FEATURE | CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT
MAKING CONTACT COUNT
ANDY ROBERTS describes five key technology trends for effective customer engagement
C
ustomer experience should be brilliant. There really is no excuse today for brands that don’t step up to meet customers’ service expectations, given the multiple technologies and expertise that’s available. However, it’s hardly surprising that customers get frustrated, when so many organisations still operate and manage digital and contact centre strategies separately. That simply doesn’t make sense when we know that over 60% of customers today go online before engaging with a contact centre. Winning organisations will be those that work to close the gap between digital and traditional customer contact channels – effectively building their “digital front door” and evolving their contact centres into true relationship hubs. In a world where the actual customer service experience offered is often the only differentiator between sellers, it’s imperative that organisations do as much as they can to get this right. To achieve this, organisations need to work on fixing the disconnects between their disparate marketing, digital and operational contact centre services – and that means the end-to-end mapping of customer journeys across all digital and humanassisted activities. Customer service must be integral to the whole digital experience – not just show up when things go wrong. There are five key technology trends that I believe will be instrumental in delivering an improved customer experience: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) “Customer service must be integral to AND MACHINE LEARNING the whole digital experience – not WILL TAKE CENTRE STAGE AI and machine learning will start to have a just show up when things go wrong” much more meaningful impact in terms of intelligent customer contact. While previous generation virtual assistants were little more than front-ends to a knowledge base, today’s intelligent assistants are taking things to the next level with full conversational interactions – whether via chatbots in messaging threads or 52 WINNING EDGE
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