Four Ways to Win at CX-Focused Digital Transformation

One of the most significant business trends of the last few years, digital transformation, involves using the latest technologies to update a business service or process. Instead of simply replicating the service digitally, a successful transformation strategy aims to take the same service and turn it into something that is significantly better than what already exists.

Big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence are all driving the next wave of digital transformations. From a Customer Experience (CX) perspective, the biggest benefit these technologies provide is the ability to satisfy consumer expectations for a consistent customer journey - from channel to channel and device to device. Your contact center can play a crucial role in enabling the seamless experiences customers have come to expect. Read on for four ways to win at CX-focused digital transformation.

Break down walls between the front and back office

From processing payments to dispatching orders, a business's back office provides vital support for front-office employees, including contact center agents. However, the different departments across an organization often use their own systems and processes, causing a lack of insight that can damage customer experience and cost your business money.

A cloud contact center solution, when tightly integrated with an organization's CRM, can remove these boundaries by creating a single source of truth for customer and business-related data. This means sales and service agents will gain visibility over every process, allowing them to solve problems without transferring customers between departments.

Transform from multichannel to omnichannel

A Google study recently revealed that 61 percent of mobile users rate click-to-call as extremely important during the research and purchase phase of the buying cycle. BIA/Kelsey reinforces this research, estimating that this feature will drive a total of 169 billion mobile calls to businesses by 2020.

Despite calls being the new click, many businesses lack an omnichannel solution that allows customers to switch between digital and voice seamlessly. Rather than routing and tracking all customer interactions through a unified approach, these solutions manage digital and voice channels separately, and the business ends up with a multichannel approach rather than a true omnichannel experience.

A true omnichannel solution employs a single routing engine for all digital and voice channels. As today's connected customers switch between channels and take advantage of click-to-call technology, you can apply skills-based, personalized or SLA-based routing for a more consistent and seamless experience that retains valuable context from touchpoint to touchpoint.

Elevate your escalation from self-service

Gartner estimates that by 2020, 70% of customer interactions will involve machine learning, chatbots or mobile messaging. Although customers will be able to solve most of their problems using these technologies, there will always be make-or-break moments in the business-customer relationship that require the skills of a human agent.

Freed from dealing with simple requests, contact center agents will be able to spend more time handling cases that are complex or emotionally driven. For this reason, it's crucial that businesses provide consistency when escalating customer support from digital self-service to human agents and, sometimes, back again.

A contact center solution with intelligent tracking and routing features enables you to seamlessly transfer interactions from digital to voice while maintaining a complete record of all customer interactions across channels. This means your reps can see the effort customers have already invested and the full context of their journey, making problems easier to solve and potentially tricky conversations run smoother.

Take action on trends and anticipate customer needs

Deep integration between your CRM and contact center enables all digital and voice channels to draw on the same data for a richer, more profound understanding of not only previous interactions but also where the customer's journey may lead them next. Tools like speech analytics can offer even more insight. Combining data from voice calls and your CRM, speech analytics can dig deep into conversations to learn what customers want?-?sometimes, before they even know it themselves.

For example, by analyzing response rates across crucial customer demographics and target markets, real-time speech analytics can help sales managers find creative ways to sell more to new and existing customers. Analyzing call data allows managers to identify how customers are responding to different offers and what impact they have on satisfaction levels. This information can then be used to create personalized up-sell and cross-sell suggestions.

Final Thoughts

Digital Transformation is one of the key topics among C-suites, boardrooms, and investors, and many businesses are focused on implementing technologies that can improve CX. With today's customers demanding a seamless buying journey across every channel, the contact center is a great place to start. Winning CX-focused digital transformation efforts should include strategies that break down organizational siloes, optimize self-service solutions and omnichannel operations, and allow sales and service teams to anticipate customer needs.