- Do we need to analyze all customer touchpoints?
- How to utilize data captured at each touchpoint?
- How can we improve customer experience?
Do we need to analyze each customer touchpoint?
In the digital age, the customer interacts with companies at multiple touchpoints, either direct (call, chat, email and social media) or indirect (website or through other marketing channels). In order to meet customer expectations at each of these touchpoints, it is essential to respond aptly to these interactions. Customer churn can happen at any moment and providing consistent and superior customer experience at each touchpoint is crucial in this competitive market. The sum of all customer interactions creates a company’s brand value.
Customer experience management is about tracking and understanding interactions of customers at every stage in the customer cycle and building strategies to address these. There are multiple technological offerings to improve the interaction experience in different channels. All these technologies collect enormous amounts of data about customers at all stages of the customer journey.
How to utilize captured data?
We know that the terabytes of data from direct and indirect customer interactions tell a lot about them. But are the companies actually analyzing the huge amounts of data to derive insights?
Several analytical techniques handle data in the most effective ways. Natural Language Processing helps analyze text data, and speech analytics derives a detailed analysis, backed by phonetic and speech indexing techniques, of voice data. In both voice and text data, we can detect emotions, derive the theme around the conversation, and identify the exact root cause/issue in the interaction.
A potential mistake companies make is analyzing the data in siloes. This gives a wrong picture of the customer journey. An end-to-end analytics suite ties the data between different systems and creates a unified view of the customer journey. The analytics suite should also have a transformation framework, built by experts, incorporated into it. Experts should base this framework on the company’s needs, giving right weightage to all components that can affect customer experience. The tool should also include a reporting mechanism that can give a comprehensive view of the customer journey to customer service representatives and strategic decision makers.
How can we improve customer experience?
Once decision-makers have the insights with them, they need to focus on key aspects to improve customer experience:
- Improve product/service offerings- Companies can offer different product/service options to cater to different needs of sets of customers. For example, in a telco environment, understanding what customers want and identifying the right product attributes can help create a successful bill plan.
- Proactive communication- Proactive communication is all about understanding what the customer should know and informing the customer the same. For example, in a telco environment, the communication might be about a new bill plan, offer or any expected outages. Analytics can bring in value by segmenting customers based on their demographics, usage patterns, previous communication with the company, their current location etc. to create personalized campaigns.
- A holistic view of the delivery chain- Companies engage with several third party vendors to complete service delivery. Organizations bind their outsourcing partners with SLAs primarily on the number of service requests solved on time. They do not try to analyze delays to find their root causes. The right set of analytics tools and practices can help reveal the exact issues and bottlenecks in the delivery chain. These insights can be used to solve the underlying challenges permanently.
- Channel optimization- Analyzing the data on different channels gives companies a view of customers’ pain points, existing and historical trends, and why the customer is reaching out to different channels for support. This information will enable the company to take proactive measures to optimize right channels at the right touchpoint. For example, delivering chat channels to customers who are weary of calling the
In a market increasingly driven by customers, creating necessary channels and touchpoints for the customer to interact, and responding aptly to these interactions are essential to enable differentiated customer experiences. A unified view of the customer integrating the customer interactions across channels with a right transformation framework in place will help companies run effective campaigns, improve service delivery, optimize channels, and increase revenue with better product/service offerings, all leading to improved customer experience.
