One of the most common phrases in the new world of remote work is “we are all in it together”. But the reality is often different. Ever since the onset of the pandemic businesses have been grappling to find the best solution to bring optimal results and accommodate their employees and their customers. As “going digital” has become an imperative for keeping with the current business landscape, many organisations have shifted to a digital environment but have not yet achieved “connectedness” within the operation.
According to a Calabrio report, 63% of contact centre managers believe the impact of the pandemic on the customer service function is permanent. Customers’ expectations and demands of businesses have changed, and the needs of the employees who support them have shifted too. Unhappy employees can easily lead to unhappy customers.
By building connected departments and employees, organisations can take advantage of information from across the company to find undiscovered insights. The added connectivity between departments can illuminate opportunities for efficiency, innovation, and improved customer experiences.
To uncover further interesting insights into the benefits of the connected enterprise and how to create it, Mary Moilanen, Business Intelligence Initiatives Manager at Calabrio, and Katie Martell, Customer Experience (CX) Evangelist, recently collaborated on a webinar about closing this gap with 9 Ways to Connect the Enterprise with Voice-of-the-Customer (VoC) Insights. CX Today now welcomes Mary to explain what a connected enterprise means for customers and employees in terms of the contact centre.
Mary begins: “A connected enterprise is one that has done what is often talked about, but so rarely accomplished. This includes breaking down silos and working together across departments to understand the data flowing between areas.
“Understanding what’s going on across the organisation is invaluable, and is the reason connected enterprises are able to deliver outstanding customer experiences. Instead of siloed departments trying to work in vacuums, resulting in disjointed customer experiences, they are able to look at the full customer journey across the company to determine how to provide the best results.”
Keeping employees in the loop
“Connectedness” starts with employees. It’s never been more important to keep employees in the loop, with customers and with each other. Breaking down silos and unifying the entire organisation is one of the main elements of a connected enterprise.
Mary explains: “This is the part I really like. Being a connected enterprise saves employees from wasting time stumbling through disparate, clunky applications, or entering the same data into three different systems. With added context from complete information and less inconvenience and inefficiency, employees can focus on what they do best, like engaging with customers, executing marketing campaigns, or designing amazing products.
“Improving your customers’ experiences makes life better for your employees, too! The customer experience is simply better when someone contacts a connected organisation. Customers experience less frustration when agents are empowered to meet customer needs by having all the information they need to help. With more positive customer interactions, employees can feel helpful and appreciated, rather than feeling like a scapegoat for things out of their control.”
Innovation via true customer insights
Connected enterprises gather and disperse the valuable data that shows which products or services are falling short, what customers like or dislike and the common problems they are having. Having that information available at hand, for whichever department needs it, makes the process of resolving issues much quicker.
“Traditionally, data has not been shared across organisations. Marketing departments may hear exactly what customers wished the product did, however, the message hasn’t yet reached product development. In a connected enterprise you can prioritise whatever it is you’re doing, regardless of department, in a way that actually matters to your customers, based on their feedback,” observes Mary.
Customer surveys do not pick up the information in the same way as a call, Mary says. “There is always a possibility of bias when utilising customer surveys, whereas analysing a call from a customer can reveal exactly what the problem is and how it could be resolved.
Unlocking the potential of cloud-first digitalisation
A number of organisations are still wary of going fully digital with their business. Connected enterprises thrive through digital transformations that allow them to take advantage of all the benefits of connected solutions. Mary shares the common misconceptions people have towards digital transformation and cloud solutions.
“People often think that digital transformation is costly and difficult. With cloud products, it is so easy to choose a new option. Without lengthy installation processes and costly hardware requirements, companies can focus their energies and budgets on getting the most out of their new solution quickly.
“Even better, it’s so much easier to integrate data across various systems, because they’re all designed to talk to each other. When you’re researching products, look for something that is designed to have a high level of communication and integration. Our advanced reporting product, for example, can pull data from an ACD (automatic call distributor), your CRM (customer relationship management), WFO (workforce optimisation) software, and more to gives you insights across all these platforms in one place.”
Advanced automation and the digitalisation of processes saves people from executing each task separately or manually. Enterprise Customer Experience Intelligence (CXI) is the type of modern tool that helps successfully drive such digital transformation and embraces the latest ‘must-haves’ such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) to push insights about customers from the contact centre out to other departments.
Making this valuable voice-of-customer data accessible to more departments like marketing, sales, product development, and beyond, is a powerful step in becoming a Connected Enterprise.
To find out more about driving connected, customer-centric decisions across the enterprise, watch this webinar in which Mary dives deeper into the topic of connected enterprise and how it closely ties to contact centres’ unprompted VoC insights.
