Cross-channel consistency: A prerequisite for effective Customer Engagement

Engaged customers are three times more likely to recommend or advocate a product or service to a friend. Put another way, engaged customers are more likely to be happy customers. As distinguished from one-directional push marketing efforts, engagement involves a two-way dialogue with customers. That conversation is very much enabled by new technologies—think chat forums, Twitter, support communities and mobile apps. As businesses increasingly pursue engagement, balance has to be found between being present in all these channels and unintentionally producing new organizational silos that ultimately fragment the conversation and defeat the intimacy that engagement is meant to create.

As customers we “channel hop” at our own convenience. But when the rep on the phone isn’t aware of a promotion on the company Facebook page, we question the competency of the representative and ultimately the brand. Similarly, we offer no mercy when an agent on the phone can’t comprehend that we just spent valuable time IM’ing in a chat window and are, in fact, calling because the problem wasn’t solved. Next stop, Twitter.

Clearly, the customer conversation has come to include not just marketing touchpoints but customer service and sales interactions as well. Marketing traditionally has a bigger role on the buying side of the customer journey (becoming aware of a product, researching and selecting one), customer service more upon ownership (account handling, ordering, use and maintenance). But overlap between them is increasing. For engagement to be sustainable, the business-to-customer conversation has to be continuous across emerging as well as traditional channels and the individual departments underpinning them.

Yet, many businesses expanding into channels like chat, Twitter, Facebook and mobile, have created new silos in the process, or have not managed to integrate traditional ones such as fax and letter mail effectively with new systems. In fact, the reality for many service organizations (90% in one Gartner survey) ⁱⁱ is that customer communication channels are not yet integrated organizational functions. These companies struggle to deliver a seamless experience, and investments in technologies that enhance individual steps in the customer experience aren’t providing the big picture needed to meet customer and business requirements.

Rewriting agent-to-customer interactions

As a customer navigates self-service on your website one minute, then calls in with questions or gets help in chat the next, success depends on continuity between channels. Contextual and integrative technologies enable the customer experience to transcend functional silos such as online transacting and online search, and flow across organizational seams—the multiple departments, systems and channels underpinning the customer experience.

When a customer transitions from one channel or agent to another, information won’t need to be restated. Agents can simply pick up the thread where the customer left off, regardless of in which channel the last interaction took place. Customers aren’t made to feel like they’re dealing with yet another agent, but rather that they’re dealing with you, the company they are buying the product from.

One customer. One conversation

Customer Experience Management (CEM) takes a step back and tackles the customer experience end-to-end. Optimizing individual steps and touchpoints in the customer journey depends on a holistic overview of interactions and understanding of the customer experience, as well as the ability to adapt businesses processes quickly to change. That overview and agility has been made possible by unifying CEM technologies, designed to bring disparate channels and data silos together and provide business-level control of the customer experience across channels. It’s a development driven in part by the increasing value placed on customer experience as a competitive differentiator and by a heightened focus on operational efficiency.

The big picture at a granular level

For customer-service agents a comprehensive understanding of the customer includes a view of interactions with the company in all channels. Social and mobile channels must be included along with traditional and offline channels—email, fax, phone and visits to the reception desk—or communication breaks down when it moves beyond the immediate interaction. Faster insight is needed into whether a call is a follow-up to an email, or whether chat is being initiated by a new customer or an existing one. Mobile apps for reporting service issues improve the customer experience but at the risk of creating new inefficiencies if not integrated with service operations.

For marketers, mobile is important in particular because it represents an exponentially growing percentage of online traffic, and a surge in mobile transactions is predicted for the years ahead.ⁱⁱⁱ Integrating social listening is critical to both customer service and marketing, because social commentary carries unprecedented influence in terms of brand reputation and product referral. Is a negative tweet a one-off from an angry customer who has tried to reach you through other channels or from a community “influencer”? Your agents need to know.

The process of cross-sell or upsell marketing on the company website is comparable to the process that’s giving relevance to the online self-service experience. It’s a matter of what information is presented when. Done well, it’s driven by the context of the task or action at hand and simultaneously of individual customer profiles. Process-centric technologies that make use of customer data from electronic interactions and collaborative threads (text from email, social media, surveys, etc.,), inform the customer journey so that information is meaningful to customers as unique individuals. It’s mass marketing turned on its head and transformed into personalized marketing to the masses. It’s individualized customer service and engagement on a grand scale.

The power of knowing

Driving a high level of relevance into each interaction depends on being able to inform processes and next-best actions by everything we know about customers. Thanks especially to electronic interaction—transactions and clickstreams—and quantitative and qualitative listening technologies, we know quite a lot.

In fact, data, or big data as the explosion of incoming datapoints is popularly called, is what’s making it possible to automate the personalized customer experience, i.e.: Linking that data to customers to create customer intelligence, and then mining it to enhance search intelligence and filter information, is transforming the customer experience. And now it’s changing customer expectations too.

Until recently this knowledge and these capabilities were more frequently used to improve targeting. But the growing importance of the customer experience and increasing expectations among customers for a meaningful exchange with companies regardless of channel are extending the need for data- and context-driven interactions to customer service and all touchpoints.

Unifying technologies that are helping businesses overcome channel and data silos are enabling that cross-channel, holistic understanding of customers—individually and collectively. Better overview, control and analysis of the customer journey is paving the way for real engagement, a more authentic dialogue and better relationships with customers.

ⁱHarvard Business Review. HBR Blog Network, “How to Engage Your Customers and Employees,” Ray Wang, May 9, 2012

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/05/how_to_engage_your_customers_a.html#disq...

ⁱⁱGartner White Paper, "CRM Technologies for the Emerging Customer Engagement Hub," Michael Maoz, March 13, 2012

ⁱⁱGartner Press Release, “Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Payment Transaction Value to Surpass $171.5 Billion,” May 29, 2012 http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=2028315

Customer Experience: More inputs for smarter outputs

Your needs or mine? Context matters

Good customer experiences—and bad ones—define your brand. With the overload of choices and experiences customers face today, good experiences are relevant experiences. Customers want fast answers and fitting options from the brands they choose to support. In fact, personalized experiences are becoming the expectation, whether customers are navigating your website, community forums or talking to one of your reps.

To deliver a good, personalized experience the right information has to be made available to agents and customers at just the right time. And that means taking the context of the situation and of the individual customer into account.

Customers bring their own context to a service interaction, such as past requests or the intention to acquire information or transact business. And the interaction itself delivers context that shapes the experience—such as the services you offer and the flow of information a customer is presented with. KANA Enterprise takes all the details and data into account to orchestrate the optimal experience for every individual and every interaction.

Orchestrated experiences are optimal experiences

As a KANA customer journey unfolds, a multitude of inputs and contextual data are evaluated to inform and direct the service experience. The experience orchestrator enables automated business processes to unfold across systems and data in a complex environment and takes inputs from the four sources significant to the service experience to create the ideal output:

• Input from the customer service manager; Service managers define the possible steps of the service interaction and design its flow.
• Input from knowledge bases; Data and knowledge is infused into every step of the experience through Web services made available via KANA Enterprise integration and/or IT.
• Input from the customer; Contextual information about the customer tailors the experience to the individual.
• Input from the collective customer experience; Data generated from similar service interactions over time fine-tunes each experience to meet business objectives.

Each input has numerous variables—there are many possible service interactions within a business and each one will branch out depending on context and customer choice. Knowledge infused into the experience will vary depending on those choices and contexts. And the entire experience will be shaped by business objectives and data culled from similar service interactions.

An orchestrated experience is formed from the infinite possibilities these inputs combine to create. Orchestration creates the optimal experience for each customer at every touchpoint. The service manager's vision is transformed into the actual choices that appear in the user interface—brought either directly to your customers on your website or through your agents. It's a sure route to really good, really relevant experiences.

Measuring good experiences to make them even better

KANA Enterprise measures and records every detail of the customer journey—from the precise path a customer takes, to the time spent going from one step to another. The collected data is distilled in the KPI optimizer according to business objectives, and used to shape and improve the experience. Orchestration relays the garnered customer insight into ever more meaningful choices and provides faster ways to reach resolution. And when a customer encounters a difficulty, the situation is evaluated to determine whether agents should be alerted. Real-time suggestions can be given to agents as the service experience unfolds. Orchestration is a key part of the Design-Orchestrate-Listen methodology that makes KANA Enterprise what it is. Learn more about this and what KANA Enterprise can do for you »