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Creating Meaningful Customer Experiences is the Differentiator for Successful Businesses

While businesses are delighted to see that customers are becoming exponentially more comfortable with using lower-cost self-service methods and a plethora of new communication channels, it’s a two-edged sword. While many organizations provide access to such options, they are often not proactive about ensuring that all touchpoints along a customer journey are optimized. Although technology drives innovation and transformation, particularly in customer experience, it is also causing customers' expectations to continually reach new heights. If solutions are not thoughtfully implemented and integrated with other communication tools, they can cause more problems than they solve. The challenges increase in live interactions; by the time customers make the decision to personally interact with an agent, whether on a call, chat, SMS exchange, or social media channel, they have already reached a higher level of frustration than any time in the recent past. 

The number of engagement channels continue to grow. While private messaging was simply not an option for customer experience as little as ten years ago, today 70% of consumers expect brands to engage over private messaging channels, according to a 2021 study by Conversocial, a Verint company. 

In today’s business environment, providing a meaningful customer experience is no longer a nice-to-have, but a must-have.  If a brand is to succeed and compete with gold-standard, customer-centric organizations such as Zappos or Amazon, they need to deliver memorable positive experiences on a consistent basis.  Consumers can search online for anything, at any time and brands need to make it easy and effective to interact with them in ways that require less customer effort. Many companies find the greatest obstacle to connecting with their customers is having to sift through fragmented or siloed data, making it difficult to get an accurate, integrated view of increasingly complex customer journeys.  Having access to comprehensive, accurate data is critical to designing and consistently deliver more intuitive customer journeys.

What is the best way for businesses to position themselves to build more positive and profitable customer relationships? According to the American Management Association, businesses that incorporate customer experience strategies “have 75% greater customer retention and 65% better customer satisfaction than the average company.” Once a company makes a commitment to creating a CX strategy, it often turns into a long and drawn-out process that requires extensive research.

As shown in the CallMiner graphic below, malleability in catering to your customer’s connection preferences, as well as flexibility in the customer journey is a game changer that presents a phone call as the next best step for the customer. About 50% of customers who start with self-service contact end up transferring to a live agent.  The use of analytics helps organizations understand each customer's preferred method of communication.

 

Customers in different generations have expressed preferences for contact points in their customer journey. Survey findings from Telus International reveal that across all age groups, the majority (65%) expect at least part of their customer journey to be automated versus having to interact with a human. Gen Z (46%), Gen X (53%) and Baby Boomer (60%) respondents indicated that real-time help powered by AI has the most positive impact on how they view a brand and is most likely to grow their loyalty.

Of equal importance is the journey of the employee.  If we learned one lesson from the pandemic, and the expansion of omnichannel routing, employees are able to work from any location which is leading to what is now known as The Great Resignation. Unfortunately in a recent Bain-UiPath study it was discovered that as automation becomes increasingly entrenched in company strategies, a paradox has emerged: 86% of employees want to use automation, but only 30% of business leaders give them access to it, and only 5% allow them to create their own automations.  According to Thrio, the intelligent agent journey has the agent working from anywhere.  This can be from their home, office or hybrid environment.