The Nooks and Crannies of Customer Engagement
When it comes to delivering truly modern customer engagement across all the nooks and crannies of an enterprise, one thing is clear.
It’s not clear.
With all the innovation and movement in the customer engagement space these days…not to mention the incredible chasm that exists between technology early adopters, the mainstream, and the laggards, what one organization may consider modern, another tried seven months ago…and yet another 18 months ago.
So what is clear?
Three Customer-Centered Actions
The actions needed to become customer-centered…to be able to engage with not only today’s customers, but the people they become in the future:
- Empower the Workforce and the Customer
- Simplify Customer Engagement
- Share Real-time Intelligence
Empower the Workforce and the Customer
Most organizations understand the need to empower today’s customers. With the advent of the smartphone, control shifted from the enterprise to the individual consumer, and as time has passed, more and more companies have begun to adapt.
Where a gap remains—largely due to limitations of outdated process and technologies in place—is empowerment of the workforce. Yesterday’s customer would get frustrated repeating basic identifying information. But today’s customer? Your employees, i.e. customer service agents, must have access to know history and ask about proactively understand and address potential issues. To achieve an engaged customer, engaging and empowering the workforce has become a top priority.
Simplify Customer Engagement
It’s a strange dichotomy. The more advanced technology becomes, the easier it can be to simplify customer engagement. What may be an incredibly complex fabric behind the scenes can make customers feel like a relationship with you is smooth…frictionless…effortless.
Of course, creating such simplicity is not necessarily quick and easy. The first step is designing processes and approaches holistically with the overall experience in mind. This design-thinking approach is critical to lay the most flexible foundation. And, it can mean discarding processes that may have worked for you for years and years. For today’s customers—and tomorrow’s—it’s a must to be more holistic in your approach. To break down the silos of information and channels and business context. And, of course, to audit your technology that enables it all.
Share Real-time Intelligence
And here’s where that tech closes the loop. Empowering your workforce—and in turn engaging your customers—starts with intelligence. Make no mistake, this isn’t just data. It’s taking in information, behaviors, context, demographics, and much, much more, and then drawing actionable conclusions from it...in real-time. In other words, actionable intelligence. Considering the massive amount of data that exists—and continuously grows—in any organization, this cannot happen without the right technology in place.
Let's Explore
In the next several blog posts, we’ll explore this technology. It’s become the hottest technology available to jump-start the journey to being truly customer-centered. And, we’ll provide you with a checklist of essential steps to put it in place.
So keep an eye out…
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Let’s make 2018 the year you become truly customer-centered.
