What Three Key Elements Mark the Success of an Omnichannel Customer Experience?

As digital transformation changes the business landscape, customer experience (CX) has become the number one service in the call center. In fact, contact center and customer experience (CX) leaders recently surveyed by Aberdeen prioritize adapting to customer needs above all else when establishing their digital strategies.

Aberdeen recently surveyed more than 1,300 business leaders about their customer service operations. Among the key findings, detailed in the consultancy’s report, “AI in CX,” is three building blocks that companies are using to maximize their CX results, increase operational efficiency, and improve their competitive position:

1) Obtaining Key Data to Better Understand and Address Customer Expectations

With changing user expectations for a frictionless experience, organizations must have access to a holistic view of the customer, and data is the key to doing so effectively.

As detailed in the report, omnichannel CX programs are designed to ensure that the unique needs of each customer are met in the channel of their choice. This means minimizing the risk of using poor or inaccurate data that leads to inefficiencies.

For this reason, companies are increasingly using solutions based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) that allow them to turn data into information. We detail below the most outstanding results of the survey in this regard:

• 77% model conversations with customers to map the customer journey (compared to 51% among all other companies).
• 77% automatically adapt customer journeys based on the context of previous interactions (compared to 49%).
• 69% use analytics to detect the correlation between agent activities and customer satisfaction (compared to 50%).
• Machine Learning enables organizations to quickly and accurately analyze large volumes of interactions across all channels (including structured and unstructured data), enabling call center leaders to take action to deliver superior customer service frictionless ride.

2) Optimizing CX Activities with Data, Analytics and AI

Despite the proliferation of data, from every voice and text interaction companies have with customers across all channels, organizations still struggle to use data to achieve their goals. One in three leaders (34%) indicate this is due to insufficient data, closely followed by data quality (33% of respondents).

This is because not all the data companies have in their systems is relevant to every interaction, according to Aberdeen. In addition, these may be outdated and may not reflect current customer behavior and needs.

The Aberdeen survey found that the best-performing organizations are 2.7 times more likely to use customer data to identify the most appropriate channels to resolve their issues and queries. They are also 82% more likely to use automation to then route customers through the correct channel to address the issue in the most effective way possible.

3) Hyper-personalization of CX Activities Across All Channels

Half of all call centers use nine or more channels to serve customers, making it increasingly important for organizations to be able to connect structured and unstructured data from all channels to create a holistic view of customers, and use it to personalize each interaction.

In addition, companies are increasingly using AI capabilities to achieve these goals. According to the report, 47% of contact centers currently use predictive analytics and 31% plan to do so. Four out of 10 use prescriptive intelligence, which is responsible for collecting data, recommending actions and predicting their impact to facilitate and automate decision-making, identifying the best decision among all possible ones (31% plan to do so); 36% take advantage of machine learning or ML (and 37% plan to do so); 29% use automation (34% have it planned); and nearly one in four use AI (with 27% planning to do so).