Written by: Mary Wardley, Program Vice President, Customer Care and CRM
Proactive service can play an important role in enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of an organization’s customer interactions. This Technology Spotlight discusses the actions required for organizations to effectively develop this competency.
Upheavals in technology and culture are precipitating massive digital transformation (DX) initiatives within organizations that profoundly impact what it means to engage with a customer.
Customers are now mobile and socially connected, so enterprises must provide engagement and services across multiple channels at the time, place, and device desired by the customer.
Brand interactions via these various touch points impact awareness, discovery, cultivation, advocacy, purchases, and service over the life of the customer relationship. DX projects are often targeted at improving the customer experience (CX) but challenged in specifying what that means.
Just consider that there are approximately 15 different communication channels that may be offered to a consumer, including physical and digital or that Internet of Things (IoT) devices are emerging like Amazon's Echo with Alexa.
Not only does the device utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to drive conversational capabilities, it can contribute to proactive service processes.
Such devices set the stage for the next level of consumer expectations by signaling their own servicing and capturing maintenance and usage patterns to enable proactive service engagement before failure. Ultimately, avoiding service issues increases usable uptime and improves customer satisfaction.
In this brave new world of smart devices and multiple channels, it is a lot to expect that organizations would be able to tie so many individual transactions together to respond to a customer in real time, in context, and persistently.
Organizations are also grappling with challenges to omni-channel marketing presented by privacy legislation like the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which lets customers decide what data they will share with marketers.
Failure to comply could trigger fines that total in the millions of dollars. It is clear that end-to-end customer journeys that emphasize processes and workflow, such as compliance, need to balance out the front-end engagement focus that is a hallmark of omni-channel.
Fortunately, organizations have the opportunity in the current technological environment to build upon state-of-the-art functionality that enables proactive service to customers, reducing friction in the customer engagement process, which contributes to the broader brand related customer experience.
By engaging in proactive customer service, organizations have an opportunity to "make a friend for life" by implementing mechanisms to deliver a superior experience that enhances overall customer satisfaction and delight with the brand.
For customer engagement areas of the organization —specifically customer service and contact centers —DX initiatives filter down to cloud-based technologies. In customer service environments, the pressure is high to integrate the multichannel access points that customers use to reach an organization while enabling trust and transparency.
With the refresh of architectures to include mobility, IoT, and cloud-based products, organizations are looking for new technologies and better integration within processes. Customer service functions, in combination with contact centers, are at the forefront of customer handling in the digital economy.
However, new channels of customer interaction such as social, messaging, and communities shift where customer activity occurs. Not only are the channels different but, in the case of social media and communities, the interactions could be occurring outside the organization on publicly accessible sites. This means issues and missteps would be occurring in full view of other customers or prospects.
All customers know there could be issues; how they are handled is what matters. Enter cloud, one of the most important DX enablers. There is significant experimentation in the field to create seamless customer-handling environments in the cloud and to harness AI and machine learning (ML) to speed resolution of customer issues.
AI and ML are not only engaged to analyze customer interactions; they also route cases to the most appropriate agents and direct them to the next best action. AI and ML help diagnose and intelligently suggest fixes to issues based on historical patterns, often without the customer being aware of the issue.
Cloud-based products are a foundational element upon which to build the interaction platform of the future to achieve both flexibility and scalability. A cloud-based platform for customer service focused on supporting front-end customer engagement and tying together back-end service operations allows an organization to focus on CX supported by DX and plan for an end-to-end service framework. Proactive customer service is a key aspect of this framework.
