The Future of Technology in CX

By David Blakers, and Managing Director,

David Blakers,

As companies become more competitive, their customer experience practitioners are becoming more experienced and more specialised. To take a company to the next level, CX practitioners now need to do more than just chase NPS scores they need to deliver real business outcomes. To do this, they need to stay up-to-date with the latest trends in technology. New technologies available nowenable companies to make better customer experience decisions to help drive growth, profitability and market share. To yield greater business results, successful CX practitioners understand the importance of both leveraging CX Management Platforms to run their CX programs; and putting in place a framework for evolvingtheir organisational CX maturity; thus gaining executive buy-in and commitmentwith company leadership, all key to driving ongoing future success.

CX Management Platforms

While there has long been widespread belief that greater customer-centricity and a more robust CX program will lead to better business results, for most companies this has been more of a dream than reality. Technology, such as the MaritzCX Platform, allows organisations to collect, analyse and act on the experiences of every customer, at every touchpoint, at scale and in real-time. To continuously improve customer experience performance, CX platforms leverage Big Data to process large amounts of data quickly, accommodating structured and unstructured data forms using Hadoop, Elastic Search and NoSQL-based infrastructures to return useful insights from customer data.

Collect

You need to capture feedback from everyone and everywhere. CX platforms make managing multiple surveys easy, and now provide sample management features such as global fatigue management;automated invite management;multi-language email deployment;email list management;invitation reports (including drop off and bounce); global calendar view; and response list data availability.

Omni-channel data collection(transactional, operational, relationship, employee, loyalty, mobile and social) is essential for collecting and integrating customer data from all contact points across the organisation. CX platforms are evolving and becoming increasingly adept at capturing data and metadata from customer interactions and customer experiences; such as call centre hold time, passenger

flight details or specific product purchase data – all critical to completing the customer experience picture.

Analyse

For decades, companies have asked open-ended questions on marketing and customer experience surveys.Sometimes just letting customers talk delivers the best insight. But, without understanding unstructured customer feedback provided in narrative text format,you can’t truly understand voice of customer(VoC) and customer sentiment. Integrated text analytics is based on sophisticated NLP (Natural Language Processing) technology. These complex algorithms are able to detect positive and negative customer sentiment, or customer feelings, in open-ended survey responses, chat logs, call logs and service reviews and deliver it in an easy-to-understand format that is fully integrated with your feedback data.

Big data means storing lots of information about customer interactions, but also big calculations, big processing and big predictions. For CX data analysts, that means no longer having to link data together, export data to an external tool built for statistical processing and create custom reports that decision makers can understand. CX platforms now provide Dashboards to visualise your data instantly. Easy drag and drop, combining multiple survey results with operational data to create real-timeanalytics and comparison boards which can then be shared, exported or drilled into responses to see actual feedback.

" When customers take the time to provide feedback, they expect someone to respond accordingly"

Advanced analytics features such as spotlightanalytics (powered by a sophisticated data-mining algorithm and patented software) automatically analyses - in seconds - every pattern in your datasets to uncover high-value insights hidden in your data, highlighting areas that will help you improve your performance against key metrics.

Act

When customers take the time to provide feedback, they expect someone to respond accordingly. Integrated Case Management features provide a comprehensive closed-loop system thatenables CX professionals to not only collect feedback, but to do something about it. Root cause analysis and reporting, centralised case management,custom triggers and rules, can all be set to automate the process of assigning actions to the right person to respond in a timely manner, take charge of potential situations, and deliver on the customer-centric promise the organisation has set.

CX Maturity – New Global Research

According to the recent MaritzCXCXEvolution global study of 4,000 CX professionals worldwide, only 56 percent have a formal CX program in place and of those, only 28 percent of the CX professionals surveyed in the study reported that their CX programs were very successful.

The MaritzCXCXEvolution framework proposes 14 key CX competencies to assess an organisation’s current level of CX maturity. Those companies that have reached the highest level of CX maturity are 3 times more successful at driving significant financial improvement and customer retention than those companies in the bottom half of the maturity framework.

The CXEvolution framework and assessment tools provide not just an assessment of a company’s level of CX maturity, but also a comprehensive understanding of why they land where they do and a roadmap to move up the scale.

According to a recent study by Gartner, 89 percent of companies will compete mostly on the basis of customer experience in 2016, nearly a three-fold increase from just five years ago.More than ever, CX is a strategic priority for companies. CXEvolution goes beyond assessing measurement and tools to understanding the very organisational foundation that determines the relative success of CX efforts.

The prescriptive results allow CX pros to more effectively assess their own programs and have the conversations with company leadership that will be key to driving future success.