How can you become a responsive, agile and customer-driven business? Move beyond simply knowing what customers say and work towards a better customer journey visibility.
In the age of big data, businesses face a paradox. They’re capturing unprecedented amounts of customer information but are troubled by limited customer journey visibility into all this information – since it’s hard to get a single, overarching view of all customer interactions.
Voice of Customer (VoC) campaigns can provide insight on how customers view an organisation. This feedback is often limited to a single channel and thus, may be difficult to interpret visually, making it hard to turn insight into meaningful changes. By itself, direct VoC captures only the views of a minority and it’s challenging to interpret the data.
VoC campaigns often only capture the customer’s voice at a particular stage in their interaction journey. Then, the organisation often loses track of that customer as they progress through that journey.
Companies want to have a meaningful conversation with customers but the sheer scale of the task involved makes it difficult. These challenges should not hinder you from listening to what customers have to say. Arguably, customer interactions are the single most important data source for most businesses in terms of identifying true customer experience and effort. Modern enterprises can gain significant advantages by unlocking behavioural insights currently hidden in customer journeys.
Key to this is taking a holistic view of customer journeys across all touchpoints within an organisation: contact centre, web, chat, social media, retail, and surveys. This gives a true omnichannel view of the customer journey.
Having the data and doing the analytics is one part of the process. It’s important to access the results and operationalise those insights. By combining omnichannel analytics with strong visualisation, organisations can extract key insights and act accordingly. By capturing 100% of interactions and analysing those in relevant real-time, companies can respond immediately.
Using VoC as a source for these analytics raises the value of the VoC program itself. Businesses have good chances to maximise the value of these insights gained. Beyond that, every interaction becomes a building block in nurturing customer relationship. So you must understand what interactions came before and what will likely follow to optimise customer experience.
These analytics can reveal customer behaviour patterns. They also identify where processes are working or failing, in both traditional assisted and newer unassisted digital channels. Companies can then invest more strategically and strike a balance between increased productivity and better customer experience.
Customer journey optimisation turns disparate customer experiences into a single, cohesive picture and uses this to optimise each step of the journey. To achieve this, businesses can: enable seamless customer engagements; pinpoint inefficiencies to improve overall customer experience; identify opportunities for self-service channel optimisation and containment; and discover and address business issues with the highest impact for both operations and customers.
The result is a responsive, agile and customer-driven organisation that understands and delivers exceptional customer satisfaction.
Customer journey optimisation can help businesses achieve a seemingly impossible goal: to cut costs while improving customer experience. It enables the organisation to identify which channels to invest in so customers can have a better experience with the business. An example is moving towards digital channels that require fewer human resources to manage versus traditional channels like phone, email and in-person.
People are used to self-serving by now and many prefer it. By pushing customers to self-service channels where possible, you can reduce complexity and costs. Use analytics to understand what channels your customers prefer and are willing to use.
Customer journey optimisation is the next evolutionary step in VoC campaigns. The combination will enable you to reduce risk of failure, reduce time to market, and improve customer experience.
Gerry Tucker, Managing Director, ANZ, NICE
