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According to the latest 2016 Dimension Data Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report1 digital volumes handled by the contact centre are on track to exceed phone contacts by the end of 2016. Across virtually all digital channels, significant annual growth is being reported from most geographies. This supports the reality that the quest to deliver exemplarity Autonomous Customer Experience (Cx) is now widely recognized as the top reason for offering digital self-service and assisted service channels. What’s more, according to the research, four out of five participating organizations clearly recognize Customer Experience as being their number one competitive differentiator.
While the crafting of low-effort customer journeys and the optimisation of true omnichannel self-service architectures are the focus of significant strategic thinking and deployment, there are strong indicators that many organisations lack the maturity of their ‘digitization strategies’ and as such, they are, in fact, still tending to develop and deploy somewhat disparate multichannel solutions.
One of the several tragic consequences of the typical multichannel approach is that such operations are not able to take full advantage of omnichannel analytics nor the ability to glean incredibly powerful business intelligence from more appropriate platforms.
Some of today’s more sophisticated omnichannel platforms also deliver advanced intelligent routing and process automation across all channels. This means that the organization can build an intelligent record of individual customer channel preferences and behaviors and in many instances, will be able to pre-empt their needs while simultaneously providing high levels of appropriate and relevant personalisation.
Such personalisation could, for example, be by way of automated chat pop-ups, emailed notes or documents or, for that matter, prepared text or audio or video responses directed through the customer’s preferred social channel. Alternatively, the customer could be directed via the voice channel to the best trained or equipped agent or in some cases, to the same agent that he or she has successfully interacted with previously.
By digitally engaging with customers (assuming an appropriate omnichannel platform) it is now possible to identify many of an individual customer’s traits, preferences, characteristics and intent. Armed with this type of information the system can effectively route the interaction to the most appropriate channel and put forward just the right digital content.
Significantly reduced customer effort linked to high levels of appropriate personalisation all add up to a vastly improved customer experience and a greater depth of customer engagement. Engaged customers are infinitely more loyal; they purchase more, stay longer and rerefer more. Engaged customers are an organization’s true advocates.
[About the author]
Dylon Mills is the Director of Marketing Content Strategy & Development at Uniphore. As such, Dylon’s main responsibilities are to strategize, create and deliver content for Uniphore’s product portfolio that align with the global Go-To-Market strategy, corporate positioning, and marketing campaigns. Dylon’s prior work experience includes Product Management at one of the top Fortune 500 Technology companies, Symantec Corporation. Outside of work, Dylon enjoys problem-solving and any project that includes building/tinkering with tools. Dylon holds a BS Consumer Economics from the University of Georgia.
1 Dimension Data’s 2016 Global Contact Center Benchmarking Report © Dimension Data 2013-2016