The customer experience (CX) can determine whether a business thrives or fails, is warmly recommended or brutally disparaged. It’s crucial that businesses provide enjoyable, adaptable and intelligently delivered customer experiences across multiple channels, from voice to email and SMS to social media. These experiences should also be seamless: if a customer hops from a chatbot to a call centre agent, for instance, they shouldn’t have to repeat their query. 

In recent years, many businesses have significantly improved digital customer experiences to enable more self-service and personalisation, and deliver these seamless interactions. But if you wander beyond the glossy front-end of some digital CX channels, you may encounter a customer service operation that is still decidedly analogue.

“The systems, tools, and data used by a contact centre advisor typically lag those presented to a customer in digital channels,” says Dave Pattman, managing director of CX services at Gobeyond Partners, part of the Webhelp Group.

This can make it harder for businesses to achieve a digitally integrated customer service operation that, as Pattman says: “Looks at customer experience holistically, seamlessly blending human and machine assistance. Using data to understand or anticipate the job a customer wishes to complete and guiding them to the most efficient and effective means of doing so.”

Reaching this state of digital nirvana not only improves customer convenience; it also allows contact centre staff to focus on value-creation – sales, retention and resolving complex complaints, for example – rather than issues customers could solve themselves through self-service channels. But getting there requires considerable time, effort and insight into current customer journeys.

For example, while AI and analytics can be game-changing for customer experience, companies first need to ensure that their customer records are accurate, complete and formatted in a usable way.

“Many organisations mistakenly think that AI and analytics are ‘plug and play’ technologies that deliver immediate returns, but their potential can’t be reached without proper training data,” says Harry Dougall, CFO and co-founder of Sagacity. “Customer information must be unified into a centralised profile to create a single customer view. This can then be accessed and used by all departments – from marketing to call centres – to deliver a joined up, seamless experience for customers.”

Breaking down silos

Historically, many organisations have been hampered by a siloed approach, with ownership of contact centre operations, digital channels, technology and data sitting in different parts of the business. “This makes it significantly more difficult to leverage the potential of data, analytics and AI-enabled technologies,” Pattman says.

Breaking down these silos can help companies to deliver the kind of personalised customer experiences that are highly valued and increasingly expected. “For example, when a customer gets in touch with a contact centre and the interaction requires them to speak with a customer service agent, if that agent has the customer’s history with the company and personal details to hand, they can deliver an experience with a personal touch,” says Craig Farley, head of consulting at IPI. 

As well as unlocking information across the organisation, companies need to analyse current customer journeys holistically, and at scale, to understand the root causes of common pain points for their customers. “By using automated speech and text-based analytics tools, for example, which can analyse conversations from phone calls to webchat messages, companies can identify points of friction throughout the customer journey and see where improvements can be made to services, products and processes,” says Farley.

Along with identifying points of friction, companies also need to ensure their teams have the skills needed to deliver digitally integrated customer experiences.

“There needs to be a general upskilling at both senior and operational levels to avoid common failure points, which include not investing enough to maintain and support systems; not considering how they need to be tested to ensure robust operational and ethical parameters; and building a data infrastructure that is not optimised for developing business applications that deliver tangible ROI,” adds Dr Daniel Hulme, chief AI officer at WPP and CEO of Satalia.

Seeing the benefits

Once businesses have a full understanding of customer behaviour, a unified view of the data they hold, and the skills in place to develop digitally integrated CX experiences, they can unlock one of the key benefits customers value: consistency.

“While it may seem boring, offering consistent information, service and simplicity to your customer is a huge benefit,” says Stephen Lester, CTO at Paragon Customer Communications. 

Hulme mentions another benefit: companies can use AI to profile customer service agents’ skills, as well as the types of customers engaging with the contact centre, “and then use optimisation to ensure the right agents with the right skills are being allocated to the right customers. This has the potential to drastically move the needle, as you are accurately allocating resources in the right way.”

By using automated speech and text-based analytics tools companies can identify points of friction throughout the customer journey and see where improvements can be made to services, products and processes

It’s important to measure how digital technologies are impacting the customer experience. “Having advance analytics to track KPIs is especially important for CCaaS [contact-centre-as-a-service] as providing a strong omnichannel experience requires the same quality of service across a variety of communication channels,” says Elisha Sudlow-Poole, research analyst at Juniper Research.

Other common indicators of success include the customer satisfactionscore (Csat), net promoter score (NPS) and customer retention rates. “Business leaders need to ensure that the customer data they collect is measured effectively, so that these indicators are accurate,” says Linda Chen, chief marketing and strategy officer at Cyara. “Organisations can also implement customer surveys to collect further, qualitative data and thereby assess the success of their CX channels.”

However, CX success factors are often more subtle than traditional indicators of ROI or KPIs, such as the reduction in drop-off rates or the number of touchpoints required to onboard a customer. “Instead, decision-makers need to look for the failure demand KPIs before and after the improvements were made,” says Andrew Stevens, principal, banking and financial services, at Quadient.

He adds that companies should ask themselves about the effectiveness of their customer communications channels and the efficacy of their call centre support. Once they understand the number of touchpoints required to meet customer needs, companies will be better prepared to optimise the user journey.

“All of these areas come with a cost or a revenue attached, which can be tightly tied into efficiency, performance, and ROI in the same way that smiling customers can be linked to NPS and Csat scores,” he adds. “But these much more nuanced questions and the data collected will give businesses an acute understanding of whether customer service technology is working or not.”

Transforming the customer experience relies on a considered data and analytics strategy as well as an understanding of the customer journey and how it can be improved and optimised.

Customer experience is changing rapidly. People now fully expect to buy from businesses easily, and quickly resolve any queries, no matter the channel. A data-led approach to technology strategy and methodology is essential to meeting these heightened expectations.

Strikingly, with only one or two bad experiences, 57% of consumers would abandon a brand, according to research by the customer experience (CX) company Nice Systems. Consumers particularly count on being able to do what they want quickly, yet only 15% agree with companies that claim their online self-service is good. This is a surprising figure given that providing an interaction on such channels can mean a rapid answer for customers and costs less than one hundredth of a contact centre call.

Companies risk high costs, customer churn and a loss of profit by failing to optimise their customer interaction strategies.

Problems commonly arise in these settings because companies may be siloed – with social chatbots created by PR teams, and complex and unstandardised knowledge bases built by marketing teams – and retain a reliance on inconsistent, outsourced contact centres lacking personalised customer information for human support agents. All of this leads to an inability to automate common processes or to offer a coherent experience.

Improvement starts with a strategy shaped around high-quality data and powerful intelligence

“There's a real urgency for companies to get this right, and there’s a powerful route they can follow to do so,” says Elizabeth Tobey, head of marketing for digital solutions at Nice. "It starts with building the right strategy, which should be shaped entirely around pulling in high quality data and deriving powerful intelligence. Businesses can then improve and automate processes, understanding what customers need, and providing a consistent experience across channels.”

In practice, if a customer is looking online to buy a new vacuum cleaner or replace its brushes, a positive approach by the supplier would see a knowledge system projecting the relevant article right to the top of the customer’s online search, based on an understanding of the person and using smart search engine optimisation. Following this, the article or video should be clear and written in consistent language, supported by an intelligent virtual bot that can answer most queries, only escalating them to a well-informed call centre agent when needed. If a business has interacted with that customer before, relevant personalised information or offers could also be supplied. The entire experience would be consistent and unified.

In order to achieve this level of seamlessness, Tobey says: “Businesses need one main, cloud-based scalable system for customer interactions, giving them a 360-degree view of what is happening, and the ability to drive a singular experience. They must equally be able to automate as many standard functions as possible, a capacity that comes from having systems that constantly identify suitable processes to make robotic for self-service or conversational AI.”

By making these advancements across typed online and mobile interactions, as well as supporting voice call triage and well-informed voice conversations with agents, businesses can powerfully increase customer happiness and decrease costs. The integration of smart technology into existing operations is critical to constantly refining and automating processes, and personalising customer experiences to meet changing demands. “Doing this well makes customer experiences seamless, frictionless, effective and delightful,” Tobey says.

Brands across industries work with Nice to transform their customer interactions, using the Enlighten XO platform to empower smart self-service and elevate digital experiences. They range from ecommerce operators seeking to improve their knowledge base to help customers find products, to finance companies aiming to triage only the most complex queries for human operators to handle. Among them is a large healthcare insurance company, which deployed Enlighten XO to listen to service centre conversations, understanding which human answers were most helpful, and improving future automated answers. Meanwhile, a household media company has rolled out Enlighten XO to its 500 sales agents, reducing call waiting time and increasing promotional sales conversions by enabling bots to learn helpful answers from the best agents.

Looking ahead, the demand to excel in this area will be higher than ever. Tobey says: “I believe that, increasingly, customers are going to spend more of their money with fewer brands. This is why empowering the right relationships between brands and customers is so crucial, and why brands need to deliver personalised and highly effective experiences."

To build the new frontier for customer interactions, visit nice.com

Customer needs and expectations are constantly changing, and companies that fail to adapt soon find themselves lagging behind their competitors. They have to work harder to ensure they’re delivering the kind of customer experience (CX) that people have come to expect. Meeting this challenge requires them to unlock data and insights that they might not have had access to in the past.

“Precise behavioural data across the customer journey will always be needed to identify specific problems,” says Stephen Lester, CTO at Paragon Customer Communications. “Analysing the data you do have is a great starting point – as it can allow you to set benchmarks to monitor over and under-performance – but identifying the missing data from across your customer journey is just as important.” 

Graham Brown, CRO at HGS UK, says organisations are often unaware of what data they have on their customers, let alone how they can leverage it. “It’s a tall task to gather data from multiple sources in its varying formats and be able to understand it and act on it, but without it, businesses will soon find themselves behind the pace,” he says.

Aligning this data requires companies to take stock of their existing insights and identify opportunities for gathering more data. Stuart Russell, chief strategy officer at Planning-inc, adds: “First and foremost, brands need to have fully connected first party data, bringing together full transactional and behavioural histories to provide a holistic view of each customer’s relationship with the business. Then it’s about democratising and activating that data in meaningful ways – ensuring the most up-to-date data is available, whilst carefully reviewing precisely which data is relevant for each CX use case.”

Applying analytics tools to accurate, consolidated data can reveal the key pain points in current customer experiences. “For example, say you have an ecommerce channel and you’re collecting data from all the touch points along your customer journey, then you can see where customers are dropping out, and therefore where improvements need to be made,” says Tom Voskes, co-founder of digital transformation consultancy firm SparkOptimus, and co-author of the newly released book 'Disruption in Action.'

First and foremost, brands need to have fully connected first party data, bringing together full transactional and behavioural histories to provide a holistic view of each customer’s relationship with the business.

A low or declining net promoter score (NPS) or customer satisfaction score (Csat) is also a signal that something is wrong with the customer experience. “However, it is only by delving into the granularity of these ratings, and the raw data behind them, that companies can truly understand how to improve the overall customer experience, and indeed company operations,” says Linda Chen, chief marketing and strategy officer at Cyara. 

Harry Dougall, CFO and co-founder of Sagacity, expands on this point: “By analysing customer data in granular detail, businesses can better understand the precise cause of problems so they can implement practical solutions to optimise experiences. This means that no matter what new issues arise, companies can always ensure they are able to eradicate problems and adapt to changing customer needs.”

But unless customer data is joined up to the rest of the business, it may be hard to reach the level of granularity needed to truly identify the root causes of customer experience issues.

“We worked with a telecoms company who was seeing increasing calls to its support centre but could not work out why,” says Dougall. “By analysing customer data from multiple dimensions – including location, tariffs, which products they owned – we were able to identify that all the callers were purchasing devices through a specific channel partner.” Using this insight, the company was able to provide the channel with additional product training, which in turn reduced call centre complaints and delivered operating expenditure savings of £1m. 

Advanced AI and conversational AI also lets firm listen to – and interpret – customer conversations at the kind of scale needed to properly enhance CX across multiple channels. “You can start to understand why your customers are contacting you, what their intent was, what actions the customer agent took to resolve the issue, and so on,” says Iain Fisher, director of digital solutions in Europe for ISG. “This can all be analysed to give you actionable insight on how to improve the customer experience. The trick is being able to act on this insight.”

Many of these insights could remain locked without AI and analytics tools. “Applying sophisticated data science capabilities to your customer data can uncover hidden patterns that are invisible to humans,” says Dr Daniel Hulme, chief AI officer at WPP and CEO of Satalia. “For example, how do you know well in advance when specific customers might churn, even before they do?”

Optimisation technology can use these insights to trigger actions from a customer service team, allowing them to intervene well before customers abandon ship. “These systems learn over time, improving based on real-time feedback on which interventions work, and which don’t,” says Hulme. And ultimately “This ability to learn and adapt is key to building resilience in customer service functions and businesses in general.”

The arrival of five technologies is changing the effectiveness and costs of customer conversations in multiple businesses. Scottish Power is among them, slashing customer churn by eradicating low-value touchpoints, while Lloyds Banking Group is powering rapid loan signups through streamlined self-assessment. In all, 62% of European businesses are increasing investment in CX tools, so making the right choices is essential to success.

Here are the five technologies transforming customer conversations:

1. AI-based self-service

Digital self-service, driven by AI, empowers customers to resolve problems or find information more quickly and cost-effectively. Self-service is “extremely important,” particularly for younger customers, says Moira Clark, professor of strategic marketing at Henley Business School. A quality experience is fundamental, she adds: “Brands must invest to ensure their self-service channels are designed for their customers’ needs.”In such a setup, virtual agents and bots can harness machine learning to understand common queries and identify positive responses, improving answers constantly. They can also be programmed to provide personalised guidance at key moments, such as when a customer is discontented or showing interest in related products.

2. Robotic journey orchestration

Every customer conversation is part of a journey, which businesses need to shape from beginning to end in line with user behaviour. To provide the consistency customers want, journey orchestration technology is critical, with robotic systems making these interactions more intuitive and connecting customers seamlessly to the best possible resources. Online bank Monzo is among the companies doing this well. It has simplified customer signups, replaced cards and responded more quickly to queries, so its entire customer journey is significantly more coherent. Engaging experiences are also key, with research by the Henley Centre for Customer Management showing that more tactile journeys deliver much better rates of emotional satisfaction. Meanwhile, predictive analytics enable chatbots to deliver ever more relevant conversational experiences throughout.

3. Contact centre automation

Human interaction will always be an important part of customer engagement, particularly where complex or unusual queries are involved, but cutting-edge automation enhances both efficiency and efficacy. Smart automation can handle an ever-growing array of tasks to ensure human assistance is optimally applied. And when human agents are engaged, they can now be equipped with real-time guidance based on what customers say or do. For this to work, the information must be well catalogued, Clark says: “Leading brands adopt a customer-centric approach, so that data is organised around customers’ needs and can be presented in an integrated form to call centre operatives.” Disney Streaming, for example, automatically routes customers to its most relevant agents and resources, providing agents and bots with updated scripts in real time as service issues arise.

4. Data-led workforce engagement

Optimising management of employees, their performance and the resources being provided to them relies on a proper understanding of their daily workload and contributions. From that basis, automated coaching and gamification of employee engagement tools can help ensure staff enjoy constantly improving their levels of proficiency and performance. Smart forecasting helps reduce employee stress by ensuring contact centres are always staffed in line with demand.

5. Cloud-based scalability

Underlying businesses’ success in all these areas is the ability to scale as needed. Cloud computing, therefore, is essential in supporting customer conversations. The best cloud platforms ensure businesses can confidently handle fluctuations in demand and ally those capabilities to the processing and security needed to truly personalise experiences. The Radisson Hotel Group, which runs 1,400 properties globally, uses a powerful cloud-based system to supply agents across six global contact centres with a wealth of relevant on-screen information. Those capabilities have enabled the group to create a cutting-edge personalised omnichannel experience and dramatically improve customer satisfaction rates.