When it comes to breaking through barriers, we’ve got form. Capita plans, deploys and manages large-scale solutions that result in a wide range of public and private sector organisations having great conversations with their customers. And it’s this experience that’s enabled us to identify a number of key factors for ensuring that new technologies enhance – rather than hinder – customer conversations
How can you achieve the holy grail of having just one customer database that all your communications channels use – eliminating the possibility of customers having to repeat themselves, deepening your understanding of customer preferences and enabling you to have great conversations
All too often – given the pressure to support new channels and attracted by the lure of new, cost-saving technologies – you could be diverted by the temptation to deploy numerous point solutions.
And while each solution might fix a specific problem or address a particular need, the cumulative effect is an increasingly fragmented and complex infrastructure. And with that comes problems:
With complexities embedded across the business, you are likely to resort to manual intervention. That’s time consuming, costly and compounds the issues.
Employ a joined-up approach and align with what your users want. This delivers a superior customer experience, which can strengthen your customer loyalty and profitability.
Simplify everyone’s life by rationalising your roster of vendors. The more parties there are involved in delivering your solutions, the more difficult the situation is to manage and the trickier it becomes to identify and resolve the source of any issues.
You need vendors who make your life simpler, combining the different services you want into a single solution that’s easy for you to oversee. With a managed service solution – one that integrates all the technology and its various suppliers into a single package – the line of responsibility is clear.
Overcoming the complexities that sit within your business means working with people who have a track record of transforming the convoluted into the clear cut. Look for a partner who can bring expert knowledge and best-practice insight to your table.
Many organisations remain fragmented, hampered by a disconnect between the C-level mission and day-to-day operations. Without a unified vision, it’s difficult to deliver a single, consistent customer experience – and gain the competitive advantage that this delivers. Too many point solutions. Too much management strain. A siloed approach, with different teams managing different channels – each with their own objectives, approach and metrics.
It’s all pointing one way: a disjointed, often frustrating experience for customers. When contacting a company, no-one wants to repeat themselves.
Customers want a joined up conversation no matter how, when or where they engage with an organisation.
And for the people within an organisation who are trying to provide great customer experiences, it’s frustrating to be handcuffed by the inefficiencies of technical infrastructure and processes that are more gap-to-gap than end-to-end.
Clearly, the aim is a seamless experience for customers, underpinned by an efficient operating model that avoids duplication of effort.
Achieving this aim begins with gaining a better understanding of where the business is right now. Then you can deploy a vision of how to create a seamless customer journey – one which is understood, supported and delivered across all functions of the business – and break the cycle of just keeping the lights on.
It’s all about taking a more customer-centric approach to planning and deploying new technology. If you start by asking “What’s the customer benefit?” and keep on asking at every point in their journey, you’ll create a rewarding experience. You’ll find you’re optimising existing technology, achieving data management across channels, and aligning metrics and KPIs across teams.
As organisations have developed their communication capabilities over recent years, they’ve too often lost sight of the main prize. The focus has been on technology and cost, instead of on the impact on the customers who are using the technology.
One of the problems is a failure to engage with customers, to understand what experience they want. Even when there’s a will, there can be a lack of way because organisations simply don’t know where to start. Paradoxically, the result can be to focus on reducing contact with the customer, rather than on building it.
We’ve often encountered an approach that pushes users to adapt their behaviour to fit in with the features of the technology being deployed, internal processes and structure. The motivation may be to reduce costs, but it never pays to lose focus on how to make it easier for customers to interact in the way that suits them.
Another stumbling block is the failure to use language that customers understand, which further deteriorates users’ experiences. The take-out? Success depends on understanding how conversational technology can be aligned with human behaviour.
Analytics can be utilised to give increased visibility of your customers’ personas and desired experiences.
By understanding personal preferences and preferred journeys, you can better plan the appropriate channels for each customer. This includes harnessing multiple streams of technology to create individual, consistent and meaningful conversations.
Taking an outside-in approach works best. By first understanding the experience the customer wants, you can work out how best to enable that experience, both from a technical and process perspective. The alternative – focusing on a clever new piece of technology and then trying to get customers to adapt to it – is simply unsustainable. Understanding customers – their psychology and behavioural patterns – also helps planning for peak and seasonal demands. Clearly, the better the planning, the better the customer experience.
Many organisations do not actually understand their end-to-end business processes. Process issues are considered a headache and too difficult to resolve. They’re often linked to legacy: “That’s the way we’ve always done it.”
Technology should exist to make business processes simpler. Unless the end-to-end process is clearly defined and understood by everyone involved in delivering it, it’s unlikely that desired outcomes will be achieved. If you’re not opening the door to great customer experiences and internal efficiency improvements, you’re probably shutting it. Delivering great customer experiences is often further complicated by the fact that the process is no longer linear, lacks ownership and has many siloed aspects. Fragmented information sources can only hinder – rather than support – delivery.
As organisations have raced to enable new channels and deploy new technology, they’ve often neglected the broader business process that the technology is enabling. The information flows lack clarity. The handoffs aren’t clearly defined. The interdependencies aren’t understood.
Process analysis tools can help you to understand and baseline your processes. By identifying where your challenges are, you can start to understand what needs to be fixed and how technology can help.
Successfully deploying any new technology depends on full awareness of the end-toend business process. Usually, technology deployment will result in a process being changed, but unless the previous process is understood and the new process clearly defined, the likelihood is that things will get missed. And that means more negative customer experiences and business inefficiencies.
How can you effectively manage what you can’t see or measure? For many organisations, a lack of visibility across their communications estate is resulting in critical blind spots.
Without detailed reporting on such factors as performance, SLAs and compliance, it’s impossible to accurately understand and baseline the business. Making informed decisions on infrastructure investments. Justifying those decisions. Reporting on their returns. How?
Siloed data from different technologies and information sources results in a lack of synchronised reporting. Producing a consolidated view of what’s happening across a communications estate becomes increasingly onerous and costly. Multiplication and different departmental versions of the truth abound. Problems can go undetected. Who, these days, can afford to ignore a poor response to customer service queries, or potential customers abandoning a purchase and going elsewhere? Conversely, where improvements are made, the resultant successes cannot be recognised or built on.
With management technology often viewed as an overhead, it’s either not invested in or not set-up properly. Where it is in place, it’s considered out of place and used with extreme reluctance. To ensure that it’s acted upon regularly and consistently, data needs to be tangible across organisations.
You need to ensure that you can easily get a comprehensive, revealing view of what’s happening across all of your communication channels. Then you need to be able to interrogate that information to detect patterns and anomalies.
When issues are identified, you need the means to easily take corrective action without lengthy, manual interventions.
Simplifying your communications estate and reducing the number of point solutions will help. But, for full visibility, you also need to put the right management tools and reporting platforms in place.
Experienced experts can provide the knowledge and detail that help build and justify investment business cases. By providing an external voice, they also help to increase the internal visibility of a business solution.
As the digital revolution rolls inexorably on, IT has been empowered more than ever to support the drive for competitive advantage. Business objectives are being translated into objectives that build customer experiences and relationships. IT now has a fundamental strategic role for all organisations.
At the same time, the consumerisation of IT has resulted in many employees becoming technically tooled up and switched on. And they’re often frustrated that their working environment lacks synchronised, technological sophistication.
But employees can help drive strategy from the bottom up. If they feel empowered, their motivation, engagement and productivity heads north. All of which is happening against a backdrop of technological and channel evolution that’s moving so fast, developing a long-term plan can feel beyond reach. How do you know what you’ll need in two years’ time?
It’s just a question of clarifying your business strategy, deciding how IT can help you reach your objectives, identifying the barriers your IT is up against and seeing how you can break through these barriers. Understand this, and you can be confident your investments will deliver the returns you want.
You need to build a self-funded roadmap, based around the outcomes that the business wants to achieve. What’s not to impress stakeholders about a long-term IT strategy delivering the savings that effectively make it cost-free? It’s a route to decision-making that’s based on strategic – and economic – value, rather than just deploying technology for technology’s sake.
With your IT and processes married up and focused on making your customers happy, integrating new technologies and channels becomes surprisingly straightforward.
Getting your strategy sorted – ensuring that it accommodates the needs of different stakeholders – clearly clarifies operational and investment decisions.
Again, having the right partners makes a massive difference. You need someone with a vision of what’s possible and a clear future view on how technology is evolving. You should also look for experience – across a variety of sectors – of building effective, long-term plans at both a macro and tactical level.