As the Chinese philosopher Confucius once said: “Study the past if you would define the future.”
Unfortunately, the past of customer experience is littered with trends that garnered too much hype too soon.
As a result, businesses sunk lots of money into technology projects that did not deliver ROI.
Some will argue that this is the price many brands pay for daring to be great and doing business on the cusp of CX innovation.
Yet, chasing the latest trends is perhaps not the best way forwards – intelligent creativity is.
Trend Chasing Is Risky Business
Many will consider contact center AI as a relatively new concept. In reality, it dates back decades, with BT running AI service projects in the 1990s.
Yet, the hype around AI died down for approximately 20 years after the first hype cycle. Why? The deep learning capabilities did not exist to provide truly compelling use cases.
These use cases often drive profitability, not bold attempts at AI transformation.
Harvard Business Review research reflects this, noting: “Ambitious moon shots are less likely to be successful than “low-hanging fruit” projects that enhance business processes.”
The advent of customer messaging paints a similar picture. Its first commercial deployment was in 1993, but it has started to become mainstream only in recent years with smartphone advancements.
These examples highlight how technology must catch up with the concept.
The Metaverse Example
Consider the metaverse as an example of a technology that recently enjoyed its first significant wave of CX hype. This buzz resonated strongly with many businesses. Indeed, HSBC, Nike, and Samsung quickly opened metaverse storefronts.
Moreover, the idea of AI-enabled digital bots supporting customers through a metaverse experience also invoked murmurs of excitement.
However, such use cases and thoughts are still in their infancy. As Nuri Gocay, Chief Solutions Officer at Local Measure, says in an interesting interview:
“The metaverse is coming. Customers will want to use it, and companies are going to want to have their products on it. Yet, is it going to be a place where we play, buy things, and what will that look like for customer experience? Only time will tell.”
Unfortunately, it may be a long wait. Indeed, Gartner’s 2022 hype cycle for emerging technologies suggests it will take more than ten years for the metaverse and digital humans to reach their “plateau of productivity.”
In addition, a thought-provoking article recently noted: “Silicon Valley CEOs Say They’re ‘Not Interested’ In Current Scenario Of The Metaverse.”
As such, there are risks – and potentially high costs – involved in jumping into the metaverse, especially if a brand commits too much to a single platform.
Instead, history indicates businesses may have more success by first learning, exploring, and preparing before accessing tangible use cases. For now, it seems best to focus on what customers want and use that as a base for creativity.
After all, “A smart person once said that revenue was a trailing indicator of doing the right thing for your customers over time,” notes Gocay.
Intelligent Creativity Is the Way Forward
Urging caution around innovations like the metaverse may seem like slamming the breaks on creativity in customer experience.
Yet, latching onto the latest CX trend is not truly creative. Creativity involves wrapping new ideas around customer needs and desires to develop differentiated customer journeys.
Unfortunately, such differentiation often goes sorely missed as businesses struggle to understand customer preferences and end up making the same assumptions.
Alternatively, they make false assumptions based on pre-conceived narratives.
Why? Because the contact center has traditionally operated in a silo, concealing customer insights. These are critical to enabling the three steps of intelligent creativity, as put forward by Forrester:
- Define the problem to solve with algorithms and insight.
- Develop creative solutions to these problems with the assistance of intelligent software.
- Verify and then scale creative solutions with machine precision and accuracy.
Without this process – and the customer data to kickstart it – businesses often end up swirling in a pool of sameness, waiting for the next trend to weigh up.
As such, a new role for the contact center must come to the fore, giving it the platform within the enterprise to bring all its rich customer data to the fore.
Gocay believes this transition is finally taking shape, stating:
“We have companies finally realizing that they can build something cool for their customers by using that data. I think that’s probably the most significant shift in customer experience in the last 20 or 30 years.”
The rise of CCaaS platforms – coupled with business intelligence tools – enables a flow of data from the contact center, funneling it across the company – connecting the enterprise, and enabling this intelligent creativity at scale.
How to Best Prepare for the Future
As AI evolves and the cloud takes hold of many more enterprises, customer experience innovation opportunities will likely come thick and fast.
Indeed, the possibilities are fascinating, from innovation with smart devices to “robo-bosses” supporting employees in keeping customer experiences in check.
While such possibilities are exciting, avoid getting trapped in hype cycles. Instead, Gocay recommends first following these three principles for future-proofing an organization:
- Be flexible
- Hire innovators
- Stay focused on what your customers want.
Local Measure helps companies with the latter, enabling effortless customer experience and the actionable business intelligence features within its Engage CCaaS platform.
To find out more, visit: www.localmeasure.com/engage-features
Local Measure Engage is available via the AWS Marketplace
