Throughout 2019, customer experience or “CX” has been a top concern for businesses throughout the world. After all, CX is now the only way for brands to effectively and consistently differentiate themselves in a growing market. Unfortunately, there are still many companies out there that could be missing the mark on some key issues for customer service.
Sabio Group, one of the market leaders in customer experience solutions, recently conducted a study into the most significant frustrations in the industry today. According to Sabio, three key problems are at the heart of the concerns that brands will need to address in 2020 if they want to become better at delivering customer experiences. These issues involve:
- Taking advantage of conversational user interfaces
- Addressing the impact of excellent voice and augmented solutions
- Ensuring effective analytics within customer journeys
Creating an Incredible Strategy for Customer Experience
According to the Chief Innovation Officer of Sabio, Stuart Dorman, more CX teams are beginning to recognise that simply pursuing a broader omni-channel strategy for customer engagement isn’t enough in the current landscape. In 2020, Sabio believes that we’ll begin to see an increased emphasis on the refinement and management of smarter customer journeys. Instead of simply creating as many channels as possible for customers to connect through, companies will begin to direct people towards the channels and resources suited to their needs.
Of course, there will be challenges to face when it comes to providing this level of high-scale engagement. As conversational user interfaces become the more common way for customers to begin engaging with organisations, it’s essential that projects receive the care and attention of CX specialists. Sabio feels that today’s customer journey strategies should be optimised with the latest analytics tools. This way, companies will be able to identify strategies for customer experience improvements.
At the same time, Sabio also feels that businesses need to understand the increasing complexity of voice interactions. This could mean providing agents with better levels of augmented support to help them accomplish more in the contact centre.
The 3 Focus Areas for 2020
Sabio has highlighted three key focus areas for all brands in 2020:
- Conversational User Interfaces: Creating comprehensive virtual assistants that can empower a range of customer journeys will still delivering service at scale is a challenging feat. To be successful here, companies will need to look beyond things like speech recognition and text-to-speech and focus on the art of CX. According to Sabio, this means looking at the language used in conversations, the UI design aspects, and other aspects associated with deep operational engagement
- Journey analytics: Sabio also feels that companies aren’t taking enough advantage of the analytics tools available to them. Analytics are crucial to understanding how the end-to-end customer journey actually works. Implementing the right analytical strategies might be difficult at first. However, the benefits are worth the effort. With the right insights, companies can gather and analyse details on customer intent, refining process, and improve the digital experience. Effective journey analytics could also help businesses to close the loop within their other CX processes too
- Peak Voice: Finally, as customers continue to experience new and improved options for self-service options, organisations are beginning to see a reduction in voice traffic. However, as the industry moves outside of the Peak Voice environment, the complexity of the calls that do come into the contact centre is increasing. Handling times are also going up, as agents are left to deal with interactions too complicated for self-service processes. This change is placing additional focus on continued improvements to the conversational user interface. Additionally, it could mean that businesses need to invest more in augmented voice service that adds a digital channel alongside the voice landscape
Preparing for 2020 Customer Experience
According to Stuart Dorman, tackling the three focus areas above and working cohesively to improve the customer journey is crucial in 2020. Companies that can overcome the challenges above will be able to unlock huge benefits for both their customers and themselves.
However, it’s worth noting that brands won’t be able to simply rely on virtual assistants and chatbot systems that only deliver a one-size-fits-all solution in the marketplace. As consumers continue to develop more advanced expectations, today’s conversations must be tailored to suit customer understanding. Additionally, the tools that companies use need to be agile enough to recover from disconnects in the journey or errors in dialogue. Bringing these complicated elements together and making something intuitive for customers is where the “art of CX” becomes essential.
