AiiA November roundup on: Your Customer

A new year is on the horizon. This November roundup of all things customer includes several webinars and reports to ensure that your enterprise is prepared for a successful 2020. Running short on time? Peruse the articles section and bookmark the heavy lifting for resolution season.

ON-DEMAND WEBINARS

How to Create Customer Centricity in the Cloud

Adopting a cloud mindset is a pivotal first step on the road to customer centricity. But what does that really mean, and most importantly, how do you achieve it?

Watch this on-demand webinar with Randy Carter, Product Marketing Director at Genesys, to learn:

• How to be in the mindset with which you should make technology decisions
• What specific capabilities should a customer centricity center have
• How to make the most of your cloud contact center investment

Untapped Opportunities: What You Should Know About IVR

Today customers depend on the voice channel more than ever to resolve complex issues they can’t address through other channels. Callers get frustrated when they can’t get the information they need quickly. Too often, poorly designed IVRs cause a bottleneck in the customer journey resulting in bad customer experiences. Therefore it isn’t a surprise that recent data shows 83% would avoid a company after a poor experience with an interactive voice response.

In this webinar, you will learn how to:

• Offer an IVR experience that drives optimal customer journeys that increase efficiency and deliver better business results.
• Easily create IVR voice applications without coding.
• Use data to gain a better understanding of how end-users interact with your voice application so you can continuously identify areas of improvement.
• Effectively collect customer feedback and link it to specific customer-agent interactions.

Expand and Scale Your RPA Footprint - Unleash the Value of Attended Automation

With the unattended RPA market becoming largely commoditized, the next step in extending the value and potential ROI gains of an enterprise’s investment in RPA is to move towards attended automation. In addition to augmenting the value of back-office operations, intelligent desktop robots are designed to intuitively support each and every employee, in real-time and at scale.

In this webinar session, NICE and Symphony will explore:

• How attended automation technology can be leveraged to extend the value of RPA investments at scale
• How bringing automation to the people of an organization increases automation opportunities and ROI into other areas such as upselling
• Practical use cases which demonstrate the successful scaling of attended automation

4 Ways to boost EX and CX with AI Powered Sentiment Analytics

Do you know how your customers feel about your brand? Do you know if your contact center agents exhibit your priority brand elements? Using sentiment analytics to measure all customer interactions and digital touchpoints with your business can uncover powerful insights into how to create strong brand loyalty and improved customer experiences.

This on-demand webinar defines what AI-powered sentiment is. Also learn:

• Why AI-powered sentiment analytics is being used by the world’s most recognized brands today
• How sentiment analytics changes the dynamics in the contact center
• Real-world stories of how businesses have realized cost savings, greater customer satisfaction, and increased business efficiency

From Idea to Success – A Contact Center’s Journey to Digital Transformation with Cognitive RPA

Rapid advancements in digital technology are shifting the competitive balance for contact centers—putting pressure on executives to stay ahead of existing and emerging competitors. When it comes to leveraging intelligent automation, companies usually stall at the Proof of Concept (PoC) stage. Implementing intelligent automation requires a comprehensive and inclusive approach.

Join Tarun Mehta, global industry leader for BPO at Automotation Anywhere, Christopher Vitek, global contact center expert at Automation Anywhere, and Brian Cantor, CCW Digital Analyst, to learn how contact centers can better deliver on their digital transformation initiatives and gain competitive advantage.

Discussed during this session:

• Prime use case candidates and success stories for intelligent automation
• Where to find automation opportunities in contact centers
• What should be the outcomes of your automation initiatives
• Review of Contact Center Reference Architecture for RPA

How to tackle the biggest mistake in customer churn management

Mobile operators are losing hundreds of customers every year (14% average) as customers easily switch between different suppliers if they are unsatisfied.

The strategies telecoms brands are using to stop churn have limited effect, with many subscribers still dissatisfied with communication methods. 

Many telecoms brands are left asking: How do we successfully reduce churn and retain customers? 

In this session, Thomas Westman, Commercial Director Telecom at Wiraya, will share his insights on how to tackle the biggest mistakes in churn management that drive customers away.

Watch this on-demand webinar to learn: 

• How to boost CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) and NPS
• How to effectively reduce churn and turn around dissatisfied customers.
• How can AI help telecom operators reduce churn
• Learn about scalable and cost-effective solutions allowing brands to  automate and communicate throughout the customer journey

Downloadable Reports

Customer feedback, signals and satisfaction: Market Report

Customers are more prepared to switch than ever if brands fail to meet their desires. CX practitioners are tasked with the responsibility to ensure their brands are aligned with their customers.

In a world where customers are swimming in surveys, emails and special offers, feedback response rates can suffer and brands are left questioning how they can get the insight they need to drive their business forward.

It all comes down to how well they listen to signals of intent from their customers.

In this report CX Network provides the latest strategies to help you avoid letting valuable customer insights fall through the cracks. 

Based on the back of research with 200 CX practitioners, case studies and insights from the likes of John Lewis, Galeries Lafayette and 7-Eleven here are just a few of the insights contained in the customer feedback, signals and satisfaction report:

• Text analytics are being applied to gauge customer sentiment and flag potential detractors so brands can intervene and rescue customers from churning
• Rather than relying on singular metrics such as NPS, brands are now opting for a more holistic assessment of customer content
• Brands are decoding customer signals and contextual data to provide pre-emptive customer experience 
• How Galeries Lafayette is democratizing the voice of the customer to their 70 stores and employees
• Despite 74 per cent of the respondents noting that they look to action customer feedback, only 14 per cent of them manage to always close the loop
• Brands are using customer feedback to shape experiences in real time. 

Special Report: The Modern Programmable Contact Center

As contact center leaders think about the future, they first look to eliminate consumers’ conditioned expectations of being put on hold, deflected through IVR, transferred between agents, and being asked to repeat information throughout the customer experience.

To achieve this, contact centers will need to be agile, which means acting on insights in real time, having the ability to evolve and manage their KPIs, and improve their technology stack and workforce in a changing competitive landscape.

In this special report, you’ll learn what’s holding contact centers back. More importantly, you’ll learn how to turn your contact center into a proactive and predictive data center, improve digital channels and communication, and so much more.

How-To-Guide: Using AI to Personalize the Customer Experience

Personalizing the customer experience is a task that every organization knows is important, yet, few businesses are willing to strategically deliver. Individualizing the experience is more than firm handshakes and friendly smiles. It requires a robust infrastructure, one able to analyze actionable data and artificial intelligence.

Today’s contact centers and organizations gather far too much customer intel to get away with impersonal service. Attention scarcity means you can’t afford to bombard your customers with irrelevant emails or lose their followership on social media. They’ll churn.

This report will help you change your contact center into a seat of personalization – a value creator that can turn AI into individualized customer experiences.

In this report, we cover the development of systematic customer profiles, how to collect more data through different mediums, reaching consumers on their preferred channels, detailed approaches for collecting feedback, and so much more. 

Special Report: Retail CX

It’s hard to think of an industry that isn’t being “disrupted,” but retail is under especial pressure to evolve or die. Legacy brands from Sears to Payless ShoeSource are closing stores, further corroborating the so-called “retail apocalypse.” At the same time, digitally native businesses like Warby Parker, Bonobos and Amazon are opening physical stores, thereby refuting the popular misconception that customers overwhelmingly prefer to shop online.  

With all these changes afoot, retailers are scrambling to re-strategize and navigate a channel-agnostic world where brands that successfully blend the in-store and digital purchasing experience come out on top. Just like machine-human interactions have shown that virtual agents augment the performance of live agents instead of stealing their jobs, physical retail and e-commerce don’t have to be antagonistic.  

In this Special Report, you’ll discover the following:

• Innovations in the digital customer experience, from website personalization to mobile apps, featuring case studies from Danone and Home Depot 
• What retail brands like T-Mobile and Pinterest are doing to lure customers into stores and personalize their shopping experience through data and analytics
• The future of experiential retail – blending entertainment and shopping with advanced technology
• Lessons learned from brands like Best Buy and Toys R’ Us that rebounded from the retail apocalypse

Special Report: Rethinking Omnichannel Engagement

We'd all scoff at the idea of frequently repeating information, arbitrarily switching channels and enduring undue delays when speaking to our friends, family and coworkers.

Yet this is the exact experience we impose on our customers. We have spent the past decade (if not longer) talking about the omnichannel experience, but we continue to deliver engagement journeys that are slow, fragmented, impersonal and unproductive. We make it hard to do business with us, which is a recipe for keeping customers goodbye.

Our Special Report on the State of Omnichannel will help break this cycle of customer and agent frustration. It reveals what customers expect from the omnichannel experience, what roadblocks you need to overcome, and what specific steps you can take to deliver. Topics include:

• 4 signs of a customer-centric approach to omnichannel
• How omnichannel helps reduce effort and increase personalization
• 5 ways omnichannel will transform your contact center operation
• Specific steps to prepare your agents, leaders and systems for the omnichannel revolution

Special Report: Workforce Optimization

Today’s contact centers are multi-channel or omnichannel, with more complicated operations than ever before.

They’re tasked with maintaining exceptional service levels while keeping operating costs down — both an art and a science that needs to be happen at scale. 

Workforce optimization is a business strategy for managing operational costs while delivering expected service levels at the contact center, often using a combination of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

In this Special Report, you’ll understand how modern contact centers use WFO, specifically:

• 7 ways omnichannel contact centers benefit from WFO
• 4 business objectives you can achieve
• 3 strategies for optimizing your WFO solution 
• Insights from executives at Commerce Bank and Lufthansa InTouch 

Articles

2020 Customer Experience Differentiator: Gaining Brand Publicity Through Better Search
IBM estimates that 90% of the world's online data has been created in the past two years. In other words, content is being posted to the internet at a faster rate than ever. Much of that content is explored through Google, controlling 88% of the search market, as the world’s most powerful search engine and reigning champion of language processing. This article touches on:

• Oversaturated content
• “Shouldn’t the answers come from you?”
• Yext answers to search-based problems

From AI Crossovers to AI Chatbots: The NBA Has Found a New Cheat Code

Predictive analytics and AI generated algorithms are being used throughout the professional sports industry in more ways than play calls and decisions consumers view on the surface. In fact, AI is dictating how NBA consumers view the sport period. This article covers:

• NBA personalizing the consumer experience
• Streamlining content through GameOn
• The bigger picture

Will We Need the Human Touch In the Age of Automation?

There are plenty of reasons  why unprofessional or violent customer and customer service actions have skyrocketed within the past few years, even months. Most of these reasons, of course, can be tied back to an increase in consumer expectations.

As technology increases our ability to deliver quality customer service, the expectation for technology driven instant gratification and service has also exponentially increased. Customers want the convenience aspect of automation, yet the personalization of human-based interactions. This article covers the whys of this new phenomenon and what corporations can do about it.

B2B Marketing Enters the Customer Experience Era

Marketing to B2B buyers is an entirely different ballgame than wooing individual consumers. Business procurements are driven by return on investment, while people purchase goods and services based mainly on emotional incentives.

In spite of this divergence, B2B marketers are taking cues from the B2C playbook to provide more personalized, data-driven interactions for their customers.  

This article discusses four major trends shaping B2B marketing, according to the 2020 Data-Driven Marketing and Advertising Outlook by Dun & Bradstreet. 

1. CX has become critical for B2B marketers
2. B2B companies are using B2C-type strategies to reach their customers
3. B2B companies don’t know how to leverage their data
4. Selecting the right tools to tap the power of data

Future Channels of Customer Centricity: 2025

Solving a consumer’s pain point will always be the focus of meaningful customer service. However, the question is, where will technology make its biggest impact to help organizations solve these pain points? CCW Digital recently collected data from a series of studies that surveyed contact center, marketing, customer experience, information technology, operations and C-suite professionals in quite possibly our best market study yet. In preparation for our upcoming online event, The Contact Center of 2025, we wanted to share a couple of our findings on one of the market study’s insightful trends on the future of business, channels of the contact center including:

• Chatbots and IVR
• Messaging and social media
• Getting ahead

Study by MIT Shows the Growing Pains Businesses Face in Digital Transformation

A new report, 'Coming of Age Digitally,' by the MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte Insights highlights the challenges companies face adjusting to the faster pace of digital business. The most interesting finding? Digital transformation constitutes a culture and mindset change first – namely, an approach to experimentation, speedy decision-making and the overturning of top-down hierarchies.

Sunsetting legacy systems and rethinking technology stacks happens further down the line, but not without culture as the primer for it. This article covers:

• What does it mean to be a digitally mature company?
• How not to fall into the “competency trap”
• Why a lack of experimentation will hold you back
• How a fear of failure might be baked into your company culture
• Why employees feel they don’t have the skills to compete in a digital environment

4 Things to Consider Before Building a Review System

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. As the standard for consumer engagement rises, so too does the standard for customer intelligence. Digital engagement continues to emerge as a differentiator between brands, giving customers an idea of how responsive and reliable your customer service is. And understanding customer insights past conventional metrics and CSAT scores is also important. Lucky for any brand operating in the digital era, you can kill two birds with one stone. This article covers why you should:

1. Invest in a digital ecosystem
2. Cultivate the content
3. Dig through valid and invalid reviews
4. Offer cream-of-the-crop incentives

4 Key Predictions about the Contact Center of 2025

As we head into 2020, we surveyed leaders in the contact center, marketing, customer experience, IT, and the C-suite from July-October this year to hear about their predictions for the contact center of 2025 for our Market Study on the Contact Center of 2025: A Road Map.

This sneak peek into the four most surprising findings talks about how:

1. Contact centers want to shatter negative stereotypes
2. The phone isn’t going anywhere
3. Most organizations don’t know what to do with their data
4. Organizations are preparing for automation

The Contact Center of 2025

If there’s one item in your technology stack that takes precedence over everything else, it’s the knowledge base of your customers. It’s the lifeblood powering agent-facing tools like your CRM system as well as customer interfaces like self-service, voice tech, chat, quality online review systems, and more. How customer interfaces like these interact with a CRM system using AI can be the defining factor in whether a business has a competitive advantage when it comes to the knowledge base of customers. This article covers implementing AI to provide personalized customer service experiences.

Brands struggling to create seamless digital experiences, CX Network reveals

Digital customer experience allows brands to decode customer’s journeys through data extraction and gathering feedback from their digital touch points and channels. However, research has revealed that brands are struggling in their ability to effectively analyze data and operationalize CX teams. Learn more by reading this article or watch the accompanying video, “Customer Experience 2019 … In 3 Minutes.”

The future of chatbots as a cornerstone of customer experience

According to Forrester, 63 per cent of customers are happy to be served by a chatbot, and when most customers can find a solution without having to call a customer service representative, they will. Whether it is a chatbot, online FAQ or knowledge bank, customers want to resolve issues quickly and comprehensively.

Conversely, customer service agents want to spend more of the workday handling complex cases, so having a bot on hand to take routine conversations out of the day-to-day allows agents to focus on complex and difficult tasks such as servicing unhappy customers.  In this article, CX Network looks at is how the future of chatbots is shaping up.

Only 7 per cent of brands surveyed have an omnichannel model, reveals CX Network survey

It is apparent that brands are struggling to make headway in implementing omnichannel models. Major challenges include fragmented silos with competing goals and metrics, omnichannel revenue management and distinguishing between multichannel and omnichannel. At the same time, customers have increased their expectations for a buying journey to feature integrated cross-channel experiences. This article covers the whys and hows of an omnichannel model.

Oracle on how to start your AI journey with a winning formula

Implementing artificial intelligence (AI) is an undertaking that can often give companies a moment of pause, as it raises questions over hurdles such as data governance, proving ROI and building the right internal culture. Ahead of CX Network's Artificial intelligence in customer experience: 2019 Report we sat down with Oracle's Jon Stanesby to discover how practitioners can supercharge customer experiences (CX) with artificial intelligence.

Bonus eBook

Telecoms CEM Investment Trends eBook: 2020

In order to stay relevant in a market saturated with alternatives and becoming more populated with a growing number of agile, customer-centric companies that are digital natives, telecoms can no longer afford to focus solely on the solution angle, they also have to innovate on the customer experience they provide. 

Ahead of the 2020 Customer Experience Management in Telecoms Global summit in this eBook we hear from a panel of telecoms customer experience experts to gain insight on how telecoms firms are investing into customer experience to overcome stubborn pain-points and achieve longlasting business benefits.