Customer Experience, Deep Insight and the Omnichannel Opportunity

Deep Insight in an Omnichannel World

The customer landscape is changing with the rise of the younger ‘millennial’ generations. These customers are more tech-savvy and are looking for a better experience when considering the different channels of communication at their disposal such as online chat, SMS, email, social media, and newer options like WhatsApp for Business. They are adopting and adapting to these different ways to communicate and the business, and their contact centre, must be ready to meet their needs.

Despite this shift, it is important to remember that the phone call continues to be a significant customer touch-point, and importantly, is the primary mechanism for interactions where a medium-to-serious customer service issue is ongoing.

As a result, it is becoming increasingly important for businesses to be able to assess high-level customer experience metrics across the different channels in play, whilst at the same time having the means to dive deep into the most critical interactions. In addition, it must be delivered in a way that’s accessible to decision-makers throughout the business – the right information, in the right context, and at the right time.

Better Customer Experience for All Businesses

Businesses are becoming much better equipped to manage their customer facing teams and use intelligent analytics to assist in more-informed decision-making. As analytics services become more accessible to businesses of all types and sizes, the focus is turning towards customer engagement in line with relevant media channels and using analytics to understand customer interactions across the entire business, to truly understand overall customer experience.

Customer experience is a key differentiator for brands all over the world, and solutions that unlock this are in high demand. We’re already seeing core omnichannel principles, like treating the customer journey as a complete story or flow, start to filter down to the midmarket and to informal contact centres. When armed with rich analytics around customer interactions across the business, these organisations can monitor the resolution time of enquiries or issues alongside averages over time. By reviewing the journey from the customer’s perspective in this way, they are able to put the infrastructure in place to achieve the ultimate objective of resolving customer issues on first contact.

In the past, it had been difficult for these organisations to invest heavily in customer experience because it has been hard to measure results in a way that suits their individual business and is accessible and affordable. That was true before you even consider omnichannel customer service environments. However, we are making that possible by making it easy for all sizes and shapes of businesses to unlock hidden data that exists within all channels, both verbal and written, and across the whole of the business – not just within a contact centre – and put it in the context of departmental and wider business productivity.

The Role of the Channel

The move to omnichannel services is going to be gradual and shouldn’t be daunting to resellers. Integrated analytics that help businesses to monitor and understand how customers interact with each channel will be vital if contact centres are to prove their success. This type of holistic insight will be enabled hugely by omnichannel, and indeed by speech intelligence, both of which are changing the rules for customer experience.

Fortunately, resellers are already moving away from simply offering telecoms as a standalone product, understanding the increased ‘stickiness’ of an integrated proposition and the value that creates. Furthermore, as we enter a new era of APIs and information in context, resellers are increasingly empowered to deliver these advantages to their customers in a way that allows them to differentiate and build loyalty.

As well as building technical skillsets in this area, resellers need to put renewed emphasis on the consultative sell. Before discussing any communications requirements, resellers must help business customers to achieve a clear understanding of how end customers want to communicate with them. Not every business will need to facilitate communication over every channel available. By working together, resellers can help businesses to create the optimal customer experience, manage it effectively and continually improve the customer journey.

Resellers play a vital role in helping business customers to leverage the latest technologies and make the customer experience central to their offering. When resellers get it right and support their customers in attaining exceptional customer service, the rewards can be significant. Resellers that understand their customers’ businesses and can advise on the right technology to suit their needs will differentiate themselves from their competitors and win valuable long-term customer relationships.

The wide-ranging data drawn from across a business enables managers in different departments to be truly informed about how customers interact with their organisation based on their own specific responsibilities and requirements. Even those operating in the most niche of industries can get an understanding that’s totally relevant and applicable to them with insights that are drawn from deep within their data.

As published in Comms Dealer.