Organisations may talk about building complete, end-to-end views of the customer journey – but that’s almost impossible to do well without bringing data together from across the business.
Data – and effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data integration – needs to be at the heart of successful CX transformation.
Not surprisingly, many brands are finding it hard to accommodate this shift, with contact volumes placing huge demands on contact centre employees, legacy technology as well as those teams responsible for leading corporate CX initiatives.
However, a number of key factors are now coming together to support what could prove to be the next key phase in customer service: the convergence of the contact centre, AI & Automation and CRM spaces – with customer experience at the core.
Building Out The Next Generation of CX Capabilities
Traditionally customer engagement technologies have been largely polarised – you’ve either been a CRM-led customer engagement operation with a largely silo-ed contact centre, a dedicated service desk style operation, or more contact centre-focused with basic screen pop links or advisors left to source data manually.
But today’s CX teams can no longer afford to remain isolated in their contact centre, service desk or CRM camps. The pressure for brands to differentiate via their customer experience makes any CX technology decisions taken now even more important.
That’s why it’s essential that organisations move quickly to align their technologies so that they’re able to provide a unified, end-to-end customer engagement experience.
How brands manage their customer data is also critical. Technologies such as AI, machine learning and natural language speech recognition are already established within the contact centre and their data is already helping to power cross-functional customer data platforms and digital experience platforms.
Implemented in the right way, AI & Automation will provide new ways to free up CX resources and help brands to make more informed decisions – transforming customer journeys into a source of rich insights that drive a richer experience for customers. So, it’s perhaps unfortunate that most organisations still fail to take advantage of the data that’s hidden within voice interactions – still by far the most prevalent CX channel.
The good news is that some of the key technologies already being put to use in the contact centre world are becoming connected with other parts of the organisation.