'Technology' Bookmarks

Paul Shetler is a technologist and entrepreneur with over 20 years’ experience leading large-scale IT and organisational change projects for local and international organisations.

Paul is currently working with the Sydney-based FinTech hub, Stone & Chalk, as an innovation advisor for in-house and external organisations to educate boards of directors about innovation. Prior to this, he was Chief Digital Officer of Australia’s Digital Transformation Office.

Paul spoke to us about key customer experience (CX) trends, challenges and opportunities for today’s organisations, and what the future of customer engagement looks like.

In our digitally-driven business world, the rise of the customer has led to organisations looking for new ways to innovate and enhance the customer experience (CX). Today’s customers demand immediate, accurate and responsive answers to their questions – and organisations need the right technologies and processes in place to deliver this.

Forward-thinking organisations are looking to KM to improve operational efficiencies and internal data-sharing capabilities.

For over 10 years, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has found that a KM strategy helps to establish the right knowledge foundations, creating more streamlined processes and empowering employees and customers to solve complex problems (1).

However, there is still some confusion around the role of technology in KM. A Monash University survey of 1000 Australian SMEs, government bodies and tertiary institutions found that 85% of respondents defined KM as being a business issue, rather than technology-based2– yet the two are in fact interlinked.

More and more organisations are beginning to understand the important role of technology in enhancing KM. With 2 out of 3 organisations ‘contracting out’ to KM technology experts to better navigate and manage knowledge, KM is the next step in the CX revolution.

Resident KM and customer engagement expert at Verint, Jason du Preez, shares his top 4 insights on how effective KM combines people, growth and technology to enhance customer satisfaction.

While most organisations have some concept of the value of a KM platform, most of their KM platforms are not optimised or designed to deliver a good CX.

Policy and process documents are an important asset to any business. However, they are not optimised to deliver a quick and reliable CX.

This is because most KM platforms are developed on document management applications that only deliver detailed process and policy documents to employees. The employee then tries to digest these documents while engaging with the customer.

Document management systems are not KM platforms as they are not optimised to deliver short, sharp articles written specifically to answer a customer query in real time during an interaction. Most customers have already done their research and are looking for specific answers – which is where KM can help.

By leveraging KM, organisations can respond proactively to customer queries, provide timely answers and solve complex problems. KM makes it easier for the customer to access information and for employees to respond, reducing the effort and time usually taken up with phone calls or in-person consultations.

For organisations to effectively engage both customers and employees and enhance the CX, there needs to be accessible and actionable knowledge for all.

Is knowledge in your organisation accessible and actionable for both customers and employees? What effect does your current KM content have on performance outcomes and customer metrics?

For any organisation, these questions are not easily answered. The knowledge journey is an ongoing process of identifying where knowledge is, how it’s being used and which processes can be improved to enhance the CX. It’s about keeping knowledge up-to-date and relevant, with the right processes in place to manage it.

KM technology is an easily integrated asset for businesses to improve their existing systems and infrastructure to enhance the CX. The best KM technology makes it easy for both customers and employees to provide feedback and for organisations to report on its usage, driving greater operational efficiencies.

As we continue down the path of KM, the concept of knowledge as “a single source of truth” for all channels will be key to lifting business performance.

We have a saying at Verint that “search is failure”. This means that any KM context should be a unified whole that pre-empts and delivers a relevant piece of knowledge, preventing individuals from labouring over in-depth searches.

In the age of digital transformation, ensuring you understand the customer and their specific requirements when engaging with your organisation will allow you to preempt their needs.

This means you can deliver the right knowledge in context to the customer and their journey, which is vital to delivering a more seamless CX. KM delivered in context plays well into digital channels and is a critical element of “doing more with less”.

With the rise of IoT and AI, new market drivers will continue to disrupt the CX journey in 2017 and beyond.

As organisations continue to adopt new digital solutions, KM will play a significant role in resolving technical issues. Automation is a key feature of KM that enables customers to solve problems for themselves and become more self-sufficient.

With the rise of the IoT and AI, more and more processes will become automated along the CX journey. For example, the IoT will require a single source of knowledge to deliver smarter products and services, and the immediate delivery of information.

New disruptive tools such as AI bots will also play a role in supporting the customer. Bots are set to become more predominant for the CX, and at the core they should use business KM to provide an enhanced CX.

As a highly integrated and innovative solution, KM as “a single source of truth” is paving the way for the automated and interconnected CX of the future.

Brisbane is a great place to live, work, and relax – it’s a safe, vibrant, green and prosperous city, valued for its friendly and optimistic character and enjoyable lifestyle.

Together, we’ve achieved a lot, but there’s more to be done.

Every day, Brisbane City Council works with residents and local communities to help make our city what it is today, with a long-term vision for the future.

It’s that vision and focus that has Brisbane heading in the right direction.

Brisbane City Council is delivering congestion-busting road projects, Australia’s most modern public transport, including the Brisbane Metro, as well as the parks and vibrant, liveable communities that residents deserve – all with a strong economy and more local jobs. We’re growing our city while maintaining the character of our suburbs, planning carefully for inevitable growth and focusing development around transport options.

By delivering on a strong plan now, with a vision that looks to the future, Brisbane City Council is improving quality of life for residents while ensuring our city has the services and infrastructure to meet the needs of future generations.

Following the implementation of a successful customer experience (CX) upgrade to Brisbane City Council’s customer service centre, Councillor Matthew Bourke shares his top insights about growth improvement and meaningful customer service.

How the CX can help businesses grow

For any organisation, an omnichannel CX is key to enhancing customer engagement and delivering consistent interactions across every channel. From the accessibility of information to the responsiveness and quality of the platform – every facet of the CX needs to be robust and reliable.

For example, at Brisbane City Council, customer feedback paves the way for us to improve and transform our CX and customer service offerings.

We truly listen to customer feedback to ensure that we transform our CX in ways that will provide positive outcomes for stakeholders. By streamlining CX processes in this way, organisations can minimise rework and optimise their budget, providing meaningful, value for money to our customers.

Data is an invaluable tool in allowing organisations to realise where the best opportunities lie for enhancing their CX. All data sources should be considered to truly transform an organisation’s service delivery and CX.

A CX roadmap is an excellent guide for implementing a successful engagement strategy and working towards best-practice in the CX journey. For example, Brisbane City Council has rich data sources and has recently seen the benefits of mining data across multiple channels and interactions.

This information has given us the true human story of our CX, helping us identify strategies for improvement.

Introducing BCC’s CX Strategy Roadmap

With a 24/7 Contact Centre servicing 1.4 million residents, Brisbane City Council sees the value in listening to the many community voices asking questions and providing feedback about the city. Our current customer service focus is developing a CX Strategy Roadmap. This will guide us to implement a successful customer experience strategy and work towards delivering a best-in-class customer experience.

The roadmap will be based on our Customer Service Charter, which considers how we provide meaningful service to everyone, everywhere, every time.

Everyone

• Everyone is a customer and we all serve customers
• Customers are valued equally and individually
• Customers can speak to any Council employee and they can point them in the right direction

Everywhere

• Customers choose how they interact with Council from a range of contact methods and locations
• Wherever Council employees are, they are able and willing to assist customers

Every time

• Consistent, quality service – without exception
• Customers associate excellent customer service with Council
• Employees consider the customer in all they do

This is an organisational-wide vision for all employees, third party contractors and suppliers. It outlines the Council we want our external customers to experience and also describes how we serve each other internally.

Our Customer Focus Vision, will be achieved through realising the following six key aspirations.

• One Council
• Customer Council
• Dedicated Council
• Personalised Council
• Trusted Council
• Open Council

Digital disruption and the evolution of the CX

In a disrupted world, there is a rising expectation for services to be delivered digitally via the customer’s device of choice. Organisations need to meet the rising customer demand for a seamless digital CX, providing a personalised and engaging CX that’s accessible anywhere, anytime via multiple devices.

Today’s customers expect value for money, responsiveness and ease of access to services and information. As we progress further into the digital age, it’s critical that organisations understand their customer pain points and set new standards of service delivery, prioritising digital engagement.

In Council, our CX focus is to truly listen to our customers so that we can design services in ways that create an outstanding CX. Whether it’s delivered digitally, in person or through other channels, we are committed to understanding what our customers value most and how they want to be served. Our ongoing focus on enhancing the CX will allow us to identify our biggest opportunities and action these quickly.

By listening to our customers and delivering on a strong plan now, with a vision that looks to the future, Brisbane City Council is improving quality of life for residents while ensuring our city has the services and infrastructure to meet the needs of future generations.

Three key strategies for enhancing the CX in your organisation

1. Integrate CX processes with innovative technology.
   Highly integrated processes are key to building a customer-focused culture across the entire organisation. Previously, Brisbane City Council’s customer service environment was siloed, with 13 different systems. The platform we were using was becoming increasing unstable and it was difficult to find skilled resources to manage it.

   To solve this issue and improve our CX delivery, we partnered with Verint to implement a highly configurable and knowledgeable system, with the ability to manage, modify and improve our customer interactions. This new system enabled us respond to changing customer behaviours and expectations, driving innovation and greater efficiencies in our CX journey, as well as modernising our old and complex technology environment.

2. An intuitive system frees up your people for more complex tasks.
   Having the right technology in place to deliver an integrated CX is one thing; you also need the right people on board to manage the change. A customer-centric, intuitive system with better reporting, reliability and ‘one view of customer’ will assist organisations in decreasing the amount of time required for training.

   In short, with a platform that provides real-time updates of knowledge and self-service capabilities, organisations can free up talent for addressing and solving more complex issues that require a human touch.

3. Don’t underestimate complexity.
   When embarking on a transformational CX project, don’t underestimate the complexity of your business when you are trying to simplify it.

   The most time-consuming task for any organisation is defining each and every process that is completed on behalf of a customer. Focus on enabling improved customer intelligence to support business planning and decision-making, both now and in the future.

Daniel Bergan, Omni-Channel Transformation at Westpac, discusses the need to mobilise the customer experience through technology and a personal touch ahead of the Verint APAC Engage conference.

Daniel Bergan is a leader in the Australian and New Zealand omni-channel transformation space, charged with bringing together Westpac's digital, physical and virtual channels to deliver a seamless experience for customers and bankers. Westpac’s omni-channel efforts are about providing the customer with choices for the episodes that matter, blending human and digital interactions to ensure Westpac get every interaction right, everywhere and every time.

Daniel Bergan is a leader in the Australian and New Zealand omni-channel transformation space, charged with bringing together Westpac's digital, physical and virtual channels to deliver a seamless experience for customers and bankers.

Westpac’s omni-channel efforts are about providing the customer with choices for the episodes that matter, blending human and digital interactions to ensure Westpac get every interaction right, everywhere and every time.

Daniel spoke to us about how to reduce customer pain points with automation, along with the need to mobilise the customer experience through technology and a personal touch.

Enhance the CX to remain competitive in the digital age

We with spoke with Carl Borchardt, Regional Manager for Contact Centre and Customer Experience Solutions at Cisco Systems Asia Pacific & Japan, about strategies for enhancing the customer experience (CX) and remaining competitive in the digital age.

In a world increasingly reliant upon technology, the new competitive battleground is an exemplary customer experience (CX), with the least amount of customer effort.

Today’s companies require a CX strategy that is continually evolving in ‘real time’ in line with changing customer behaviours and preferences. While most companies realise this, few are capable of executing a low-effort CX throughout the lifecycle journey.

That’s why forward-thinking companies are looking at their ecosystem of partners, technology and processes to build an integrated CX strategy. An effective CX strategy is key to deeper customer engagement, digital transformation and remaining competitive in the digital age.

Personalised customer service is key to business success

With the proliferation of the web and social media, today’s customers are communicating through new channels and expecting a deeper level of personalised service as they interact digitally. Gone are the days of a ‘one size fits all’ CX.

Expert, personalised customer service is now the rule rather than the exception and technology is continually evolving to support this. Today’s customers learn much more about products and services before they reach out to a business. This means companies need to be acutely aware of customer interactions and the CX journey leading up to the contact event.

Customers demand a human touch in customer service

Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are predicated to provide the next generation of ‘self-service’ – but customers still want a human touch in customer service.

There is a point in each customer journey when human engagement is still essential. Certain tasks are suited to robotic interaction, while others require emotional understanding and human connection. Balancing this blend of automated versus human interaction proactively allows companies to deliver an exemplary and consistent customer experience.

Data analytics can maximise the CX

To attract and retain customers in the digital age, companies need to effectively track customer behaviours and interaction preferences. The next generation of customer databases aren’t simply static records of past transactions, but ‘real time’ interaction histories that use contextual data to optimise each customer’s current and future experience.

Today’s customers have a broad digital footprint, and organisations must leverage this data to proactively resolve and serve. The feedback from customers is that they are fine for companies to profile their needs and preferences, as long as the data is used to create more personalised and efficient interactions.

A truly omni-channel CX enhances customer loyalty

Customer loyalty is an outcome of measuring and managing ‘customer effort.’ The challenge for companies today is to provide an accurate resolution/transaction across preferred consumer channels, with the least amount of effort.

The CX also needs to be consistent across the full omni-channel customer journey. From a strategic point of view, companies should focus on improving ‘disconnected’ customer journeys. Integrating customer context across all interactions will drive vast improvements in ‘customer effort’ and ultimately loyalty.

On the ground, this means eliminating ‘silos of data’ and systems, bringing together disparate interaction channels, and leveraging context and analytics to make informed decisions in real time.

Advice for industry leaders to get ahead in 2017

1. Adopt agile and nimble technologies. The biggest inhibitor to organisations achieving an omni-channel CX is a lack of flexibility and agility in their legacy systems and silos of information. More agile and nimble solutions will unlock greater value for the customer. There are many traditional players who made preemptive or very rapid evolutions in response to agile competitors, accelerating growth and market standing exponentially.
2. Prioritise personalised engagement. Going forward, leaders need to prioritise unique and personalised engagement with customers across the channel of their choice, every time. Harnessing the ‘lifecycle value’ of your customer across all channels and systems creates a single view of the customer, enabling leaders to make business decisions based on this intelligence.
3. Find a balance between human skill and technology. A blend of human skill and technology is required to deliver an exemplary CX. Don’t over-rotate in either direction; know the customer and their interactions and preferences; and build your CX strategy on the data and context you have.
4. Disrupt the status quo with CX at the core. The new generation of ‘digital disruptors’ are successful because CX is core to their strategy. These new players came into traditional industries and applied a ‘best in class’ CX strategy that is based on ease, insight and intelligence rather than conformance. Disrupting the status quo is fundamental for future success.

As a key Unified Communications and Customer Experience partner of Verint, Cisco is delighted to be a sponsor and supporter of this year’s APAC Engage conference. The ability to deploy a combined Verint/Cisco solution to manage customer interactions and a broader CX strategy is proving to be very attractive to organisations across the APAC region.

We spoke to Isabella Villani, CEO of Exceed Global about the connection between a great customer and employee experience and a successful business – with a particular focus upon an intuitive and tailored customer experience.

Q: How can customer and employee engagement be improved by putting people at the centre of the customer experience?

A: There is definitely a correlation between the customer experience and employee experience. Customer experience is very much leader-led and comes from the top, but it’s delivered by all employees.

That’s why it’s important to have a strong people strategy in place for your business. The most successful companies are those where the senior leadership team are 100% behind both the customer and employee experience, and have a very good understanding that the two are interlinked.

Q: Should businesses try to better understand the impact of human emotion on the customer experience?

A: There should definitely be consideration of emotions in the customer experience. For example, when you’re doing customer journey maps, you will always factor in the emotion of the person at that particular time.

From a business perspective, it’s important to think about a customer or employee’s emotional state – for example, with a customer it’s important to think about the following: Why they are contacting you? What are the emotional drivers behind the call? If someone is ringing because their house burnt down and they need to speak to someone about insurance, that’s obviously a very different call to someone who is excited because they’ve got pre-approval for a loan and have purchased their first home.

Q: How can businesses achieve more personalised interactions for their customers across the customer experience journey?

A: In order to provide a personalised interaction, the first thing you need to do is understand who your customer is, regardless of where they are in their journey and the channel they are using to interact with you.

To achieve this, you need to leverage the data you already have about that person and tailor the customer experience accordingly. It could be the number they’re calling from, or what they’ve been doing when they were logged into your website before they clicked to chat with you. Leverage whatever information you’ve got available to understand your customer – who they are and why they are calling – to improve the customer experience.

It’s also important to have an element of reactive and proactive customer communication. Leveraging data and really customising the customer experience will help you understand where your customers are and allow them to communicate in their channel of choice, rather than making them swap to channels that suit you as a business.

As we understand our customers a lot more and how we can leverage data strategically, companies can make the customer experience more seamless and intuitive. However, we don’t want customers to think that their privacy and data security has been breached in the process.

Q: To what extent should businesses try to replace the human customer experience with a digital one?

A: I’m not sure if we should be looking to replace so much as to augment or provide an alternative to the human customer experience. The key is to provide customers with a choice. Sometimes digital platforms like chatbots work well, but other times, customers actually want to speak to a person and have that human interaction via online chat, over the phone or in person.

So the challenge for organisations is to make a digital channel easy and straightforward for customers and to see digital as a separate channel, rather than a replacement for the human customer experience.

Q: Can you name any great customer/employee experience examples?

A: I don’t feel that any organisation in Australia is doing customer experience end-to-end really well. Many organisations are doing certain aspects of it well, but most are still on a transformational journey.

With technology and customer demands changing, organisations are constantly challenged by trying to keep up and deliver a great customer experience. This isn’t surprising when you consider the huge cultural and operational shift needed to drive this kind of transformation.

Globally, lots of big brands talk about doing customer experience really well, but whether or not they do is a different thing (e.g. Apple, Amazon, Google). Sometimes the businesses delivering the best customer experience are not the big brands at all. An equally good customer/employee experience can be delivered by the coffee shop down the road, where there is a barista who remembers who you are and what your coffee order is, and you can tell that the employees there are happy.

Q: What do you think will be the biggest influence on customer experience behaviours for businesses in the next two years?

A: The advance of digital technology and data will continue to be a big influencer upon the customer experience. We have a lot more data available about our customers and their behaviours, so in the next two years, we will see companies use data to not only personalise the customer experience, but to eliminate white noise.

Going forward, CEOs and boards will really start to understand the important link between customer and employee experience, and the financial success of the organisation. To drive business success, remain competitive and speed to market, leaders need to be more savvy and intuitive about customer preferences, leveraging data to enhance the customer experience.

Q: Do you think it will be human skill or technology that will create the customer experience of the future?

A: I think the customer experience of the future is going to be a mix of both human skill and technology. As customer experience becomes more complex, we require a highly skilled work force to manage customer interactions across multiple channels.

Customer expectations around technology and data capturing are also changing. For example, a customer might call up and say, “I know my call is being recorded. I have a problem with my bill and you know this from my last bill. Rather than me telling you this again, why don’t you listen to that last call recording and tell me what’s wrong?” So customers are expecting you to use the latest technology to deliver a more efficient service.

Q: What do you believe customers are wanting from organisations in 2017?

A: What customers want is ease of doing business. They want organisations to make their life less complicated, so any organisation that prioritises this is likely to keep customers happy and drive customer retention.

My advice to leaders is to remove barriers for the customer, allowing them to interact in a manner and channel that suits them rather than the business. Make sure information is consistent and easy for customers to understand, because they want to make informed decisions.

The other element of a great customer experience is to “wow” the customer. Show them that you really care – that you really understand who they are and the value they add to your business.

Overall, what customers are expecting in 2017 is for organisations to become more genuine and personal – and less transactional – in their customer service offerings.

By being smart about listening to customers Bank of America cuts support tickets by 10,000 a month.

At a time when many leading global financial institutions are still saddled with poor reputations dating from the financial crisis, Bank of America, one of the world’s largest commercial banks, has invested in building credibility with its customers by listening and responding to customer feedback in real-time.

Over the past three years, Bank of America has partnered with OpinionLab to capture, manage, and act on real-time, opt-in customer feedback on its website and in its branches.

Using the power of the [+] feedback symbol, the bank has reaffirmed its commitment to transparency and amazing customer service — the very tenets that made it a world-class financial institution in the first place. Bank of America has seen clear-cut benefits since working with OpinionLab, including:

Reducing customer support expenses

Through the OpinionLab Comment Cards, Bank of America received a large volume of support-related feedback. BoA was eventually able to classify these support-related issues into 25+ distinct categories, including issues with bill payments, money transfers, and new account applications. Issues that fell into categories that were controllable received an immediate resolution.

Several months after deploying these resolution tactics, BoA saw online support ticket volume fall by more than 10 per cent. In a high-volume customer service environment, this added up to over 10,000 fewer support tickets per month — a monthly cost savings of close to half a million dollars.

Winning back customers

After the financial crisis, churn was a major problem for BoA, as explosive media reports drove many clients to take their business to smaller community banks.

BoA decided to tackle this head on, and part of the strategy involved using OpinionLab’s Intelligent Support module to identify at risk customers and deploy recovery tactics in real-time. Using sophisticated data and text mining technology, it was possible to identify customers who had highly negative online experiences and who were showing warning signs of possible defection.

Once these customers were identified, the closing screen of the Comment Card was used to help BoA drive these at-risk customers into real-time recovery events, often leveraging real-time chat and other advanced rescue tactics. The result was a decrease in web-based churn of more than 5 per cent within 6 months, thereby saving the bank millions of dollars per year.

Aligning service expectations

BoA’s initial goal was to better measure and manage customer experience performance for BankofAmerica.com, but program stakeholders very quickly realised that a significant share of the feedback was related to the branch experience, including comments pertaining to branch wait times, quality of service offered by tellers, and overall branch atmosphere.

To that end OpinionLab built a custom alerting and report routing system that would classify comments by channel and forward them to the appropriate stakeholders, at both the site and branch levels. This allowed Bank of America to align customer service quality across channels and become one of the first commercial banks to deliver a truly seamless omnichannel customer experience.

We asked Michael Stelzer, Verint’s VP of ANZ, what lessons local leaders could take from the BoA experience, “‘These days, many enterprise organisations appear to be making it harder and harder for customers to contact them with telephone, email etc details buried deep inside websites.”

• Further Reading: How to build mid-management mindshare for your CX program

“However, as seen in the Tipping Point research, consumers appear not to trust such organisations that hide this information. Therefore, it would seem that any approach an organisation can undertake to become more transparent leads to happier customers that are ultimately stickier and therefore spend more,” he said.

Digital feedback has the potential to have a far-reaching business impact on things like customer loyalty and revenue. But only if it’s harnessed correctly.

For instance, there are a handful of absolutely critical strategies you should be following, such as making sure you capture the right data.

That may sound easy, but it is surprising how many large businesses do not get the basics right?

Further Reading:

• How to build mid-management mindshare for your CX program 
• Download Seven strategies to improve CX with digital feedback

So what’s the first step? Simply, start by listening to what your customers have to say, and in their own words. This may sound straightforward but many companies get this wrong.

And this is something leaders do much better than laggards.

According to the Temkin Group, 61 percent of organisations that have “mature” Voice of Customer programs and $500 million or more in annual revenue believe that open-ended verbatims from customers provide the most value when it comes to customer insights.

This makes sense.

When your customers initiate a conversation with you, they will tell you exactly how you can improve their experience, and what aspects of their experience they expect for you to take action on to improve – but only if you let them.

But it is just the start. How else can you ensure digital feedback delivers a better customer experience.

1: Listen to what your customers have to say…don’t just let them speak at you

If you already use a digital feedback solution or are capturing direct customer insight online, you need to be clear that there’s a subtle but important distinction between letting your customers speak to/at you and actually listening to what they have to say.

Listening involves a two-way communication exchange, where your customers speak to you and you then take the time to consider what they are actually saying. As more and more exchanges between customers and businesses take place online, the fewer opportunities there are to have the same level of two-way exchange typical of face-to-face communication.

One of the main goals in gathering feedback is to enable communication between you and your customer: information is delivered (by the customer), and a message is received (by the company). And ideally your customers’ messages compel you, as an organisation, to take action.

Think about it: if a customer in a brick-and-mortar store approached a manager and indicated that product pricing on tags didn’t match with the store’s promotional signage, that manager would take action to correct the mistake – more than likely, immediately. That customer’s expectation for you to take action is no different on digital channels.

2: Ensure you don’t influence responses

To get the true and honest digital feedback you require, be careful not to influence customer responses in any way. When requesting digital feedback, think about the following points:

1. Let them speak in their own words – enable your customers to leave actual open-ended comments about what they want to tell you.
2. How you ask is important – invite online feedback with an open-ended comment so as not to influence the nature of what your customers want to tell you. If, for example, you instead ask a specific attitudinal question such as “how do you feel about content of our site?” – odds are that the information you get will focus specifically on content.
3. Ensure the location for providing the comment is front and center – By prominently displaying the comment box when your customer opts to leave digital feedback, they will tell you exactly what first came to mind when they elected to speak with you.

The best and most actionable feedback is direct, undiluted and most reflective of your customer experience. So invite comments from your customers that encourages this insight.

3: Invite feedback across all digital touchpoints

You should offer your customers the capability to provide you with feedback across all of your digital touchpoints. In other words, let them talk to you from every single page of your website, mobile apps and other platforms. Customer-initiated feedback is just that, initiated by the customer, and more often than not at the moment when they have encountered some barrier to their success

As an analyst working with businesses to improve their digital customer experience, I often encounter situations when companies have gaps in their perspective on drivers of CX – all because key site sections, sub domains, or even specific digital tools are devoid of a continuous listening solution. Often in these situations, organisations assume that no problems exist on these neglected touchpoints simply because no feedback is being relayed on or about them – which is obviously a big mistake.

To give you an example of what I’m talking about – modal pop-up windows for password recovery are a perfect example of a commonly missed opportunity to gather feedback, particularly on mobile devices. If your goal is to create a comprehensive view of all possible exchanges between yourself and your customers, then allow for users to leave digital feedback on all digital touchpoints.

4: Make providing digital feedback easy for your customers

If you want your customers to speak to you about whatever’s on their mind so that you can then listen and react, you need to make it easy for them to do so.

Take the below example (which incorporates an invitation to provide feedback via a tab on the right side of the page and in the header), which is mirrored throughout the website – users are in no doubt at any point of their interaction how to tell you what they think about you. The invitation is easily findable/accessible and ever-present across the experience.

Another benefit of a highly visible invitation to leave feedback is that you end up with a far more balanced view. For example – if you bury your digital feedback invitation in the footer of your site, or too deep in the hamburger menu of your mobile applications or mobile web experience, the more negatively skewed and customer support oriented the commentary tends to be. Because your customers will have to work hard to figure out how to leave feedback, only the most motivated will do so…and making it so difficult will only irritate them further.

If you want digital feedback to be actionable, and related to in-moment pain points, make it easy for your end users to speak to you as close to the actual moment of truth as possible – whether that “moment of truth” is a page itself, or even an aspect of a specific page such as search results or account details.

This approach also encourages cross-channel feedback. Where is the first place your customers go to engage with you or research your products or services? More often than not, it’s your website. Providing an easy-to-find platform for delivering feedback means you not only receive the insight to improve your digital customer experience, but also CX within your store or branch network or the quality of your products and more.

Staying on the theme of making it easy, make it easy for yourself by implementing a “channel selector” like the one highlighted below. This means you can segment and route data easily for action, while also asking questions specific to channels or services.

If you want to find out more techniques for making providing digital feedback easy for your customers, this is covered in a recent OpinionLab eBook.

Let your customers be your guide

Comments directly from your customers in their own words captured via digital feedback help bring CX issues to life. Remember: every comment represents the voice of an actual person. Listening will help instill you with a greater sense of organisational empathy, and better allow you to truly see your business processes from the perspective of your actual customers’ journeys.

Familiarising yourself with verbatim digital feedback is the ultimate way to challenge your own assumptions about your customer experience, gain a true sense of customers’ desired outcomes, and shed light on unmet needs that you never even considered to be factors in their overall satisfaction with your company.

When you think about it like that, the impact of digital feedback on your customer experience – both online and offline – can be immense. But make sure you follow these four crucial steps to maximise its full potential to uncover the type of insights that drive discernible CX and business improvements.

This year, we celebrated several acquisitions that will see Verint continue to deliver robust Customer Engagement solutions to organisations across the region and we head into the New Year with some significant momentum.

In October, Verint acquired Verba Technologies (www.verba.com), a leading RegTech vendor. We now offer a broad portfolio of technologies designed specifically for the financial compliance market with industry-specific features including scalable compliance recording, speech analytics, and proactive policy control technology.

In November, Verint acquired eg solutions (www.egoptimize.com) an enterprise workforce optimisation software company. Verint and eg share a united focus on helping some of the world’s largest enterprises transform and optimise their workforce with a particular focus on back-office operations.

As part of Verint’s customer engagement solutions group, eg’s solutions will further strengthen Verint’s customer engagement platform, providing extended capabilities in operational management, (especially around the fast-growing Work Allocation requirement), and help us improve workforce optimisation across the enterprise.

Verint’s latest acquisition, finalised in December, is Next IT (www.nextit.com), a leading provider of conversational AI tools. With the Next IT team, we will help companies further enhance their customer engagement strategies, utilising advanced cognitive technologies such as Natural Language Understanding, Natural Language Processing, Natural Language Generation, machine learning and conversation analysis.

As we move into 2018, the team at Verint look forward to the strengths and opportunities that these new partnerships will provide.

The workforce management market has evolved considerably in recent years. Once referred to as workforce optimisation (WFO), research and advisory firm Gartner recently redefined this software category to accommodate the growing millennial workforce that is driving change in the way it expects to be engaged by the employer.

As such, workforce engagement management (WEM) expands on the established multibillion-dollar WFO market to include various functionalities such as time management, recruitment, onboarding, recognition and Voice of the Employee (VoE).

While WFO technology has traditionally focused on recording employee compliance, WEM builds upon existing WFO strategies to assist companies to realise the benefits of truly engaged employees – and in turn, forming the backbone of customer and operational success.

An overarching WEM strategy is underpinned by strong employee-centric functionalities and is essential to empowering the employee and customer concurrently.

3 reasons business leaders should have a WEM strategy:

Prioritising the employee

1. Serial entrepreneur Richard Branson aptly summed up the importance of the employee when he remarked: “If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.”
2. Empowering employees and enhancing workplace satisfaction is central to an effective WEM strategy, which we achieve by using solutions such as Performance Management and Gamification. To that end, organisations should prioritise initiatives that support a greater focus on flexible working arrangements, including more options for start times, shift durations, time off and work locations.
3. Sophisticated workforce management solutions allow for the optimisation of customer and employee needs, while next-generation technologies for recording interactions in remote locations and performance management help ensure that remote employees or those who work at times when their managers may not be present are still performing well and in compliance with organisational needs.
4. Understanding what drives and motivates employees and providing them with the tools and resources to do their best possible job will form the basis for a superior customer experience.

A positive impact on the bottom line

1. Discerning business leaders know that cost avoidance is often vital to strengthening a firm’s financial position. WEM can make a material difference to a company’s balance sheet particularly with retention levels, thus avoiding the associated costs of recruitment and onboarding.
2. Our customers often identify employee engagement and retention as a challenge and cost on the business. However, companies that do well in their financials also have high levels of engagement with their workforce. The financial benefits of engaged employees are too important to be ignored. Unengaged employees impose significant internal costs through lost productivity and subsequent recruitment and onboarding costs.

Driving performance

1. According to Gallup, engaged employees are 27% more likely to report “excellent” performance. WEM helps companies improve productivity and performance levels within their organisations. Our customers typically report up to a 5% performance increase in their employees as a result of implementing WEM technology such as Performance Management alone.
2. By combining Performance Management with other solutions like Coaching and Gamification, these benefits will increase even more. Further, WEM tools like VoE arm agents with the tools they need to best serve customers. This has never been more important, especially as customers become more demanding.

The future of WEM

The technology-driven workplace now calls for a high-calibre customer service employee who can effectively and efficiently resolve complex customer issues from whichever working environment they choose.

The amalgamation of technology into every facet of a business and the rising millennial workforce will see end-to-end WEM solutions become mandatory in the customer service industry.

We are already seeing companies linking WEM to their employee financial and performance recognition programs, further leveraging the technology to elevate employee engagement levels.

Against the backdrop of all the ebbs and flows that occur in the twenty-first-century customer service industry, one certainty business leaders can be sure of is the effectiveness of a well-executed WEM strategy on the quality of employee engagement levels and customer interactions.

Voice biometrics is cutting-edge technology used for contactless authentication. It’s technology that shouldn’t be overlooked when it comes to organisations’ ability to maximise the customer experience.

However, a fine balance needs to be struck between organisations correctly identifying their phone customers and, at the same time, avoiding a long authentication process.

If the right balance is struck, a seamless positive customer experience (CX) will ensue that will help drive long-term sustainable business results.

Here are three reasons why voice biometrics is a potential CX game changer for businesses.

Digitally transforming the CX:

In line with the advancements in automated innovation, consumers are demanding quicker transactions and a frictionless authentication experience.

Voice biometrics is at the core of elevating organisations’ CX.

Security questions, PINS and passwords are all traditional authentication methods that generally result in low satisfaction.

Verint found that it usually takes 45 seconds to get through security questions on average, which most consumers find annoying.

Voice biometrics can authenticate a caller in a fraction of that time, directly underpinning a boost in customer satisfaction.

With customer satisfaction resembling a crucial element in driving business success, voice biometrics, when done right, is guaranteed to improve the caller experience by reducing customer effort and frustration.

Protection against security and fraud:

With the threat of security breaches remaining a downside of technological and automation advancements, businesses should look to implement voice biometrics in their multilayered fraud prevention strategy.

Often, call centres and other similar business functions grapple with the task of effectively streamlining the CX without jeopardising security.

Contact centres continue to be targeted by the online fraudsters intent on stealing confidential information from your customers.

A security breach not only leads to dissatisfied, angry customers in the short-term, but it can have long-term ramifications to your organisation’s reputation.

A strong defence against the increased digital fraud that accompanies chip and PIN card migration is the new generation of voice biometrics.

Forward-thinking organisations can screen live calls against a database of known fraudster ‘voiceprints’ to flag compromised accounts.

These passive voice biometric systems operate in the background of calls – no passphrase required – to help recognise ‘bad actors’.

By using passive voice biometrics to recognise a fraudster’s voice during a support call, organisations can help reduce a card not present (CNP) fraud, better protecting their customers and thereby keeping them happy.

Strengthened regulations bullet-proof privacy data:

The recent introduction of new regulations governing financial markets, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and Markets in Financial in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), provide a heightened layer of compliance that further strengthens and protects private individual data.

It is a new solution for the financial community that further bolsters the effectiveness of voice biometrics in practice.

For example, MiFIID II includes tightened rules around the recording and storing of conversation, which will significantly boost customer confidence in the areas of private information and transparency.

As the new regulations stipulate, all companies that store or process voice biometric data must comply with the GDPR.

While voice biometrics already safeguards private information, the introduction of new regulatory requirements in this space will bolster peace of mind for customers.

Organisations that don’t consider voice biometrics as part of their customer optimisation portfolio are at risk of exposing themselves to avoidable internal and external frustrations that could harm your business.

While a multitude of factors are taken into consideration when assessing the entire CX, deployment of intelligent voice biometrics is a smart and cost-effective customer engagement solution.

Voice biometrics not only detects fraud more effectively, it enhances customer satisfaction by authenticating faster.

This article first appeared in The CEO Magazine.

“Hey, Siri. Tell me a joke.” 

Remember those early iPhone commercials with celebrities conversing with Siri as if she were human?

How little did I, and most others I suspect, know how that entertaining bit of commercial nonsense was about to change our expectations of customer self-service. 

Today’s customer service is driven in large part by the expectations of the Millennial generation, which represents the largest living generation.

The majority of today’s consumers grew up in a mobile digital world where dynamic interactions with various devices and technologies set the standard for communications of all descriptions.

For the majority of today’s consumers, the thought of being led through a menu-driven interactive voice response (IVR) system is as foreign as the thought of being led to their seat at the movie theater by a uniformed usher with a flashlight. 

Customer expectations are changing, and the successful contact center will change with them. That means delivering a self-service customer experience that parallels the customers’ expectations of that experience—dynamic, intelligent and conversational.

The contact center that can’t provide this kind of experience soon will likely become just a fading memory of the way things used to be. 

The early answer to this evolving contact center self-service customer requirement has been the chatbot. While clearly conversational and dynamic, chatbots have a limited scope that restricts their ability to help the customer only within a narrowly defined domain.

By definition, chatbots do one thing really well, responding to key words and conversing with users within a given area of expertise. If the customer strays outside of the chatbot’s domain of expertise, it generally means another chatbot with different expertise is called in, or the customer is transferred to a live agent for additional help. 

The next generation of intelligent self-service is the Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA). The IVA differs from the chatbot in its ability to understand concepts rather than just key words, which allows the IVA to better understand the customer’s intent and what the customer wishes to accomplish.

As an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven platform, the IVA continues to learn over time and improves with each interaction. Given its understanding of customer intent, the IVA is able to jump in and out of a conversational flow in order to address a customer inquiry that is related to, but not necessarily resident in, a given domain. 

The focus of self-service in today’s contact center should be to help the customer to the next best action, whether that action is getting them to the right resources via an automated assistance path or getting them to live help when necessary.

And, of course, all the activity that has transpired during the course of the automated self-service experience should accompany the customer to the live agent as well.

For employees, IVA self-service can help them solve customer needs faster with a single source of information delivered through a conversational engagement and integrated with enterprise systems, providing a streamlined way to be empowered and efficient. 

When I was young and got my first apartment, the pride of the place was my stereo system.  Lots of knobs, gauges, needles and an analog tuner that I could fiddle around with until I found music I wanted to listen to.

My Millennial daughter doesn’t have a stereo in her apartment. She has Google Home. When she wants to hear a certain kind of music, she just says, “Hey Google, play some country music.”

It’s intelligent, conversational and part of her daily life in a myriad of ways. As a potential consumer for the next 50 or 60-plus years, her expectations of self-service are already established. 

Customer interaction dynamics are changing and the industry must get onboard.

The time for thinking about making the transformation to intelligent, assisted self-service is past. Intelligent virtual agents are the contact center self-service future, and the future is here.

With mere hours to go before the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect, it seems appropriate to take a few minutes to reflect on the approaches and issues we have seen amongst those we have been talking to.

What is probably most concerning is the number of organisations that do not understand the need for them to comply with the GDPR.

Although designed to protect the rights and privacy of those residents within the EU, it applies to ANY organisation that collects or processes personal data, regardless of where they are based, headquartered or registered.

In a globalised business environment, this point is important.

We are actively communicating this to Verint customers in the Americas and throughout the Asia Pacific region—offering information and advice on how their Verint solutions can help them comply with the regulations. 

Click here to find out more.

On the other hand, while organisations based in the EU are clear about their responsibility to comply with the new legislation, there still appears to be some confusion around the requirement to gather the explicit consent of data subjects.

Many businesses find themselves part of a frantic round of communications with customers, requesting that they provide consent to allow continued storage and processing of their data.

And yet, in my estimation (as an EU resident on the receiving end of these efforts), at least 30% of these requests may not be necessary, because I have an existing contractual relationship with that business—such as supplying my utilities or other goods I have ordered.

As we pointed out in an earlier blog post on this subject, the GDPR’s requirement for recorded consent only applies if there is no other legitimate or legally required reason for holding and processing personal data, such as the fulfillment of contractual obligations, other applicable laws and regulations, or the delivery of public services.

What is also clear is that, understandably, most organisations’ current focus is on putting in place processes and tools that will allow them to comply with the new regulations at a basic level—or at least demonstrate progress in that direction.

Of course, it is a broad spectrum, with some having made significantly more progress than others. However, the big, largely unanswered question is: “How do we move from manual compliance to sustainable compliance?”

GDPR will be around for many years to come. It will still apply in the UK, even after “Brexit.”

And, analysts are already predicting that it will become the model for a tightening of U.S. laws in this arena.

Going forward we will need to harness policies and processes, organisational structures and IT tools to achieve an effective, efficient and compliant “state of grace.”

These efforts should help make GDPR best practices a normal part of every business day.

We will discuss this with Forrester’s GDPR expert, Enza Iannopollo, during an upcoming webinar called “It’s Here – Now What? Building a Foundation for Sustained GDPR Compliance.”

I recently co-hosted a webinar with Fifth Quadrant’s Head of Consulting, Stephanie Bauer, to discuss the release of its annual Contact Centre Benchmark Study & Report, where we unpacked operational performance, customer experience (CX) measurement and engagement in the industry.

Clear themes weaving throughout the discussion with business leaders from a wide band of frontline-heavy organisations, was the various ways digital technologies are adding new complexities, challenges and opportunities to overall CX delivery; as well as how customer journeys are becoming less and less linear.

With the call centre industry shifting away from traditional approaches to voice communications, an emerging focus for the sector is now on understanding the new channel environment for interactions - and the direct implications this has on the customer journey and customer experience.

Here are 3 key CX highlights that contact centre leaders need to have front of mind to perform in this fast-changing business landscape.

Changing nature of phone interactions.

Call centre interactions via telephony are declining, but still a preferred method of communication for some consumers.

With web chat, social platforms and mobile apps growing channels for CX interactions – and an increase in self-service options for customers, complex conversations via telephone are now on the rise.

These critical conversations are setting an organisation’s frontline agents apart from others, as those people who are attuned and knowledgeable in delivering high-level phone-based customer service are fast becoming CX secret weapons in businesses.

Handling time is on the rise.

One area the organisations need to get right is the handle time for inbound call centres.

There’s been an increase in the extension of time in these types of interactions because contact agents can’t get the right information at the right time. Longer handling time is problematic due to its negative impact on CX.

One way to rein in handling time is to introduce a sophisticated knowledge management system.

Often, contact agents prolong a call due to a lack of visible information, which is a result of a poor management system. Organisations should have systems to do the searching for the customer, not the agent.

Actionable insights are paramount.

To deliver a great customer experience, organisations need to know what they do well and where the can improve the customer journey.

Startingly, there are many businesses that still don not have CX measurements in place, reducing their ability to operate the business from a CX lens.

The changing business environment, underpinned by the introduction of advanced technologies, calls for a greater focus on measuring the customer experience and acting on those insights.

With customers feeling survey fatigue, call centres can adopt speech and text analytics tools to generate a higher response rate and measure customer satisfaction.

In CX environments, customer journeys are more fluid than ever before and now include touchpoints across multiple new online channels.

The differentiator for organisations as the importance placed on delivering a unique customer experience across every channel and every platform.