Regardless of what industry or the size of the company, ‘customers’ are the center of the company activity and reason for its existence. Companies continue to produce products and services that meet customer’s needs, and customers continue to consume them and provide feedback on them, leading to two pillars of the economy. So, it’s only natural that products or companies that are shunned by customers are left behind in the ecosystem of the market.
Companies must put tremendous efforts in attracting customers. Various marketing activities are performed and constant trials of improving service quality are made, all which are concentrated efforts of corporations to deliver higher customer satisfaction results. At the center of these efforts is the ‘Customer Experience’, and companies want to increase their brand value by providing a differentiated customer experience and to continue to stay ahead of their competitors.
What is the Customer Experience?
Customer Experience also called CX refers to the total customer experiences across the organization. Sometimes CX is confused with ‘User Experience,’ (UX) and User Experience means the cognitive response of a user using a product or service, Customer Experience refers to the sum of every moment that a customer has experienced throughout the customer’s purchasing journey, from beginning an online search to purchasing and feedback. Therefore, even if you provided quality products, you would not be able to say ‘the best customer experience’ when you provided unsatisfactory experience to the customer’s purchasing processes, such as a problem with the delivery of the product or a failure to provide post-service. In other words, customer experience is not a piecemeal problem, whether it’s technology, product, or marketing, but an area that requires a holistic approach and management.
Technology is a critical component of the customer experience initiatives.
Recognizing the importance of the customer experience, companies are engaged in many activities to improve the customers experience in a variety of ways. To improve the quality and design of their products, companies reflect on feedback from customers, utilize various online channels for better communication with customers, and continue to train their employees to deliver superior service to their customers. To this end, companies are scrambling to introduce the latest technologies to transform the company’s process for improving the customer experience.
Research institution, Gartner pointed out in their recent work* that ever-advancing science technologies will be a driver leading improvement in customer experience and illustrated five main technology areas which will greatly affect the revolution.
- Artificial Intelligence
- Virtual Customer Assistance and Chatbots
- Omnichannel Customer Engagement
- Real-Time Event-Driven Application Architecture
- Internet of Things
*From ‘How to Leverage the Top 5 CX Trends in 2020’, Gartner
Contact centers are at the forefront as customer contact continues to evolve.
For modern companies, their contact center is an important interface for customer interaction. It plays a direct and diverse role from the beginning to the end of the customer’s purchasing journey.
Customers can access corporate websites, generate IDs to obtain product information or may need additional help from the contact center in the process. A customer could effectively be introduced to a product through speaking, chatting or e-mailing with a contact center agent rather than searching the information by their self. After making a purchase, customers can check the delivery status of the product through the contact center, and there are many other situations where the contact center would need to be contacted, such as how to use and after-sales service. Unfortunately contact centers some of the time are placed at the end of dealing with customers directly so the impact it has on CX is tremendous. So how quickly and accurately you can deliver a solution to a customer who’s connected to a contact center is now a very important factor that directly impacts corporate performance.
As technology advances, customers are using various devices such as PCs and smartphones in addition to telephones. Unlike in the past when customers used to rely on fixed-line phones, customers communicate with companies through various channels such as real-time chatting, e-mail and SNS etc. These evolving technologies and customer environments require an omni-channel contact center to accommodate diverse ways of communications beyond the traditional voice-oriented contact center. That’s because they can handle customer inquiries from different paths within a single contact center platform, we can improve your customers experience and increase the productivity of your employees through faster and more accurate responses.
It’s time to evolve your contact center, which is at the forefront of customer contact, as technology and customer behavior change.
Click here to see the omni-channel contact center solution from Ericsson-LG Enterprise.
