Connect data and channels to accelerate CX transformation and orchestrate experiences

Imagine every time a customer engages with your company, regardless of channel or time, the entire history of interaction is known and understood, enabling each future interaction to be personalized to that customer. The bot, IVR or advisor recognizes them, knows their purchase history, past interactions, attitudes, behaviors, personal preferences, and builds on this data and insight as the customer interacts through their channel of choice. The customer is amazed by the ease, speed, and simplicity of getting what they need from the interaction. And the positive experience builds trust and their loyalty towards your brand.

Making this work requires a connected CX ecosystem that tracks the experience delivered, and creates real-time insights to predict and guide each interaction. All customer data and channels are connected to ensure customer experience continuity—customers are recognized, they can be reached in any channel, and real-time decisioning enables valued and proactive engagement. This all sounds promising, however, why do so many brands fail to deliver this connected experience?

Why brands often fall short

The big challenge is the ability to trust your data and the process of bringing customer data together in one place, in a form that is always accurate—a challenge perpetuated by having many disparate data sources. However, data collection, consolidation, and management are only part of the challenge. Lacking a clear view of what data you have available and its value, what data you need for critical interactions, and how and where it will be used, can lead to wasted effort, over engineered solutions, and missed opportunities to create CX value.

Identify the data that matters

You need to truly understand your customers and their end-to-end journey. Identify where you are over- or underperforming to close the gaps between customer expectations and reality. Knowing what your customer is looking for across channels, and applying that knowledge in real time, is the foundation of optimized, omnichannel CX. Map out the data and insights needed to deliver your optimal CX at every touchpoint, factoring in the need to automatically recognize customers in all channels. Leverage what you know about each customer, including purchase history, past interactions, and personal preferences transactions. Now you have the blueprint to configure your CX transformation and what you need in terms of data and systems integration.

Unify connections with the right experience platform

Using a cloud-based experience platform—with out-of-the-box integration—is a great place to start. It can help to simplify the consolidation of the data sources and create a single point of control for customer data, decisions, and interactions—but on its own, it won’t drive the CX transformation. Invariably, it will need calibrating to your business, the channels through which you interact, and, of course, your customers’ needs.

By combining journey analytics to understand individual customer behaviors and needs, companies can arm themselves with real-time insights and a unified view of what the customer is looking for. You can visualize live (or historic) journeys to assess channel effectiveness. Then, you can identify opportunities to improve cross-channel experiences and self-service interactions—make adjustments and assess the impact they would have made if you had introduced them earlier.

Orchestrate your end-to-end customer journeys

Apply machine learning automation to connect conversations with historical interactions and CRM data to understand what customers are doing and determine the best next actions. This intelligence is then used to inform touchpoint technologies, such as web, mobile apps, marketing systems, email, or contact center applications, about what to say and when to say it. Now you can move from optimizing individual touchpoints to true omnichannel personalization through the entire customer journey. Whether a customer is looking to buy, discuss a problem, or is simply browsing, you can create the right conversation with each individual customer in that moment through their channel of choice.

Jonathan Carter

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Senior Director, CXTI Customer Experience Management and Consulting at Concentrix Catalyst.