Want to Boost CX? Follow This Data-Backed AdviceWant to Boost CX? Follow This Data-Backed Advice

The rise of the Internet, social media apps, and customer ratings have empowered individual consumers like no other time in history. So as business leaders build and revise their digital transformation strategies, it’s no surprise that customer experience is the key driver.

Creating a top-notch experience affects all business metrics—revenue, costs, efficiency, and competitiveness.

Yet, we still find too many companies falling into traps that reduce their chances for success, according to the Nemertes Research 2019-20 Intelligent Customer Engagement research study of 518 organizations in the United States, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.

I look forward to sharing best practices and actionable advice this week during a webinar with Five9, appropriately titled, “5 Customer Experience Pitfalls to Avoid.” We will not only provide you with those pitfalls and the compelling data behind them, but also discuss real-world examples of companies that have found success. Register here.

Part of the issue with customer experience transformations is the scope of the task at hand. It’s a broad area that covers hundreds of technology categories to enable communication, analysis, and tracking of interactions with customers. The technologies are only part of the story. Leadership, organizational structure, and culture play huge roles, as well.

Fostering the Right Culture

In fact, one of the top pitfalls is simply failing to establish a customer care culture. Cultivating that culture requires empowered leadership. That’s why 59.2% of successful companies already have a Chief Customer Officer (CCO)—an executive-level individual with ultimate responsibility for all customer-facing activities or strategy to maximize customer acquisition, retention, and satisfaction.

With the right leadership in place, it’s a lot easier to overhaul the entire agent experience, as well. That includes any combination of better compensation plans, improved coaching, artificial intelligence-enabled analytics (both for their performance and to provide them context during customer interactions), gamification, and a promotion path. As of 2019, 70% of successful companies (those with the highest measured improvements in revenue, opex, and customer ratings) are increasing their agent compensation.

By improving the agent experience and reducing turnover, the overall service they provide is better, manifesting itself in higher customer ratings. Within that feedback, CCOs can take action on customer suggestions or complaints. For example, one big success correlation is adding more interaction channels: Companies with documented success in their AI-enabled CX strategies use 6.7 channels, vs. only five for all others.

Add Channels—Wisely

All the success metrics in our research point to adding options for customers to interact. The huge pitfall with that approach is adding new ways to communicate without integrating them.

Enter omnichannel, which enables contextual customer interaction information to pass between channels (for agents or bots) in real-time and historically. About 30% of all companies are using omnichannel, but 50% of the success group from the Nemertes study use omnichannel.

One of the most compelling data points for using omnichannel is in how it affects customer ratings. When companies just add AI to their CX portfolio, they see a 37% increase in customer ratings. Pretty decent, right? But, when they add both AI and omnichannel, they see a 104% increase in ratings.

Act on Analytics Data

It’s data points like those that can make it much easier to convince stakeholders to fund new technology. Contact center analytics are making a huge impact in the service that agents deliver to their customers. By 2021, 89% of companies believe analytics will be crucial to business success.

AI and analytics go hand-in-hand, as well. As companies add AI into their CX technology portfolios, they are using it with agent analytics, sentiment analysis, and predictive analysis, among other areas.

Join us for a lively, insightful discussion on Wednesday, August 21 at 11:00 a.m. PT/2:00 p.m. ET to hear additional pitfalls to avoid and learn best practices that successful companies have embraced. I hope to see you there!