3 Goals to Tackle on the Way to a Killer CX Solution
The challenge facing brands today is less keeping up with their competitors than it is staying on top of the growing needs of their own customers. A recent study by Accenture found that more than nine in 10 companies struggle to deliver digital customer experiences that exceed their customers' expectations. With that lofty standard in mind, here are three goals for businesses that want to successfully deploy a strong customer experience solution:
Mitigating Total Cost of Ownership
Large sets of customer data usually contain patterns of customer behavior, correlations between groups of customers, market trends, and valuable business insights. The ability to capture, interrogate, analyze, and make sense of large volumes of data is crucial to improving business decisions. The findings from Big Data can indicate new revenue, improved customer service, and cost-saving opportunities.
However, holding large volumes of data can result in a high total cost of ownership (TCO). Deploying a solution that can be widely used by any business user and does not require large maintenance efforts can also reduce TCO. With new data compliance acts coming into effect in 2018, data compliance transformation will occur across many industries and markets. Storing this data securely and with instant and democratized access has become the new Big Data goal.
One of the largest U.S. banks, without funding for a replacement project, decommissioned its legacy digital analytics and session replay system. In its place a much newer technology—with TCO considerations in mind—was instituted, accomplishing the new Big Data goal. The move led to these results:
- the number of server types were more than cut in half, which translated into fewer team support requirements;
- the number of subject matter experts (SMEs) required to maintain the technology decreased by a factor of four; and
- data was able to be compressed by more than 95 percent.
Emphasizing Session Replay
When things inevitably go wrong, the first person on the firing squad is typically the call center agent. Then, assuming the issue is properly relayed within the organization, the onus falls on IT to reproduce the error as seen by the customer. Session recording and replay allows real-time playback of any online session, including desktop, tablet, and mobile sessions.
In Israel, Bank Leumi reduced its digital support call duration for support centers by 70 percent—from an average of five minutes to a minute and a half. It accomplished this by making individual customer struggles visible to customer service reps using digital session replays. Bank Leumi also cut down the number of unreproducible errors by 95 percent using visual evidence into root causes, ultimately leading to faster resolutions.
The customer optimization process encompasses the whole customer journey, capturing and following all the customer’s interactions while digitally engaging with the brand, enabling further segmentation and filtering according to any recorded data and providing a 100 percent accurate and tag-less session replay.
Enterprise insight analytic solutions enable organizations to see not only what online and mobile customers are doing, but also why they are doing it. This helps inform and facilitate actions based on real-time insights that can lead to enhanced customer analytics, decreased disputes, and improved regulatory compliance. Firms can visualize digital customer journeys by recording, replaying, and analyzing all digital sessions and customer interactions, including what customers see, click, swipe, and type.
These elements, when combined, paint a more complete view of the customer, enabling enterprises to understand root causes to customer behaviors and respond quickly while personalizing their product offering and market on a one-to-one basis.
Integrating Data to Build a 360-Degree View of the Consumer
New communication channels like social media, text, and chatbots have increased the touch points that a consumer has with a brand. Recently though, the problem businesses face is collecting experience performance data and integrating it with existing customer account data. Customer experience solutions have relied heavily on taking individual data from traditional customer channels like phone calls, emails, store sales, and website conversations. This data then gets handled in isolated silos, within their own analytics system. Moving away from a disjointed siloed approach to a more comprehensive way of examining the customer experience helps form a richer view of your customer base.
AXA Global Direct—under the brand name Direct Seguros in Spain—captured an incredibly rich set of data from their customer digital sessions on both their web and mobile applications. A company that sells motor insurance policies, AXA Global Direct is particularly focused on reducing risk from each individual transaction. Using collected data within its data lake, it could understand what clients were doing on its site, store all of this traffic, and begin to customize offerings to clients based on their online behavior. Additionally, it could manage operations more efficiently by using the replay functions to see what was working online and what was not. This not only led to increased sales but also prevented fraud and actuarial risk.
In the future, Big Data analytics is likely to evolve by incorporating advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Big Data solution providers will be able to identify anomalies in real time, as well as model and predict how customers will behave in digital sessions. Predictive analytics will provide tools to help solve problems before they spiral and become significantly bigger, and hurt the business at scale.
Audelia Boker is vice president of marketing at Glassbox Digital, a company that helps enterprises manage and optimize the entire digital life cycle of their web and mobile customers.