By Anil Chawla, Managing Director EIS, Verint Systems
In the age of the customer, executives don’t decide how customer-centric their companies are — customers do. Changes such as the explosion of digital communications, mobility, sensor, voice recognition and insights gained from Big Data have a profound impact on customer expectations.
To retain its customers companies must pay attention to these developments and trends in order to deliver customer service excellence and increase top-line revenue. Some of the customer service trends we will see in 2015 will change the way customer engagement is implemented.
Service is the new marketing
This has never been truer than now and will accelerate in 2015. It is critical for an organization to sustainably meet customers’ expectations and support them through their journey. The reputation a brand has is more than its products, and points to not only the measure of customer-centricity, but also to the ethos of the brand itself.
Organizations are now challenged on how they put their operation (money) where their marketing (mouth) is. Customer service is a key barometer of this, and the recommendation of one customer to the next is not just about service and product, but also about experience, journey and fair value exchange.
Engagement is multidimensional and long lasting
Customer service is now about solutions, outcomes and the consumer’s outcomes—along with that of the organization. Engagement reflects a choice made by the customer to interact with an organization, its products and services—and to participate in the exchange of value on their terms, or as close as they can get it. Engagement is built moment by moment, journey by journey, and experience by experience. It is about expectations, excellence and values.
Multimodal is key
Channels have proliferated and customers will continue to demand effortless interactions over web and mobile self-service channels. They will also explore new communication channels such as video chat with screen sharing and annotation. In this context the rise of chat has been powerful and rapid. Chat is a fascinating channel as it embodies the human and the digital, and opens up multiple modes (webpage or app and textual conversation).
The immediacy of the chat environment, combined with the auditability and human factor, can be an effective mix. The addition of co-browse, click-to-call and video are all modes that can and should be easily added to a chat. Organizations must be adaptive, not only to consumer choice but also to the context. A lot of chat installations have focused on the buying journey, but the good ones have moved from merely selling to facilitating the consumer to buy—to help serve them.
Mobile First
By the end of 2015, 42% of the global population will own a smartphone. In India the number is predicted to be 200 million as per data shared by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). For these smartphone users, mobile will increasingly define how they communicate, shop and engage with brands.
Used to describe the customer journey as they shift between devices and digital channels, omni-channel is one of the customer care industry’s favorite buzzwords. Mobile is not simply another digital channel – mobile in itself is a multi/omni channel platform with voice, email, web chat, video chat, SMS and social media capabilities. If a customer wants to communicate with a brand, it’s increasingly likely to be through a mobile device. In fact it is predicted that mobile search will generate 27.8 billion more queries than desktop search by 2016.
Let consumers define their experiences
One of the emerging trends is to give the consumer charge over their environment. We are all familiar with selecting electronic rather than paper bills for our cell phone, but what about the rest of the process? Why not give the customer control over usage alerts, billing cycles, monthly fee bundles, rollovers, upgrades and tax assessments? An organization can show the customer the journey they are on and give them the points of control and preferences. The key to this is trust. Organizations need to earn it and with it will come partnership.
Turn information into Actionable Intelligence
Analytics remains key to deriving holistic insight, which includes journeys, sentiment, voice of the customer, outcomes and intent, along with operational performance measures and core transactional data. Organizations must use the “dark data” of process performance, mixed with customer feedback and intent, to fully embrace the entire customer journey. And they must have the agility to act on it. Intelligence must be actionable. Organizations have been getting faster and simpler, but they also need to get smarter—in the moment and along the entire journey.
Organizations will extend the power of predictive analytics to offer service tailored to the customer’s profile, historical data of past interactions and transactions, and current situational data such as geographic location, device, and browser.
Be proactive to your customer’s benefit, not yours
Proactive communication can be a powerful tool. If you do it well, it has a great effect on customer loyalty and engagement—their choice to do business with you. If you do it wrong—either by being inappropriate or wrong in tone, volume and relevance—you create the opposite effect. Proactive process alerts have become the norm and are appreciated by customers. However this is not true for marketing offers. The difference here is about understanding consumer value rather than organizational value. An organization can monitor the customer journey and while choosing when to be proactive, the idea is to understand who the value is for.
Summing it up, it can be customer experience and more so engagement will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator in this year and to ensure this omni channel will become essential along with actionable intelligence to ensure value, satisfaction and results for customers.