Cloud technology the key to delivering future-ready CX and EX.
In the modern digital era, companies face the dual imperative of keeping up with rapidly evolving demands and expectations around both customer and employee experiences.
Against a backdrop of increasing economic uncertainty and rising competition, business leaders must leverage technology to gain and maintain a competitive advantage to attract and retain customers and employees.
In this regard, innovation in the areas of automated business processes, advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered orchestration will reshape the customer experience (CX) while elevating the employee experience (EX) by offering unprecedented simplicity, efficiency and agility.
Experience orchestration.
Customers want fast and effective experiences. Employees want to be successful problem-solvers and feel valued for their contributions. The challenge is deriving meaning and value from all your data across every source to reimagine experience orchestration and journey design.
If companies want to realise these capabilities, they need to move beyond inefficient, siloed technologies and invest to unlock technical resources where they’ll have the most impact.
Unlocking these capabilities requires a unified modern AI-powered cloud-based platform that can use all data to deliver the insights needed to act in real time, with the ability to integrate the appropriate blend of technologies and all digital channels, including self-service.
Organisations that align their strategies and technology around a connected, consistent experience that includes digital channels and voice, will transform CX with personalisation and optimise engagements based on contextual understanding.
This integration builds knowledge once, and delivers it across every channel, including bots and agents, through a centrally managed knowledge portal to orchestrate the best experiences.
By creating this visibility into what customers are doing now and have done before, companies get to know them and their preferences, are better able to analyse sentiment, and can predict their behaviour to reach out proactively and guide customers toward the best outcome.
And when a company knows what is most important to customers, they can focus knowledge-creation efforts where they’ll have the most impact.
Orchestration then enables businesses to coordinate technology based on the experience that customers want to build deeper, more loyal relationships as part of a guided process.
For instance, knowledge management tools allow companies to easily compile and access content libraries, customer data and other resources, which enables both bots and agents to accelerate problem resolution.
In this regard, turnkey digital capabilities and intent-driven conversational AI can automate interactions using multilingual self-service bots that help complete transactions, answer questions or deliver the right offer at the right time.
Digital assistants that use natural language processing can also handle routine queries via speech and capture intent. And by looking at experiences from the customer perspective to understand their needs, sentiments and steps they’ve already taken, companies can eliminate complexity and frustration.
Digital engagement automation.
Collecting data to identify customer behaviour patterns helps nudge them toward desired outcomes, which improves CX, while predictive routing and determining the next-best action gets them what they want faster.
Connecting all customer data and aligning the business technology and data strategy around customer journeys in this way creates opportunities for personalisation, real-time insight and journey management.
The ability to use these journey-based metrics can capture the value customers expect and the KPIs that drive the business.
By optimising end-to-end journeys in real time and integrating engagement channels, customer conversations can start, stop and transition across channels without a loss in context or relevance.
Furthermore, through digital engagement automation, business can rapidly identify behaviour patterns and inform orchestration decisions.
Predictive engagement enables proactive interventions and allocates human resources more effectively to focus on high-value individuals to improve resolution speed and revenue potential. And with AI guiding the conversation, agents receive the insights and direction that make conversations effortless.
In this regard, activate knowledge using AI empowers agents to answer questions before they’re even asked. And AI-powered knowledge management makes it intuitive and simple for both employees and customers to access up-to-date information.
Real-time decision-making.
Leveraging automation, data analytics and AI tools in this way also gives business decision-makers access to real-time data about customers and agents to guide decisions in a proactive and timely manner.
And decision-making based on data means that administrators can quickly modify workflows, drive toward goals and deliver on KPIs by optimising existing resources.
In this regard, using out-of-the box solutions with user-friendly features reduces the cost and effort of building AI projects. Ease of use also enables admins to configure processes and conversation flows to support changing customer needs without requiring IT resources.
And with a proven machine learning platform, companies will also reduce up-front data cleansing and prep work for a faster ROI.
Support employees.
From an EX perspective, employees are problem-solvers who require technological support to enable these skills. An open-API composable platform lets employees innovate together, solve problems faster and add capabilities that serve customer journeys to deliver great CX.
Cloud platforms enable companies to coordinate and optimise multiple AI capabilities, which positively impacts employee motivation as it empowers them to deliver better CX that contributes to company success.
In this regard, a single platform aggregates data from all sources, removing obstacles to personalising experiences by giving staff access to relevant interaction context and data and full visibility into the customer’s historical journey via an omnichannel desktop.
The desktop streamlines agent information access with all the apps they need right at hand to deliver a single view of the customer that empowers them to act on opportunities and engage proactively.
And with speech and text analytics built into a solution, solutions automatically monitor performance and can find patterns of excellence, and opportunities for improvement by recommending coaching, which has become pivotal to support employee career pathing – vital element in staff retention.
In this regard, AI tools that capture and maintain all employee-customer interactions eliminate inherent management bias and makes it easier for supervisors to understand employee needs and drivers, recognise innate skills, values and achievements; and use tools to develop more strategic and effective processes.
Providing an engaging user experience can also nudge employee behaviours and values closer toward the business objectives.
By bringing together human interaction and technology, and harnessing connected data, companies can start to create better experiences for customers and employees.
In this regard, powerful experience orchestration will play a bigger role in enabling brands to deliver consistent service while adding context that gives meaning to each interaction. And that means employees can provide the right level of connection in every interaction with the brand to drive business success in the modern digital era.
About Connect.
Connect are the independent communications experts who can transform how your organisation communicates – both internally and externally. We deliver solutions and services that join up your employee and customer communications across platforms, across sites and across countries, in three core areas: Contact Centre Solutions, Unified Communications and Network Services. We provide simple, elegant solutions to the most complex problems.