David Cousins, head of solution consulting, Capita IT and Networks
Customer experience (CX) remains one of the most important factors for any organisation today.
Customer expectations are higher and news of a good experience – and a bad one – travels faster and wider than ever, thanks to social media. As a result, organisations have had little option but to make it a bigger and bigger focus – you only need to look at the number of appointments across industries that have ‘CX’ or ‘customer experience’ within the job title.
2019 – and beyond – is going to be really interesting in the field of CX, because most organisations are realising that the competitive landscape is different. They’re not competing directly with others head on, it’s more a competition for consumers’ time.
Between our jobs, families, hobbies and other life events, there’s little left over at the end of every day.
On this basis, my predictions for 2019 are:
1. Convenience
We need to be able to deal with the mundane, yet necessary, activities such as paying bills, shopping, seeking quotes, amending services etc, when it’s convenient. Organisations will need to step up and offer these services at times that suit their customer, via theirpreferred channels.
2. Empathy
The industry has always talked about ‘knowing your customer’. In the past this was about identifying who they are when they contact. Now, organisations need to go further and offer services and conversations that are empathetic with the consumers’ circumstances in mind.
3. Event-driven
Organisations need to focus on the events that take place within a customer journey – and react accordingly in real-time. Technology that enables an organisation to monitor web-site navigation, and react with recommendations or actions to help the consumer, will enhance the online experience and, ultimately, revenue.
4. Autonomy
Some services and demands are simple, and customers just want to be able to deal with them quickly. This is where automation comes in – the ability to interact with a machine (bots for example) to service a straightforward need. This is not about automating everything, but rather getting shot of the simple stuff to make way for more empathetic, and potentially more complex, conversations when needed.
5. Technology agnosticism
Organisations have sunk significant cost into contact centre products over the years – products promising the world, but delivering the status quo. Organisations now want choice and gone are the days where they’re willing to rip and replace large platforms to enable future proofing. Organisations like Amazon (with connect) and Twilio (with Flex) are making huge headway by providing an ability to prototype and sandbox the future CX interaction in a completely bespoke manner, providing organisations with an opportunity to build something completely unique, yet powered by incredibly robust components.
I also think that we have yet to see a true capability that harnesses all the data made available to organisations. I talked recently about big data really only be ‘a lot of data’ and how technologies such as speech analytics are paving the way to gaining genuine intelligence from conversational data. This will continue to grow in 2019 as it will be key to ensure that we are agile enough to react to the consumer of 2019 and beyond.
What I will say, is that all of these trends provide an opportunity to reflect on how operations are managing the day to day right now. Technology is merely the enabler and as such we need to recognise that our people are the ones that have the real impact on whether we are successful or not within the CX ecosystem. Let’s get the basics right to ensure longevity and agility.