – all touchpoints benefiting from one central pool of information. Whether it’s legacy systems, desktop applications, CRMs, or proprietary databases, the organization’s CX strategy needs to integrate and harness the data and knowledge that resides in each and make it instantly and easily accessible to the agents on the front lines.
Trying to meet all these requirements can seem like an overwhelming and daunting task. Make sure when you’re planning your CX strategy that you’re getting the help you need to understand the requirements from all angles. Upstream Works can help – whether it’s figuring out complex integrations or planning out how to support new channels. Watch a demo of Upstream Works for Finesse and see our omnichannel agent desktop in action, or get in touch with us for a personal product walkthrough and see how we can address your organization’s specific needs.