Customer experience or “CX” has emerged as one of the most important considerations for any brand in the last couple of years. According to the Temkin Group, 86% of buyers say that they would happily pay more for great customer experience.
When it comes to something as important as good communication and collaboration strategies, today’s businesses can’t afford to take chances. From day one, they need to know that their vendors, service providers, and partners are going to give them the kind of outcomes that they’re looking for.
Now that 2020 is on the horizon, it’s safe to say that the trend for enhanced CX will continue. Going forward, businesses from all backgrounds will be looking to differentiate themselves with the incredible experiences that they can offer.
To help you prepare for a successful 2020, we’ve spoken to some of the leaders in CX solutions, including Ribbon, Donoma, Tollring, and Akixi. Here’s what today’s pioneering brands had to say about the customer experience strategies of tomorrow.
What CX Trends Have Helped to Shape 2019?
Often, to plan for the future, you need to learn from the past.
This year has taught us all a lot about what customers are starting to expect from collaboration and communication brands. For instance, most clients will assume that your communication tools will cover a range of platforms to support today’s omni-channel end-users.
Additionally, customers assume that even the most complicated tools will be designed for ease-of-use, to encourage better adoption and onboarding. Here’s what our industry leaders have noticed about the trends in CX for 2019:
Colin Gill, Product Manager for Akixi:
According to Colin Gill, the product manager for leading brand, Akixi, one of the major trends that became mainstream during 2019, was collaborative working between teams. Though the concept of collaboration, and team platforms themselves aren’t exactly new, the adoption of collaborative environments has accelerated in 2019.
“Collaborative team environments are no longer considered a specialist tool to be kept in the proverbial tech cupboard to be wheeled out for special occasions or projects; they are now considered by many to be the standard as a day-to-day working environment”
Beena Jacob, Director of Product Development for Donoma:
The Director of Product Development for software company, Donoma, Beena Jacob said that 2019 has been an exciting year from a technology perspective. For instance, throughout 2019, Donoma has seen an increased implementation of bot and AI technology.
“While we wish our observations could all be technology-based, we’d be remiss not to mention two in particular. The rise of organisations’ effect on social issues and gender diversity. These have become priorities with direct impacts on technology organisations.”
The world is becoming a more diverse and complicated place. This means that there are a lot of opportunities out there for companies to appeal to their customers by understanding their individuality, and unique needs.
Patrick Joggerst, CMO and EVP of Business Development for Ribbon:
The CMO and EVP for Business Development at Ribbon Communications, Patrick Joggerst, said that customer experience has expanded over the last year, to include every stage of the consumer journey, from attracting new clients, through to long-term engagement after they choose to buy a service or product.
“One of the trends flagged by Nemertes Research is to utilise “Intelligent Customer Engagement.” Systems provide contextual information to agents or bots to help sell or upsell. This improves customer retention and sales opportunities while lowering capital and/or operating costs.”
According to Patrick, in this environment, customers get what they need faster, which leads to higher interaction ratings. Additionally, Joggerst also noted that companies and customers are using more channels to connect these days, and support of multiple channels is arising as a success metric.
“Starting companies with 1-4 channels and growing to companies with 8+ channels, the customer ratings improved from 55% to 90% – an increase by 63%”
Tony Martino, CEO for Tollring:
The CEO for Tollring, Tony Martino said that 2019 is the year when customer experience as a critical discipline began to gain real traction. Based on experiences with customers, businesses began to consider CX to be one of the most important elements for any brand. Today’s companies know that they need great experiences to differentiate.
“This has resulted in greater demand for tools that help businesses to evaluate their performance and, by its very nature, this means analytics and reporting across all business communications is important. It’s no longer good enough to only look at a sales or support department – every customer touchpoint can impact customer experience negatively or positively. “
A stronger demand for insights has also pushed a need for data in context, integrations between platforms, and data accessibility.
“It is important, however, to acknowledge the impact this has on providing secure solutions to these organisations – from regulatory compliance to overall data security”
Which Technologies are Creating the Biggest Opportunities?
Understanding the trends that are taking place in 2019 is just the first step in preparing for the new year. Today’s companies and brands also need to think carefully about the technology and innovations that will deliver the best opportunities for the coming CX revolution.
Already, we’ve seen a lot of exciting new opportunities in the CX environment over the last year, driven by things like big data analytics for customised moments, and artificial intelligence. Many businesses are even seeing an increase in the amount of time and effort that they dedicate to creating self-service solutions for their target audiences.
So, what should you be prepared to take advantage of in 2020? Here’s what our industry experts had to say.
Akixi’s Product Manager, Colin Gill, noted that mobile devices are one of the most exciting new opportunities for today’s business. In part, the growth of this technology comes down to the simplicity and speed at which new platforms for communication can be deployed across various devices with cloud technology today.
“To add a new feature or enhancement to a PBX back in the day would take an engineer’s time, a new software upgrade, and even possibly new hardware. Even on hosted platforms, a software upgrade is no small thing and requires careful coordination to minimise any communication downtime. Whereas, with a mobile device, as I’m sure you’re aware having probably done it many times yourself, the user downloads a new or updated app and installs it themselves.”
According to Gill, the new environment means that deploying tools and upgrading solutions is a process that can happen according to a user’s convenience, without unnecessary downtime across the platform. These benefits, combined with the variety of unique applications now available to run on mobile devices, makes communication tools more flexible than ever.
Beena Jacob believes that the biggest opportunities for now and 2020 come from the information and data available in the Unified Communications environment. Donoma are seeing increased opportunities for solutions that deliver analytics and stronger integrations for customer service toolkits.
“Teams want to collaborate and use tools to work better together. Yet they are often hampered by the siloed nature of these systems. They want the tools to support a seamless flow matched to their processes for a more intuitive, organic experience”
Ribbon’s CMO and EVP said that automation is one of the most valuable technologies as of right now. Automation tools are becoming critical to managing the massive volume of conversations in the current customer service environment, as well as the diverse selection of channels that support these discussions. According to Patrick:
“With advances in AI, big data analytics, and services made affordable and scalable via the cloud, it is now possible to create systems which help brands attract, win over, and serve customers. Adding channels to business processes, via CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service), enables companies both large and small to easily add things like Mobile Business Chat, Email, Social, Video, etc. directly into the flow of their business processes.”
On top of a growing demand for automation, Joggerst also noted that Ribbon is seeing opportunities in the development of low-code and no-touch software. These solutions allow for new functionality to be added to a system with very little programming expertise. “CPaaS is radically changing the way customers interact with back end systems.”
Tollring’s CEO, Tony Martino believes that if today’s businesses want to achieve higher and more consistent levels of secure customer experience, they’re going to need two things: analytics and recording tools. Both of these solutions represent significant value-added tools for partners that deliver amazing and proven results.
“The value of these solutions is recognised within the industry, demonstrated by increasing demand. Evolution of features to support CX strategies presents new opportunities for the industry.
The ability to customise dashboards and wallboards and configure performance dashboards by overlaying business KPIs are examples of how we are developing our analytics products to meet customer experience goals in an easy to use and accessible way.”
According to Martino, compliance-ready call recording solutions that deliver information while maintaining privacy, and evaluation tools enable state-of-the-art CX insights in voice-based communications. This means that businesses can easily access more useful information about their processes and customers. What’s more, APIs are offering additional opportunities, allowing customers to see data in context, and promoting access to the right data in the correct environment. Martino believes that APIs will also be crucial to ongoing solutions for enhanced CX.
What CX Trends Will We See in 2020?
Based on the opportunities available from new technology, and the incredible trends that we’ve seen in 2019, it’s easier to look forward into the future and predict what might be yet to come. Customer Experience is a crucial consideration that will continue to be essential, moving into 2020. As the new year begins, consumers will expect even more from the companies that they do business with.
In an age of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and sentiment analysis, your customers know that you have what it takes to deliver the incredible, personalised experience that they need. Fail to deliver what your customers want, and your business will pay the price.
Here are the trends that our industry thought leaders expect to see in 2020.
Colin Gill told us that he can see a few trends coming into the forefront of the industry during 2020. For instance, first of all, though communication platforms like UC, omni-channel, and collaboration tools have been around for a while, they’ll start to join forces. This will allow vendors to offer a holistic experience, unlike anything that we’ve had before in the communications space.
“Secondly, something else that has been around for a while is the delivery of communication platforms/unified communications/etc. as a service. I can see 2020 becoming the year where delivery as a service starts to cause some serious disruption in the industry, with a number of the industry giants having already shifted their focus towards the delivery as a service model.”
Gill noted that this shift of focus has already begun to gather momentum. The migration to an as-a-service model is like a “march of elephants”. According to Colin, the process might not be fast, but it’s “pretty much unstoppable, and you know about it if you try to stand in its way.”
The director for product development at Donoma kept her predictions straight to the point for 2020. She believes that moving forward into the new year, the industry will continue to see significant changes caused by some of the most disruptive tech from the last couple of years.
As we head into 2020, “we expect to see significant impacts from IoT, Blockchain, and Analytics.” These new and engaging tools will help businesses from all backgrounds to create more pioneering solutions for communication and customer service, strengthening the CX opportunities in the marketplace.
Patrick Joggerst quoted research from Nemertes once again for his predictions on the emerging changes that may take place in 2020. According to Ribbon, voice will continue to be a significant platform for about 96% of the communication channels in business – an increase of around 24%. Additionally, mobile business chat is likely to increase to 96%, while email goes up to 95%. Video is currently the technology with the largest growth potential. Around 84% of channels will begin to access video, which represents an increase of 34% since last year.
Close behind video is the rise of in-app messaging, which grew 26% over the last year to address about 75% of the channels surveyed.
“Because every interaction between companies and their customers can now be captured, transcribed, analysed and made better with real-time insights and trending data as it happens over time, the contact centre to understand which behaviors get the best outcomes, allowing the agent or system to understand the history and how best to respond.”
Finally, the CEO of Tollring, Tony Martino told us that the increasing focus on CX is allowing both smaller and mid-sized businesses to compete on a more global stage. This means that any size of business can begin to compete against brands that have access to much greater resources.
“This trend is driving demand for sophisticated analytics and call recording solutions for these SMEs, so the need to make them accessible – both in terms of cost and usability – is changing the market.”
According to Tollring and Martino, essential features like agent call control, supervisor management, and workforce management will begin to appear as a more vital part of the environment. Providing performance management and resource scheduling used to be something only possible in larger contact centre environments. Soon, these functionalities and the opportunities that come with them to deliver greater KPI and SLA metrics will become a requirement for businesses of all sizes. According to Martino, customer experience strategies will need to align regardless of the size of the organisation.
What do you think about the changing nature of CX in 2019 and the opportunities that today’s brands have to take advantage of as we move into 2020? What do you expect to see from the year ahead, and do you think that there are any major trends on the way to transform the way companies and their clients connect in the year ahead?
Join the discussion in the comments below and contact our editorial team to be a part of our next roundtable discussion!
