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The role of digitalisation in the customer experience – the new ‘normal’

ARTICLE BY

  • Vivek Bhagwatkar

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Businesses are trying to understand the needs, desires and preferences of their existing and potential customers, whilst balancing the development of new business models that are underpinned by new digital paradigms. With the falling average margin per customer in many industries, retention of every on boarded customer is vital, along with delivering new products, services and revenue streams and creating a value proposition for potential customers.

Compounding this challenge, in a digital age, more and more customers take to social media to share personal experiences on brands, products and services which can in turn influence the next potential customers buying power.  This makes the customer experience even more important for businesses.

Research shows that a client is more likely not to purchase a product or service again based on a bad initial experience with the contact centre.  This could be due to a service or product issue, which can sometimes be unavoidable. Customers simply expect nothing less than exceptional service, and need to be reassured that they are being attended to accordingly. 

Interactions with the contact centre

The starting point on building a better user experience journey is listening to the customer and addressing the most critical touch-points – the contact centre interactions. When organisations start losing revenue due to poor customer interaction, only then do they start understanding the impact and take action.

Contact centres today are designed to play a vital role in establishing service levels, building a competitive edge in the market. An ‘out of the box’ customer service solution is required that can meet the growing service expectations of the customers. Customers are increasingly using multiple touch-points to resolve service issues and they expect an integrated and seamless omni-channel customer experience. 

Changing the customer journey

In the past, contact centres focused purely on sales, the number of calls coming in to the call centre, top call drivers, etc. Today, there is a big leap from the number driven approach to an analytics driven approach that helps link all the data across the omni-channel touch-points, mapping a single customer journey. From mere data to big data, focus is changing to analysing the data, design and developing the new processes and systems.

Furthermore, big data can help create the foundation of the new beginning in integration with the Conversational Bot or Virtual Assistants. With big data as the central theme, re-imagining the customer journey is the new normal to address the evolution of the digital community.

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