End-to-End Customer Analytics in 2017?

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In this article, Craig Pumfrey explores the relationship in between the contact centre and digital platforms, for businesses in 2017.

In looking at some of the issues underpinning our selection of the key customer engagement technology trends for 2017, it’s increasingly clear that for many organisations there’s a disconnect between their digital and contact centre strategies.

Companies such as Sabio, the contact centre specialist, believe that customer service should always be brilliant. However, if you’re not joining up two critical aspects of the end-to-end customer journey, then it should hardly be surprising that people get frustrated. Also, with 60% of today’s customers going online before they engage with your contact centre, then it really doesn’t make any sense to keep your digital and human-assisted contact activities operating in silos.

As the number and use of digital channels expands, and what Nuance describes as the ‘possible channel permutation complexity’ increases, contact centres clearly will need mechanisms in place that enable them to consistently deliver brilliant service across the entire customer journey.

This of course is going to have implications for the kind of interaction data that organisations collect, and its integration. To date, digital teams have harvested volumes of web and self-service analysis while contact centres have focused on traditional contact centre datasets such as Workforce Optimisation data, speech analytics findings and customer feedback insights. That’s all going to need to come together under a common engagement analytics banner if organisations are to get serious about building customer relationship hubs.

It’s only by adopting a true customer engagement analytics approach that brings together web analysis, self-service analysis, WFO data, speech, text analytics and customer feedback, that organisations can effectively map the whole customer journey from a reporting perspective. Identifying bottlenecks in multi-channel journeys is a key goal here, particularly when combined with broader contact centre metadata to come up with specific actions for service improvement.

Such an integrated approach will also start to enable new metrics. Instead of just flagging up customer distress indicators, the number of repeat calls or the frequency of times transferred, analytics will need to look at new factors such as ‘tweets to resolution’ or ‘digital channel containment rate’ if they are to truly measure data inputs from across both digital and human assisted elements of the customer journey.

Enabling end-to-end customer engagement analytics is a critical next step in omnichannel strategies. However, brands always need to bear in mind that behind all of these 0’s and 1’s are customers with individual needs, preferences and frustrations. 2017’s smart customer experience teams, then, will be those who use their analytics tools to determine exactly where people are on their journeys and what their concerns are, and who can then apply their data to inform their next best action.

You’ll be able to find out more about how data-driven engagement is reshaping the customer experience at Sabio’s Disrupted Customer Contact event, which will be held at The Brewery in London on February 23, 2017.

Author: Robyn Coppell

Published On: 9th Dec 2016 - Last modified: 1st Nov 2018
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