To grow and thrive in the digital-first world, businesses place an ever-increasing emphasis on Customer Experience (CX). To win hearts and minds, the most significant imperative is to build a personalized CX journey, integrated seamlessly across devices and channels.
This means finding novel ways to add value to the human experience, be it to win customers from competition or build powerful loyalty among existing customers.
In a virtual session hosted by WNS, Jitender Mohan, Head of Customer Interaction Services, WNS, and guest speaker Vasupradha Srinivasan, Senior Analyst, Forrester, shared their analysis and insights for the design and delivery of effective, memorable customer experience.
Sensitive Human-Digital Interfaces
A business’s channel mix must be embedded in its CX strategy. Instead of offering customers all the channels at all times, guide the customer to the right channel that will provide the fastest resolution to a specific query.
In this context, how well a business balances digital tools with human expertise will make all the difference. Customers prefer self-service options for routine transactions but need a skilled and sympathetic human being to respond in exceptional situations or answer complex questions.
In a Hubspot survey, 36 percent of respondents reported abandoning a purchase because there was no human assistance. This shows the importance of an integrated human-digital interface that combines an empowered, knowledgeable team with advanced analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and intelligent automation.
Strong Partner Ecosystems
To adapt quickly to the evolving market and improve their CX readiness, service providers are leveraging Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) and partnerships with other CX solution providers as a go-to-market strategy. Such collaborations or M&As are an excellent way to create a right-fit strategy or co-create IP.
Today, there exists a digital ecosystem of potential collaborators that companies can tap to orchestrate an end-to-end customer journey. Co-creating with partners who bring in capabilities for different stages of the value chain, rather than re-invent the wheel, offers a great opportunity to jumpstart a company’s journey to differentiation.
Investing in Industry-aligned Skills
The increasing use of automation has removed the need for human intervention with ‘simple’ customer queries. CX skills must now evolve with greater attention to empathy, rapport creation and problem-solving.
Given these requirements, CX solution providers seek better knowledge of and insight into the industries they serve. Indeed, a provider’s investment in developing deep domain knowledge has become a key indicator of its maturity level.
Such investment results in agile, niche domain experts adept at managing highly complex conversations. Their higher order of cognitive skills, augmented with industry awareness and a 360-degree customer view, paves the way to building customer trust and the right business outcomes.
Agile, Analytical Systems
Businesses are facing high fluctuations in call volumes and employee churn, which in turn is impacting how they manage customers. For example, customers in the US have to wait three times longer to connect to a contact center, thanks to the leaner staff, remote work and ‘chattier’ customers.
Businesses need to be insight-led to scale their operations seamlessly and manage variance and seasonality well without disrupting CX. To reach that level of maturity, they must invest in analytics, journey management, strategic demand planning, forecasting, hiring and training for the entire business operations lifecycle. Furthermore, engaging talent partners that offer hybrid workforces of permanent and gig employees guarantee better outcomes.
A differentiated approach to CX begins with a domain-led strategy that offers a human-digital interface and taps an ecosystem of partners to create end-to-end solutions. Discover the details of creating this unique CX strategy for your business at ‘In Conversation with Forrester and WNS’.