Dialing into the new year: Customer experience in 2020
Anita Raghav
Nov 17, 2023
It’s 2020 and anyone in the contact center space can clearly see CX and customer journeys have become the most pivotal points when it comes to successful operations and business growth. The transformation has been on-going, but with rapidly changing technological advancements and thereby varying touchpoints, CX has come into sharp focus.Â
So where is customer experience heading this year? What are the expectations? And more importantly, how will you meet them?Â
Customer convenience remains key
Customers are becoming more demanding, more discerning and definitely more reactive if expectations aren’t met. Aren’t we all!  According to studies by Walker, it is expected that by the end of 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.*
There are four ways you need to ensure this customer-centric experience:
- Enable Omnichannel support. Your customer expects omnichannel connections with companies. They want to connect with companies on the go, in different contexts and at different times and will use whichever device and channel that is most convenient at that point. You need to make it easy for them to do this.
- Go Regional. Customers in 2020, and therefore contact centers, are relying more on regional language support. Whether you are a small business or a large international enterprise, localized, authentic communication is key to good CX. Do this by localizing your call center operations, and enabling vernacular voice or chat bots.Â
- Guarantee Privacy. Customers are now concerned with privacy regarding their data and transparency from companies. maintain checks and measures to guarantee this kind of data privacy.Â
- Enable personalization. In spite of concerns on data privacy, customers are ok with companies storing their data and using it for improving their experience, as long as they keep it safe.Â
Contact centers balance humans and bots
With the advent of chat and voice bots, AI usage will continue to flourish. Customers will appreciate this when they want quick resolutions.
But if you don’t provide an easy way to connect with a live agent when they want a human interaction, they will get frustrated. Businesses will need to understand how to balance the experience for customers. they will need to carefully decide which interactions to automate, and which to hand over to trained, capable agents.
Agent engagement gets its due credit
A disinterested or uninvolved agent will naturally lead to a subpar interaction. For customer service to thrive, you need engaged, enthusiastic employees. Businesses are only recently coming to realize the correlation between agent performance and customer experience. Gamified feedback, intuitive dashboards, easy access to data and live stats are just some features that we are constantly enhancing. Agent User Experience has come to the forefront.Â
Data improves decisions.
Know thy customer. AI-powered speech analytics will make it possible to know your customers better. Information gathered from call recordings are sieved through and analyzed faster at the back end, without the need for human intervention. Sentiment or intent analysis and advanced features, like tracking the customer sentiment throughout a call, can be a goldmine to judge what is working and what isn’t and will prove priceless for 360-degree communication and marketing strategies.
IoT and CX
When it comes to personalization, you cannot overlook the impact IoT can make. It adds a new layer to the omnichannel approach, and also allows for seamless on-the-go acquisition of customer data due to the integration of multiple devices and channels, ultimately allowing for the creation of a more personalized customer experience. Connected devices will be able to access data consistently and continuously, freeing up agent time for more specialized work. Automation continues to become more multi-faceted this year.Â
Changes in technology and business habits, as well as a shift in data acquisition methods, is set to transform CX in 2020. Are you catching up?Â
References:
https://www.superoffice.com/blog/customer-experience-statistics/
https://www.infosys.com/oracle/insights/documents/customer-experience-iot.pdf
Also Read:Â The role of humans in the bot enabled call center
