Read Time:
12 min.
Font Size:
Font Weight:
Exclusive Q&A
What are the most significant industry changes in customer experience?
Overall, I see a portfolio of industry changes that are happening to meet the customer demand and needs from applications to adopting customer engagement hubs — to support any range of customer engagement. The adoption of cloud-based systems will continue to accelerate as vendors produce more cloud-ready systems and organizations overcome their concerns about security, integration and performance. From a systems perspective, I expect more organizations to adopt advanced analytics systems that can produce a full 360-degree view of the customer, along with journey maps and predictive analysis. I also expect more organizations to experiment with bots to automate more customer-related tasks as they seek to save money and better meet customer expectations. There will also likely be further developments related to text messaging and mobile use by both customers and employees, and to the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to automate more tasks and assist employees responding to customer requests.
That said, many organizations continue to struggle to become more customer-focused to provide the best possible experience. To accomplish such requires insight on your customers that can provide a comprehensive view on your interactions across the customer journey. This can be accomplished by using analytics that can process structured and unstructured data (voice recordings, text, pictures, video and events). Analytics also have advanced to use natural language processing, artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive capabilities, enabling organizations to make customer related tasks in the front and back-office more contextual to the situation being acted upon. And above all, analytics that can show organizations where customers are experiencing challenges, what is working and what is not, what they can do about it, and that helps drive actions that improve customer and employee engagement as well as business outcomes.
How do we deliver a consistent customer experience across all channels?
Our benchmark research into next-generation customer engagement shows organizations face two key challenges delivering omnichannel experiences: The systems in their overall architecture are largely stand-alone and the systems managing communication channels also operate independently. Together this makes it difficult to provide the same information at different touch points, both assisted and digital. To avoid undertaking disruptive changes to processes and/or their systems architecture, there are two technologies that can help overcome these challenges: what I call a smart agent desktop, and the latest Visual IVR (interactive voice response) technology.
A smart agent desktop sits above an organization’s systems architecture, including systems managing communication channels, and using it allows contact center agents or other employees handling interactions to easily access and update data in any system. The latest versions of these systems use natural language processing, artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to recognize what the interaction is about and automatically present users with the data and information they need to resolve the interaction. This ensures consistent processes in the way interactions are handled, gives customers consistent information and automates common processes such as replicating name and address changes across all systems.
The latest Visual IVR systems achieve similar results, as they are not just a visual way of presenting IVR menus on a mobile device. They also allow employees to have a dialogue with a customer using multiple channels of interaction; for example, using voice and text messaging, while at the same timesharing information in multiple forms — text, pictures, video. The key is that any shared information is extracted from systems using customers’ identifiable profile, so they get personalized, information-driven responses.
What are some best practices for personalizing the digital customer experience?
The first step is to design interactions with your customers in mind, rather than to address internal issues. The second step is to understand why your customers engage with you and what outcomes they are expecting from each interaction. Many organizations believe this is impossible because there are thousands of reasons customer interact with them. Although this may be true, most cases will involve a relatively small set of common issues and these are the ones that should be addressed first. Next, think through the complete customer journey as each interaction is likely to be just one step in a journey and getting one step wrong is likely to impact future interactions and customer actions. Then and only then should organizations think about how to select and set up digital technology that easily fulfills customers’ expectations.
Meeting these expectations will largely depend on the chosen technology but in my experience you should apply three basic principles. First, set up the system so it can quickly identify and authenticate the caller using a name, account number or other key demographic data, or using voice recognition to match the callers voice to a customer’s name, or perhaps transferring the interaction to be web- or bot- based by providing a unique URL to access the system. Second, once the caller has been identified, the system should retrieve key information about the caller to be able to base next actions on that information. This should include previous interactions as these can give context to responses – for example, prior web-based interactions can point to the customer’s intention or issue. Third, the system should identify the reason for the interaction and then set up the minimum number of steps to complete that type of interaction. For example, if a customer wants to buy a lady’s cardigan, the system should be able to use the product code to ask only about features that are variable for that product – color, neck shape, sleeve length. Where possible, the system should make responses personal – for example, it should ask for confirmation of a known delivery address and whether to use a previously authorized credit card rather than prompting customers to enter this information at each encounter. Setting up the system this way will make interactions easy and personal for the customer, which is likely to increase customer satisfaction.
How should we marry digital self-service and live assistance?
In a world where consumers have more options, our market research shows that most organizations intend to compete by providing an improved customer experience. The same research shows digital self-service technologies will be an essential part of that effort. However, the research also shows that for the foreseeable future most companies are still expecting to handle large volumes of telephone calls. The goal must be to marry traditional and digital methods and provide exceptional experiences across all channels of engagement — what has come to be called omnichannel customer engagement. Companies should also consider that interactions will often start on one channel but conclude on another, most likely moving from digital self-service to assisted service with a person or bot. This includes the possibility of customers starting on one channel, moving to another then moving back to the original channel, or in some instances having an interaction that uses multiple channels — for example, talking on the phone while collaborating on a website or mobile device.
In this situation two things are key. First, the transition from one channel to another must be seamless. In other words, data entered into one channel should be instantly available on the second channel so that the customer doesn’t have to start again or reenter any data. Second, the information provided on all channels should be the same; for example, the balance of a customer’s account should always be consistent no matter the channel or the format the information is provided in — spoken word, text message, shared picture or bot message. Achieving this integration of multiple channels during one interaction clears the way to restructuring some interactions to make best use of different media; for example, rather than trying to talk a customer through how to use a product, the agent could share a prepared video. The aim, as in the answer to the previous question, must be to make it easy for the customer to achieve what he or she wants with minimum effort on both sides.
What advice do you have for changing customer mindsets around adoption and use of digital technology?
In my view, adopting digital technology is a must in all market segments. The primary reason is that consumers have changed the way they engage with each other and this is impacting the way they want to engage with organizations. They are now more inclined to search for products using the internet, use mobile text messaging in apps like WhatsApp, watch videos on YouTube, and are increasingly using technologies such as Siri to get answers to their questions. However, there is an important caveat: Our research shows that organizations are expecting growth in all channels, so no channels are likely to disappear any time soon. This is because consumers use variety of channels and some interactions are appropriate for certain channels (for example, filing out an insurance claim form), so it is important to support an array of channels for the foreseeable future.
The way forward in any industry segment is to start by deciding what interaction types work best on what channels, keeping in mind that some interactions might start on one but finish on another and some might use multiple channels at the same time. The most likely scenario is that simpler interactions will start and finish digital; complex interactions are likely to involve talking to an employee and there will likely be grey area in the middle with some interactions starting digital but completing using assisted service. For example, an account balance inquiry will typically start and conclude digitally but something like completing a claim form might well start when a customer fills in an online form and shares a picture but end with an employee talking him or her through some of the more complex sections.
What are best practices for promoting and collecting customer feedback?
There are three basic ways to solicit and collect customer feedback:
- The traditional way is to send a feedback form to customers — typically via email — at the end of an interaction or, in many cases, randomly. Such techniques have had limited success as response rates are typically low.
- More advanced organizations build collecting feedback into their interaction handling processes and use additional forms of media to collect feedback. For example, the call handling process might include automatically asking the customer for feedback. This might be via email or directly in the channel being interacted with, but organizations are increasingly using text messaging, an app or a form of chatbot. Using more user-friendly media and asking for feedback immediately after the interaction is completed or even during the interaction improves response rates because the interaction is still at the top of the customer’s mind and the process is easier.
- The third technique is to use analytics that can derive feedback such as customer sentiment by analyzing the content of recorded calls or text-based scripts.
Going forward, the best practice is likely to include a combination of the second and third methods. However, our research shows that to increase response rates, organizations should build tasks into their overall process to respond to any feedback they receive. This should go beyond simply acknowledging receipt of the feedback and should indicate how the feedback is used. This way customers will see the influence they are having; this is likely to increase the probability they will respond to future requests.
What advice can you provide for selecting a technology to create better customer experiences?
Our benchmark research shows that of the seven key considerations when selecting new systems to support a “contact center in the cloud,” the majority (72%) of organizations said they consider usability the most important. This includes having a user interface that resonates with modern user expectations (point-and-click, highly visual) and supports access to key functionality on mobile devices. Deeper analysis shows that selecting such a system leads to more users using the system more often, and more efficient operations. As far as other key considerations, usability is followed by functionality, reliability (conforming to stated SLAs, and having built-in security capabilities), manageability (easy to set up and operate, and ability to scale up and down to meet operational requirements) and adaptability (ability to customize existing capabilities or build additional ones to support specific business requirements). Organizations also look outside technical considerations, with more than half (52%) reporting they place considerable importance in building a TCO/ROI model and nearly two-fifths (38%) who said they look for vendors that can demonstrate their viability and have a selection of active customer references.
As a whole, the research shows organizations have overcome many of their concerns about cloud- based systems and are increasingly looking for cloud-based systems that are easy to use, have functional capabilities that meet their business needs, and for which they can build a business case that stands up to the scrutiny of their CFO.
We already have a mobile app. How is visual IVR different? What are the advantages to each approach?
Consumers use mobile devices more and more to search for things, engage with each other and organizations, share information, collaborate with each other and groups of individuals and, of course, play games. Up to now, these activities have largely been social but, to keep up with these trends, many vendors have developed tools that allow organizations to create mobile business apps. Such apps are often easy to use but typically support a limited set of capabilities and are not connected directly to business applications. Consequently, the information provided on the app is often not up-to- date and, if the user cannot complete the interaction using the app, he or she must start again using a different channel of engagement.
Advanced visual IVR systems use a different approach. There is no app to download; instead the user initiates the interaction by clicking on a link. This can be provided in an email message, on a mobile device as the result of a prompt from a digital system or provided by an agent during a conversation. The system can be set-up to support a continuous exchange of information using different media – voice, text messages, pictures, forms or video — which can be used serially (swapping from one channel to another) or in combination; for example, the user and employees can share a form while talking about how to fill it in. Consequently, in these systems the information provided is up-to-date, personalized and presented in the most appropriate way given the nature and context of the interaction.
Therefore, mobile apps are more appropriate to support simpler tasks such as showing the balance of an account, making a payment, booking an appointment or looking up a delivery time, whereas visual IVR can support a continuous dialogue to resolve more complex interactions.
Exclusive Q&A
What are the most significant industry changes in customer experience?
Overall, I see a portfolio of industry changes that are happening to meet the customer demand and needs from applications to adopting customer engagement hubs — to support any range of customer engagement. The adoption of cloud-based systems will continue to accelerate as vendors produce more cloud-ready systems and organizations overcome their concerns about security, integration and performance. From a systems perspective, I expect more organizations to adopt advanced analytics systems that can produce a full 360-degree view of the customer, along with journey maps and predictive analysis. I also expect more organizations to experiment with bots to automate more customer-related tasks as they seek to save money and better meet customer expectations. There will also likely be further developments related to text messaging and mobile use by both customers and employees, and to the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to automate more tasks and assist employees responding to customer requests.
That said, many organizations continue to struggle to become more customer-focused to provide the best possible experience. To accomplish such requires insight on your customers that can provide a comprehensive view on your interactions across the customer journey. This can be accomplished by using analytics that can process structured and unstructured data (voice recordings, text, pictures, video and events). Analytics also have advanced to use natural language processing, artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive capabilities, enabling organizations to make customer related tasks in the front and back-office more contextual to the situation being acted upon. And above all, analytics that can show organizations where customers are experiencing challenges, what is working and what is not, what they can do about it, and that helps drive actions that improve customer and employee engagement as well as business outcomes.
How do we deliver a consistent customer experience across all channels?
Our benchmark research into next-generation customer engagement shows organizations face two key challenges delivering omnichannel experiences: The systems in their overall architecture are largely stand-alone and the systems managing communication channels also operate independently. Together this makes it difficult to provide the same information at different touch points, both assisted and digital. To avoid undertaking disruptive changes to processes and/or their systems architecture, there are two technologies that can help overcome these challenges: what I call a smart agent desktop, and the latest Visual IVR (interactive voice response) technology.
A smart agent desktop sits above an organization’s systems architecture, including systems managing communication channels, and using it allows contact center agents or other employees handling interactions to easily access and update data in any system. The latest versions of these systems use natural language processing, artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to recognize what the interaction is about and automatically present users with the data and information they need to resolve the interaction. This ensures consistent processes in the way interactions are handled, gives customers consistent information and automates common processes such as replicating name and address changes across all systems.
The latest Visual IVR systems achieve similar results, as they are not just a visual way of presenting IVR menus on a mobile device. They also allow employees to have a dialogue with a customer using multiple channels of interaction; for example, using voice and text messaging, while at the same timesharing information in multiple forms — text, pictures, video. The key is that any shared information is extracted from systems using customers’ identifiable profile, so they get personalized, information-driven responses.
What are some best practices for personalizing the digital customer experience?
The first step is to design interactions with your customers in mind, rather than to address internal issues. The second step is to understand why your customers engage with you and what outcomes they are expecting from each interaction. Many organizations believe this is impossible because there are thousands of reasons customer interact with them. Although this may be true, most cases will involve a relatively small set of common issues and these are the ones that should be addressed first. Next, think through the complete customer journey as each interaction is likely to be just one step in a journey and getting one step wrong is likely to impact future interactions and customer actions. Then and only then should organizations think about how to select and set up digital technology that easily fulfills customers’ expectations.
Meeting these expectations will largely depend on the chosen technology but in my experience you should apply three basic principles. First, set up the system so it can quickly identify and authenticate the caller using a name, account number or other key demographic data, or using voice recognition to match the callers voice to a customer’s name, or perhaps transferring the interaction to be web- or bot- based by providing a unique URL to access the system. Second, once the caller has been identified, the system should retrieve key information about the caller to be able to base next actions on that information. This should include previous interactions as these can give context to responses – for example, prior web-based interactions can point to the customer’s intention or issue. Third, the system should identify the reason for the interaction and then set up the minimum number of steps to complete that type of interaction. For example, if a customer wants to buy a lady’s cardigan, the system should be able to use the product code to ask only about features that are variable for that product – color, neck shape, sleeve length. Where possible, the system should make responses personal – for example, it should ask for confirmation of a known delivery address and whether to use a previously authorized credit card rather than prompting customers to enter this information at each encounter. Setting up the system this way will make interactions easy and personal for the customer, which is likely to increase customer satisfaction.
How should we marry digital self-service and live assistance?
In a world where consumers have more options, our market research shows that most organizations intend to compete by providing an improved customer experience. The same research shows digital self-service technologies will be an essential part of that effort. However, the research also shows that for the foreseeable future most companies are still expecting to handle large volumes of telephone calls. The goal must be to marry traditional and digital methods and provide exceptional experiences across all channels of engagement — what has come to be called omnichannel customer engagement. Companies should also consider that interactions will often start on one channel but conclude on another, most likely moving from digital self-service to assisted service with a person or bot. This includes the possibility of customers starting on one channel, moving to another then moving back to the original channel, or in some instances having an interaction that uses multiple channels — for example, talking on the phone while collaborating on a website or mobile device.
In this situation two things are key. First, the transition from one channel to another must be seamless. In other words, data entered into one channel should be instantly available on the second channel so that the customer doesn’t have to start again or reenter any data. Second, the information provided on all channels should be the same; for example, the balance of a customer’s account should always be consistent no matter the channel or the format the information is provided in — spoken word, text message, shared picture or bot message. Achieving this integration of multiple channels during one interaction clears the way to restructuring some interactions to make best use of different media; for example, rather than trying to talk a customer through how to use a product, the agent could share a prepared video. The aim, as in the answer to the previous question, must be to make it easy for the customer to achieve what he or she wants with minimum effort on both sides.
What advice do you have for changing customer mindsets around adoption and use of digital technology?
In my view, adopting digital technology is a must in all market segments. The primary reason is that consumers have changed the way they engage with each other and this is impacting the way they want to engage with organizations. They are now more inclined to search for products using the internet, use mobile text messaging in apps like WhatsApp, watch videos on YouTube, and are increasingly using technologies such as Siri to get answers to their questions. However, there is an important caveat: Our research shows that organizations are expecting growth in all channels, so no channels are likely to disappear any time soon. This is because consumers use variety of channels and some interactions are appropriate for certain channels (for example, filing out an insurance claim form), so it is important to support an array of channels for the foreseeable future.
The way forward in any industry segment is to start by deciding what interaction types work best on what channels, keeping in mind that some interactions might start on one but finish on another and some might use multiple channels at the same time. The most likely scenario is that simpler interactions will start and finish digital; complex interactions are likely to involve talking to an employee and there will likely be grey area in the middle with some interactions starting digital but completing using assisted service. For example, an account balance inquiry will typically start and conclude digitally but something like completing a claim form might well start when a customer fills in an online form and shares a picture but end with an employee talking him or her through some of the more complex sections.
What are best practices for promoting and collecting customer feedback?
There are three basic ways to solicit and collect customer feedback:
- The traditional way is to send a feedback form to customers — typically via email — at the end of an interaction or, in many cases, randomly. Such techniques have had limited success as response rates are typically low.
- More advanced organizations build collecting feedback into their interaction handling processes and use additional forms of media to collect feedback. For example, the call handling process might include automatically asking the customer for feedback. This might be via email or directly in the channel being interacted with, but organizations are increasingly using text messaging, an app or a form of chatbot. Using more user-friendly media and asking for feedback immediately after the interaction is completed or even during the interaction improves response rates because the interaction is still at the top of the customer’s mind and the process is easier.
- The third technique is to use analytics that can derive feedback such as customer sentiment by analyzing the content of recorded calls or text-based scripts.
Going forward, the best practice is likely to include a combination of the second and third methods. However, our research shows that to increase response rates, organizations should build tasks into their overall process to respond to any feedback they receive. This should go beyond simply acknowledging receipt of the feedback and should indicate how the feedback is used. This way customers will see the influence they are having; this is likely to increase the probability they will respond to future requests.
What advice can you provide for selecting a technology to create better customer experiences?
Our benchmark research shows that of the seven key considerations when selecting new systems to support a “contact center in the cloud,” the majority (72%) of organizations said they consider usability the most important. This includes having a user interface that resonates with modern user expectations (point-and-click, highly visual) and supports access to key functionality on mobile devices. Deeper analysis shows that selecting such a system leads to more users using the system more often, and more efficient operations. As far as other key considerations, usability is followed by functionality, reliability (conforming to stated SLAs, and having built-in security capabilities), manageability (easy to set up and operate, and ability to scale up and down to meet operational requirements) and adaptability (ability to customize existing capabilities or build additional ones to support specific business requirements). Organizations also look outside technical considerations, with more than half (52%) reporting they place considerable importance in building a TCO/ROI model and nearly two-fifths (38%) who said they look for vendors that can demonstrate their viability and have a selection of active customer references.
As a whole, the research shows organizations have overcome many of their concerns about cloud- based systems and are increasingly looking for cloud-based systems that are easy to use, have functional capabilities that meet their business needs, and for which they can build a business case that stands up to the scrutiny of their CFO.
We already have a mobile app. How is visual IVR different? What are the advantages to each approach?
Consumers use mobile devices more and more to search for things, engage with each other and organizations, share information, collaborate with each other and groups of individuals and, of course, play games. Up to now, these activities have largely been social but, to keep up with these trends, many vendors have developed tools that allow organizations to create mobile business apps. Such apps are often easy to use but typically support a limited set of capabilities and are not connected directly to business applications. Consequently, the information provided on the app is often not up-to- date and, if the user cannot complete the interaction using the app, he or she must start again using a different channel of engagement.
Advanced visual IVR systems use a different approach. There is no app to download; instead the user initiates the interaction by clicking on a link. This can be provided in an email message, on a mobile device as the result of a prompt from a digital system or provided by an agent during a conversation. The system can be set-up to support a continuous exchange of information using different media – voice, text messages, pictures, forms or video — which can be used serially (swapping from one channel to another) or in combination; for example, the user and employees can share a form while talking about how to fill it in. Consequently, in these systems the information provided is up-to-date, personalized and presented in the most appropriate way given the nature and context of the interaction.
Therefore, mobile apps are more appropriate to support simpler tasks such as showing the balance of an account, making a payment, booking an appointment or looking up a delivery time, whereas visual IVR can support a continuous dialogue to resolve more complex interactions.
Mark Smith
Partner, Head of Software Research
Mark Smith is the Partner, Head of Software Research at ISG, leading the global market agenda as a subject matter expert in digital business and enterprise software. Mark is a digital technology enthusiast using market research and insights to educate and inspire enterprises, software and service providers.